Humility
The Word of God is the Lords story not ours.
Today’s Western Christians, have a tailored perception of God. Our understanding of Him is filtered through the lens of “we are who we are because of what He has done for us”.
While this is true, it is limiting. We ARE only who we are because of what He has done for us, but when we comprehend God only by what we understand of ourselves, we end up with a very small field of vision in which God is necessarily required to fit. And, the smaller God is perceived to be the bigger and more central we/ourselves become. When we make ourselves central to the story God has given us to understand Him, we have a hard time making sense of the passages that we don’t relate to, and the field of vision shrinks even more. We do need to know who we are in light of who our God is, but a consistent gaze into who WE are in Christ, rather than who Christ IS, stifles both genuine humility and maturity.
Genuine humility is like a flame, that keeps our hearts warm and capable of growth; easily shaped and molded; and catching a glimpse of how great God is and how unworthy we are of His affection, is what lights the flame. Awe and Wonder have a purpose.
What are we to do then if we do not know enough about God for Him to be great in our minds and our hearts? For, It seems that, what we are content to know about our God is not sufficient to spark the necessary awe and wonder in our hearts that lights the fire of humility. And so our hearts stay cold and rather bored and we are told to look within ourselves to fan faith into flame.
The solution then isn’t to better manage your own cold heart, but to look to the Father and consider; is HE worthy of Awe and wonder to you? and if that answer is an honest no (even if it hurts or is even confusing to admit), well then you need to know more about Him.
Good news, chin up! no matter who you are or where you are in your walk with the Lord, there is more to learn. None of us will ever get to a place where there’s not more to learn. For His ways are unsearchable. (Isaiah 40:28)
What you need now, is plain and simple, going back to the beginning again and reading the Word of God on His terms, not yours. It’s not doubling down on the same familiar modes of study and worship, for if you have been doing these things faithfully, yet you find yourself oftentimes unmoved, what good would it do to just do more of the same? It’s not newly developed practices, nor ancient practices revived. For these are the vain philosophies of men and doctrines of devils that make their practitioners no more holy than the Pharisees (Mark 7: 6-9; Matthew 7:15-20; 1 Timothy 4:1-2)
It is plain and simple, going back to the beginning again and reading the Word of God on His terms, not yours. (Or your brothers or your pastors or your best friend who went to Seminary… ) The kind of humility that yields maturity is being willing to suspend disbelief in what you cannot naturally comprehend, and growing up in faith as a child. Matthew 18:3-4 ”truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest on the kingdom of heaven.”
Think about the way a child takes in a good story. Their eyes get wide, and their jaw drops as they try to wrap their mind around the possibility of what they are hearing. Until a certain age they don’t analyze, they don’t spend time weighing the possibilities and the impossibilities, there are no laws of nature or theology that they must align their belief to, they just… believe. What if we were humble enough to approach the Word of God like a child? I think, we would grow! We are called to faith as children, but we are not meant to stay that way. We are meant to grow up
(1 Peter 2:2), to be capable of discerning good from evil and to teach others to do the same. (Hebrews 5:12-14) The Word of God is the Lords story, not ours.