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Chapter 10: Humility

Humility is the quality of having a modest view of one's person, rank, and importance. "William Beebe, the naturalist, occasionally visited the home of former president Teddy Roosevelt. President Roosevelt and Beebe would go out on the lawn at night to search the skies for a certain spot of light near the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus constellation. Then they would recite: 'That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.' Then President Roosevelt would grin and say, 'Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed.'"

Sometimes it is really hard to be humble. It must have been hard for Christ to be humble. I mean after all, He is God. Yet He was willing to die on a cross. The cross was designed to both humiliate and kill its victim. Check out what Philippians 2:5-8 has to say about this. Our attitude should be like His? Now that is a tall order.

"As we eat with sinners, it would be wise to start each meal with a slice of humble pie, because it seems to me that it's too easy to position ourselves safely on a comfortable perch and look down with pity on those so far below us. This is absurd and un-Christlike. If we really want to reach lost people, we must be humble=and true humility comes from standing next to the cross."

An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of each of the successive major parts of a compound term. What are some famous ones? CEO, FBI, SCUBA, RADAR, ect... Arron gives us the acronym HARD:

Healing is perpetually possible with Jesus.
Always remember the well.
Reseat yourself if necessary
Dinner should be a party to which everyone is invited.

As Christians it is tempting to separate ourselves from everyone else for fear that we might 'catch their sin.' I'm not saying that we should all go down and spend the rest of our time in the bar drinking with everyone. But what I am saying is that we can't expect people to come to Christ on our terms. We can't expect people who don't know Christ to act like they do before we are willing to spend time with them. We can't look down on people from our perch of holiness and pray for their pitiful souls and expect God to bless us by using us to bring people to Christ.

When Christ healed a man on the Sabbath who was suffering from dropsy, He immediately asked the teachers of the law if the had an ox who fell in the well on the Sabbath if they would pull it out. This was to prove His point that they didn't care about this man, they only wanted to trap Jesus. We've all been 'trapped in a well' from time to time, hopelessly flailing about in our sin. "With true humility, Jesus resolves never to leave the well until every last person who is willing to follow Him is rescued." That is our mission. True humility calls us to help people who we think are "worse" than we are. People who are trapped in a well of sin and need help getting out. That is what Jesus did, think HARD on it.

Enjoy the Journey