Humility: Seeing Myself the Way God Sees Me" Sarnia

Ecuador – marketplace – bargaining to establish the correct value of the item.

Humility is the ability to put a correct value on ourselves. We have a really hard time doing that, because we want to go to one extreme or the other.

undervalued

overvalued

true value

Scale – overvalue on one end, undervalue on the other end, and true value in the middle. Humility is when I begin to understand myself and see myself and value myself with something approaching my true value – not overinflated, nor underinflated – my true value is the value God puts on me.

There are powerful forces that want to pull me away from understanding and accepting my true value as a human being.

The world – if I don’t look like Julia Roberts; If I can’t play basketball like Kobe Bryant; if I don’t drive a BMW and wear Armani clothes, then I’m less than okay. The world places a false value on things and pushes me to the undervalue end of the scale
The flesh – my sin nature wants to be pampered, stroked, coddled, and given anything it wants under the rationale that I am very special and I deserve it. It pulls me to the overvalue end of the scale.
The devil – he wants to do whatever he can to keep me away from understanding my true value (God’s value). He will either deflate me or inflate me. He will try to make me live my life from a position of humiliation or a position of pride.

There’s a difference between humilty and humiliation. When you are humiliated, you are made to think too lowly of yourself. When you are humiliated, you just want to die, because you conclude that you are worthless. Humility is not about being humiliated – humiliation is horrible; enslaving; it kills the spirit. Humiliation is something Satan tries to do to you. God never humiliates us; but he does humble us. Because humbleness, or humility, is joyful; it is liberating.

If humiliation is when you place too low a value on yourself; pride is when you think too highly of yourself. Satan tries to take us to one extreme or the other. (Like the crazy mirrors in the funhouse – one makes you look too tall, the other makes you look too short. That’s what Satan wants.)

Pride is when we think that we are more important than we really are. That we somehow have a right to the best treatment, the most recognition, the best appreciation. The best of everything.

Pride is terribly enslaving. You can become a slave to your own pride. Pride is competitive. It is isolating, because pride makes it impossible to appreciate anything or anyone that is above us. Pride ultimately isolates us from God.

But God wants to teach us humiity. He wants us to have a true view of ourselves. God humbles us, but he never humiliates us.

God honors us, but he never flatters us – he never gives us an overinflated view of ourselves.

How can I gain a true view of my own value as a human being? By going to the Scriptures and seeing what God says about me.

I need to accept my place – I’m a creature made in the image of God

Genesis 1:27 God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Psalm 8…When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet…

We generally think of humility as being a character quality we need to go “down” to get. But for some of us, at least, it may be a quality we need to go “up” to get. Many people have such a low view of themselves that they need to understand themselves correctly in terms of who God made them to be.

We are the only creatures of God who bear his image. Moreover, we are the only creatures of God, one of which God himself chose to become. That alone is reason to celebrate. Yet the reason he chose to become one of us is because we had failed him so badly that he had to rescue us at cost of his own life.

And that brings us to the next point…

Although I’m a creature made in the image of God, I need to…

Acknowledge my problem – I’m a sinner and continue to be one. I have turned my back on God, rebelled against him.

There are only two kinds of people in the world – those who are sinners and know it, and those who are sinners and either cannot or will not admit it to themselves.

Jesus tells us a vivid story about these two kinds of people in Luke 18:9. It’s a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

How did the Pharisee come into the presence of God? Did he regard himself to be a sinner? No. Oh, I’m sure that the man would have been willing to admit to some small sins of a minor nature, but on the whole, it seems he was quite satisfied with his own moral standing. You can tell that because of the way he compares himself with others.

He says “God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like that tax collector over there. I would never do the kinds of things that those people do. I am not like them in any way. No, on the whole, I’m okay. In fact, I’m better than okay: I fast, not once but twice a week, and I tithe on my income. God, you should be proud of me.” That was his attitude.

And I wonder if that might not be the attitude of many typical evangelical Christians today? “God, here I am in church again. See how good I am? My life is in order. I am successful, responsible, dignified, and an upstanding member of the community. I pay my taxes and I give to the church. I love my wife and kids and I don’t swear, or do drugs, or have other bad habits. Aren’t you proud of me, God?”

