Humility

Humility

Friday, June 3, 2016

Jeff Lampl

“(Jesus) humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.

Therefore God elevated him to the place of highest honor

and gave him the name above all other names

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”         Philippians 2:8-11 (NLT)

So, what is the “therefore” there for?

First , the “therefore” tells us that the first Christians believed that Jesus was alive ruling the world from heaven, just as Psalm 110:1 and several other Old Testament passages predicted.   It tells us that every human being on earth will one day kneel before Jesus either in worship, gratitude and love or in regret, horror and pain.   Each of us will see the entirety of our lives as they related to Him, as people who sought him or as people who have spent our lives brushing him off.

Second, it presents to us the only pattern of life that ultimately “works”.   Self-serving patterns “work” for us for a while but they progressively deaden us to others and to ourselves.   They even end up boring us, sucking the life out of ourselves and our relationships.   The path of self and to self goes nowhere but to regret and emptiness.  

On the other hand the path of humility, the path of forgetting myself and focusing on serving God and others is the path of joy and life.

I have noticed two things.   The first is that when I am absorbed in being fully present to the person or activity in front of me, and am thus unaware of myself, I am at those moments most fully alive.   Second, there is a voice in the back of my mind which, when I think of a life of being unaware of myself, screams, “what about me”.   When this voice wins the day, I’m on the path to misery.  When I am not trying to be humble and not trying to rid myself of pride, when I’m simply not thinking of myself at all, it is then that I am most alive.

Third, the “therefore”  it is also a promise.   When we give ourselves over to allowing Jesus to grow in us, crowding out my selfishness, I am renewed, a new kind of life begins to emerge, the kind of life that happens when I am “all there” listening lovingly, and attentively to another person, valuing that person above myself, especially when I don’t feel like it.

“Lord, please help me to seek not the elimination of pride, nor the virtue of humility, rather lead me to increasingly frequent moment of being fully present to you and others, so much so that I am not even aware of my own existence, yet am more myself than ever.   Amen”

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