HUMILITY
Mark 10:35-45

There is a line from an old song that says, “O Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way!” There is a lot of truth is that humorous line. I recently heard a sermon on the radio, in which the preacher made the statement that, “no man, without a sense of need, will seek out God,” and that statement was the motivation for this chapter. It struck me that we humans just want to go on our sinful way and leave God out, until we hit a roadblock and need some help. We need trials and problems; we need bumps in the road and obstructions in our path; we need pain and sorrow to keep us humble and contrite. Without them we would drift away from God and go our own way, puffed up with pride and self-sufficiency.
The apostle Paul had a similar problem. We read in 2 Cor. 12, about his “thorn in the flesh,” which God gave him, in order to keep him in line. After Paul had been given a vision of Heaven, he was tempted to brag about it and to feel self important, but he says, “….I have received wonderful revelations from God. But to keep me from getting puffed up, I was given a thorn in the flesh to keep me from getting proud.”(2nd Cor.12:7-10 NLT). He asked God three times to remove his problem, but God told him, “My grace is sufficient for you. My power works best in your weakness.” We don’t know what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was, but it was something that was a continual reminder that he was dependent upon God. It was something that constantly emphasized his humanity. God said that this weakness was an asset. It kept him humble, and in that state God could work through him more effectively. Jesus told James and John, when they asked to be placed at the right hand and left hand of Jesus’ throne when He came into His kingdom, that in order to be the top of the heap, they must be servants. They must take the place of the lowest and consider all others to be better than they, if they expected a place of honor in God’s kingdom. They must be humble.
We humans just have a lot of difficulty with that concept. We just naturally gravitate to prideful behavior. We love praise and honor to be heaped upon us. We so easily forget the reason we were able to do the thing for which we are being praised. We forget that, like Paul tells us in 1st Cor. 15:10 (NIV), “Only by the grace of God, I am what I am!” and in 1st Cor. 4:7(NLT), “What do you have that God hasn’t given you? And if everything you have is from God, why boast as though you have accomplished something on you own?”
Do you have a thorn in your flesh? Are you having trouble making ends meet financially and can see no solution? Are you dealing with a painful disease or condition, which renders you relatively helpless? Have you done chores at Church or elsewhere in service to the Lord and no one has noticed or thanked you? Maybe God is giving you a lesson in humility. Read what Paul said in 2nd Cor. 12:10. “Since I know it is all for Christ’s good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak (physically) I am strong (spiritually).
When you are sufficient unto yourself, you probably will not realize that you need God’s grace, and that’s a prescription for spiritual disaster! It is indeed hard to be humble when you feel that you are perfect in every way!


FINDING THE RIGHT ROAD

At first glance, to the non-Christian, it may seem that there is a lot of “mumbo-jumbo” or magic involved in Christianity. After all, we worship someone we can’t see, we submit to the power and authority of a spirit, and we expect to be raised from the dead and live forever in a utopian place called Heaven. Well, all that is true, but it’s a lot simpler than it might seem.
There are a few precepts one must accept if he wishes to become a Christian. One must believe that there is a god, a higher power, who is the creator of all things and the author and creator of all life. That’s not so difficult. All you have to do is look around you at the intricacy, and the complexity, and the perfection of all things in nature. It takes a lot more faith than I have to believe that all this perfection is just a coincidence. We are told in the first chapter of Romans that all humans, from the beginning of time, have been given the knowledge that there is a superior being. There is a natural instinctive awareness of that fact in every one of us, even though some folks try to deny it.
One must believe that Jesus was God incarnate, born of a virgin, and that she was made pregnant by an act of God. Thus, Jesus is God’s son. The virgin birth bothers a lot of folks, but it’s not such a difficult concept if one considers that God created something so vast and intricate as the universe and that He is the creator of all life. In view of that, it shouldn’t be any problem at all for Him to cause an egg in the body of a young woman to begin to grow and to develop into a normal fetus.