The first step to humility is to acknowledge that I am a sinner. I have this aggressively positive inclination in the core of my being to rebel against God. And I am capable of great evil. God cannot redeem me unless I come to grips with this fact.

C.S. Lewis said ““Until a person finds evil unmistakably present in his existence… he is enclosed in an illusion.”

He’s living in a dreamworld.

Now understanding that you are truly a sinner leads to one of two options:

I’m a sinner and I’m going to somehow try to fix that problem on my own.
I’m a sinner and there isn’t a thing I can do about it; only God can fix me.

I need to appreciate God’s provision for my sin – he redeemed me by his grace.

Titus 3:5 he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

Grace is the “unmerited favor of God” toward us. Grace is when God does something for us that we don’t deserve – in fact, something that we have done everything NOT to deserve. As a sinner, I am the object of God’s grace. That helps me put a true value on myself.

Understanding grace makes me truly humble, because grace rules out merit. I did nothing to deserve or merit God’s favor. The moment I believe that, to even the slightest degree, I have merited God’s favor because of who I am or what I’ve done, I become proud, puffed up. I start living on the “over-inflated” end of the scale.

On the other hand, we need to understand that we are never beyond the reach of God’s grace. I have known people who believe that they are so bad, they have sinned so grievously that God could never save them; that he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them. They are living on the “under-inflated” end of the scale.

But grace pulls us to the middle and helps us to see our true value. And once we understand that, we can get on with

Accomplishing our purpose – living for the glory of God.

Jesus said “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Our purpose as human beings is to reflect positively on God. (Remember, we are creatures who are made in his image.) We’re not here to draw attention to ourselves; we are here to draw attention to God. And when we do that, we become humble and happy, because we are doing exactly what God created us to do.

Oswald Chambers

born in 1874 in Aberdeen, Scotland
came to Christ in his teenage years under ministry of C.H. Spurgeon
studied art and archaeology at University of Edinburgh
felt called into Christian ministry
1906-1910 itinerant preaching ministry in the U.K., the U.S. and Japan
married a court stenograher named Gertrude in 1910 at age of 36 - one daughter, Kathleen.
1911 founded Bible Training College in Clapham, England - he served as principal
the school was only open for 4 years and then had to be closed due to WW1
appt. by YMCA to serve as a chaplain to Australian & NZ troops in Egypt guarding Suez Canal during WW1.
while there, his appendix ruptured and he died following surgery. He was just 43 years of age. He had been married just 7 years.
while he was alive, he wrote only one book—an obscure work entitled “Baffled to Fight Better”.
but whenever he spoke, Gertrude—his wife, the court stenographer—took verbatim shorthand notes of all his messages.
after he died, she took some of his lectures from the Bible Training College and the devotional talks that he had given to the troops in Egypt, put them together, edited them, and published them in book form in 1928.
that book was to become the best-selling devotional book of all time: My Utmost for His Highest
it has been rated by Christianity Today as one of the ten most significant Christian books of the 20th century.
yet its author never saw it!
Gertrude compiled and published 30 books under Oswald Chambers’ name.

Oswald Chambers is far better known now than he ever was when he was alive. He served the Lord (for the most part) in obscurity. He had a short life and career. But he laboured faithfully and humbly. Listen to what he says about this…

“Are you willing to sacrifice yourself for the work of another believer—to pour out your life sacrificially for the ministry and faith of others? Or do you say, “I am not willing to be poured out right now, and I don’t want God to tell me how to serve Him. I want to choose the place of my own sacrifice. And I want to have certain people watching me and saying “Well done.”

It is one thing to follow God’s way of service if you are regarded as a hero, but quite another thing if the road marked out for you by God requires becoming a “doormat” under other people’s feet. God’s purpose may be t o teach you to say, as Paul said in Philippians 4:12 “I know how to be abased.”

Are you ready to be sacrificed like that? Are you ready to be less than a mere drop in the bucket—to be so totally insignificant that no one remembers you even if they think of those you served? Are you willing to give and be poured out until you are used up and exhausted—not seeking to be ministered to, but to minister?”

Challenging words! It can only be true of us when we have…

Accepted our place as creatures made in the image of God
Acknowledged our problem as sinners who continue to struggle with sin
Appreciated God’s provision of grace in our lives
Devoted ourselves to accomplishing his purpose – to live for His glory

That’s what true humility is all about.