Matt's Muzings

Humility as Sinner

I Iast wrote about our need for humility. Our relationship with God (Grace) is linked directly to humility and that we need to understand humility if we are to walk fully in the grace of God. There are three aspects of humility I last wrote about humility as creation. This time I am writing about another aspect of humility. Humility as a sinner.

I have been taking Hap Ke Do, Korean self-defense, from a local pastor for the last 4 years. I am a brown belt and it has been a good discipline. I enjoy it and I have learned a lot. It has also revealed my own arrogance. On Thursdays, we put on our gloves, shin guards, boots and work with each other in practicing self-defense.

There have been several times during these sparring times that I am provoked by what I feel is a cheap shot. It is then that my pride kicks in and I go on the attack. One guy actually left the class because of me. I write this with great embarrassment, but it seems the only way to begin to expose and share what pride is all about. It is not some abstract idea, but an attitude/belief that we embrace that destroys all relationships and causes great pain.

UNBROKENESS

In it's simplest expression, pride can be defined by unbrokeness. I can see it in me. When I am attacked, exposed or vulnerable, then I react, strong and hard, to protect myself. I seek power to defend myself. My will is unyielding to anything else and I will do what is necessary to get what I want. In sparing, it is the submission of the one I am attacking to my strength.

Each of us have a God given desire for power or dominion. It is a part of the task in overseeing the world that God put in our hands. It is a part of being finite and one of the things that links us to God. He has unending power, there is a natural desire for power that can draw us to Him.

But the attitude that stops us from admitting we are weak is our pride. To admit we are weak is to expose ourselves and that is too humbling to do. I mentioned above an area of unbrokeness in me and God dealing with me on that. To make it clearer I should say it this way:

All of us are already broken. Selfishness has done its work. I get angry, bitter, envious of others, these are symptoms of my brokeness. My life was destroyed by my willful and militant ignorance of the truth. When the Bible talks about unbrokeness, it is talking about our selfish will being unbroken, not our life. Our life is already broken, we just refuse to admit it and seek help.

FALSE VALUES

Another area that I struggle with as I try and make this area of pride clear is the whole area of trying to hide my brokeness through worldly values. Let me try and explain.

When I stole my life from God and broke it. I realized when I looked inside myself that I had lost my source of value. God was the original source, but when I rebelled from Him I knew I was guilty and alone. Now the temptation is to find or get my value from something in this world. The most recent expression is in my education. There is a part of me that longs to be able to define myself by it. Pride says, I am more valuable because I have a doctorate. When I embrace that lie, I am exalting myself and it is pride. When that happens God is opposed to me.

COMPETITION

The last area (in terms of this short Muzing that is), that I can see in wrestling with pride is in this area of competition. When I am sparing and I define myself by my actions, then I must win in order to be better than others. That is pride. C. S. Lewis defined pride in a brilliant quote:

Each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride...Two of a trade never agree.....Pride is essentially competitive--by it's very nature--while other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest....Power is what pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy....In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that--and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison--you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God.....

TRUE LEADERSHIP

True leadership is about using my influence to serve, rather than get power. It is about embracing God's value for me and expressing that in my gifts, not trying to prove how valuable I am by my gifts. And leadership is not about competition or winning, it truly rejoices when others succeed and does not define itself by what it wins or accomplishes. If any of these areas are a part of my leadership, then God is opposed to me and I will struggle.

If you can see any of these areas in your life as I have found them in mine, then join me in humility before God. Admit it is sin, that it is only an attempt to cover up our brokeness and call out to Jesus for mercy. He will freely grace when we humble ourselves