Humble
Recently, as I was praying and imagining with the Lord, the word “love” came to mind. Specifically, how He is LOVE and how much He loves us. I thought about what a simple and easy message that was until it hit me. If He is love, and He is, then how can love be simple. How can love be easy. Actually, love must then be the hardest most complex thing there ever was or ever will be. Why? Because He is love, and He, God, is beyond imagining!
I thought about the fact that He is the Uncreated One. How He has no beginning. I used to think that He created Himself, but that is incorrect, because that would mean that He had a beginning, a starting point, but He has no starting point. Think about that for a minute. Let that sink in. God. Has. No. Starting. Point. !!!!!! He just ALWAYS WAS. If that doesn’t blow your mind, then you’ve lost the beauty of what the word “eternal” means. We’ve let movies and t.v shows convince us that it’s possible for anyone else to be that, and it’s not. Just HIM. Only He is eternal. And the One who always was, the Eternal One, calls Himself, LOVE. So, love is anything but simple and easy.
I thought about a message Corey Russell preached about the four living creatures or the Seraphim. I can’t remember which ones. But it was about how they are at His throne, non-stop, crying out Holy, and Corey said it was the equivalent of us crying out, “wow!” It was because they were constantly being shown the beauty of the Uncreated One. The One who will also never end, who will never get boring, who is constantly revealing more of His nature. They are almost speechless in the face of His majesty, in the face of love, so all they can say is, “holy or wow!”
If you remember your Bible, most people when confronted with angels, “fell as if they were dead.” Because of the glory that surrounded them most thought they were in the presence of God and the angels always had to explain that they were angels, that they were not God. The seraphim were the highest ranking angels, so they were the most glorious, and yet, they are almost speechless in the presence of God. The four living creatures, are a sight to behold and they can see everything, but even as supernatural as they are, they too can only bow before the Uncreated One and cry out, “holy!”
What does all this have to do with being humble? Well. God, who is love, left all that He is and became man. For us. The Uncreated One stepped out of eternity into time because He loved us. I’ve been saved since I was sixteen, and today is my 52nd birthday, so I’ve known this for a while, but today it hit me in a new and fresh way. A bit jumbled, I admit, so forgive me.
I thought about how amazed babies must be in the womb. Everything is new. They discover that they can move, that fingers are connected to hands that are connected to arms. They discover legs that are connected to feet. They discover that if they move their feet hard enough, they can get a response from another realm (outside the womb), because they can hear. I think they like it in there. They are comfortable, warm, and fed. That’s probably why they come out looking so traumatized.
Then I thought about what it must have been like for Jesus, the God-man, the Uncreated One. You see, my thinking used to be that He didn’t start to get humbled until days before the cross and then He got really humbled for us as He hung naked and dying on the cross. Now, I’m convinced it started the moment He entered the womb of a woman. How confined must He have been as a one day old fetus! The God-man as a one day old fetus. Think about that! Think about the Eternal One, confined to the prison of time, because Love loved us so much. Think about the humility it took for God to go through the birthing process. If you’ve ever seen it done, or if you are a woman who has given birth, you understand what I mean. The Uncreated One decided that He wanted to be with you and me forever, so He didn’t just become sin for us. No, it started way before that. He became a helpless fetus, a defenseless babe, a twelve year old that submitted to His human parents by waiting twenty-one more years to fulfill the call on His life. The God-man became the head of his family and took on the trade of a carpenter. He humbled Himself with a 9 to 5 job that required physical labor. Imagine some rich jerk making Jesus do a project all over again just because he could! Just because he thought he was lord. Imagine. And because He was Jesus, I bet He humbled Himself and did it.
Love is not simple and easy. It’s the hardest thing. If we read our Bibles, we see the hard thing called love lived out in the life of Jesus and the apostles and many of the champions of the Bible. Love is hard because it requires us to humble ourselves. It requires us to put ourselves aside. Yes, we are the sons and daughters of the Most High God, seated with Him in Christ in Heaven, but just like the God-man put on humanity and humbled Himself, we have to humble ourselves as well. We have to let love win the day by humbling ourselves. The rich jerk may have to win over and over again. The jerk might be our boss, our spouse, our parent, our sibling. The person in the check out line. In some cases, the jerk might be us. We might have to humble ourselves and take on the mantle of love. If God could do it, who are we not to?
So. God’s gift to me on my birthday. Some words of wisdom: “I give grace to the humble.” John Bevere says that God’s grace is His enabling power to do things we otherwise cannot do on our own. The ability to live HOLY. To go beyond our natural ability. We can’t live holy on our own, no matter how hard we try, but
grace gives us the strength to be holy
a humble life gives us grace
embracing love (Him)above all else, empowers us to live humble, like He did.
This may not seem like much, but the awe inspiring Seraphim and the supernatural living creatures look at God and all they can say about the Uncreated One, the Eternal One, is Holy. I want people to be able to see holy in me, to see my Father in me, my Jesus in me, to see me as the holy vessel of Holy Spirit.
