Tag Archives: humility

just thinking

To God Be the Glory

It can’t be denied that as a species, human beings have an enormous capacity for kindness. Time would fail to tell of the occasions when friends of mine have gone far beyond and above the call of duty in their love for me and for others. So perhaps it’s no surprise that we sometimes feel these good works of ours are grounds for pride, as discussed previously. But the gospel destroys our grounds for pride by reminding us that these good works of ours are really God’s works, prepared in advance for us:

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10)

In the sovereignty of God, he planned where we would end up, and the circumstances in which we would find ourselves. Both the specific needs we will be confronted with, and the gifts and resources we will be equipped with to meet those needs are ordained by God. Instinctively, I think we recognise that fact when others help us out of a situation of dire need – at least for the Christian person, it feels natural to thank God for their support.

We see this illustrated for us in the Old Testament, where even the greatest victories of the people of God are not attributed to them and their strength, but to the Lord and his mighty power. Take, for example, one the best-known victories in the Bible: that of David over Goliath. The situation makes it clear that the credit doesn’t belong to David – this young, scrawny shepherd boy armed only with five tiny pebbles and a sling clearly didn’t stand a chance against the gigantic Philistine, the shaft of whose spear was as thick as a weaver’s beam. But David never doubted what the result would be. His motto:

“All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.” (1 Samuel 17:47)

For sure, David was the human agent God used to deliver his people from the Philistines. It was David who had to gather up his pebbles from the stream; it was David who had to make the effort to stand up to Goliath and confront him when nobody else would dare; it was David who had to take aim and sling his pebbles and slay the mighty tyrant. But David saw the truth throughout: the battle was the LORD’s. Without the Lord governing and directing his every step, David would never have been so confident of a favourable outcome for the Israelites. If God could subdue the mighty Philistines by the hand of this single shepherd boy, then he could do it with anyone – David knew it wasn’t his right to take the credit for himself.

We see the same story over and over again in the Old Testament. Gideon is another example, where God deliberately thins out the Israelites army again and again until only a few hundred men remain, “In order that Israel may not boast against me that her own strength has saved her” (Judges 7:2). The victory had nothing to do with Israel, and everything to do with God.

So next time you find yourself tempted to feel proud about something you’re doing for God, ask yourself who put you in this position? Who gave you the gifts and abilities that made you able to do this? Who instilled in you the desire to serve in this way? And just see if the credit isn’t really due to God, and not to you.

just thinking

Pride and the Example of Paul

Why the Apostle Paul’s Example Removes Our Grounds for Pride

Last week I showed that if anybody has grounds for pride, it is surely the Lord Jesus Christ. But maybe the fact that Jesus is such a special case means that you find his example hard to relate to. Of course I don’t have as much grounds for pride as Jesus – he’s God! – you might say. But as far as ordinary people go, I’m pretty special. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men”, as the Pharisee prayed in Luke 18:11. Other men are far worse than me: “extortioners, unjust, adulterers” But as for me, I’m so much more religious than them: “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” But if we want to play the religion card as our grounds for pride, there’s another very strong contender in the race that we’ll find ourselves competing against: the apostle Paul.

Before his conversion, Paul was an incredibly religious man. He was the absolute model Jew. “If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh,” he writes in Philippians 3:4-11, “I have more.” If you’re feeling smug about your good works, I can assure you that they’re not a patch on mine, says Paul. Then he goes on to list his religious qualifications: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews;” Paul’s heritage and pedigree are absolutely top notch. He’s a bona fide, full-blooded Jewish male, raised according to all the laws and customs passed down from God by Moses. But he went far beyond the call of duty: he continues, “as to the law, a Pharisee”. The Pharisees get a pretty bad wrap these days, but at their core they were a group of people who were fanatical about holiness – they were absolutely devoted to obeying God’s law in all of its minutiae, even down to the level of tithing the herbs and spices that grew in their window garden. That’s how committed they were to keeping God’s law, and they were great at it: “under the law, blameless” writes Paul. From what he goes on to say next, Paul clearly isn’t suggesting here that he kept the law perfectly and could have earnt his way into God’s good books, but he is saying that as far as the external, outward requirements of the law went, he was unrivalled. And it wasn’t just a dry formalism, either; Paul’s was a religion full of zeal and vigour in the service of God: “As to zeal, a persecutor of the church.” He may have been mistaken about the right way to do God’s will, but once he’d identified what had to be done there was not a shred of hesitation or holding back in how he went about it. Paul had Christians firmly in his sight and he wasn’t going to lose track of the scent until he’d completely eradicated all hints of this terrible heresy.

Paul was exactly the kind of believer you’d want to have in your congregation. He’d never skive off synagogue on a Saturday morning because of an important football match; he’d never be distracted from what he was supposed to be doing by some pretty girl; he’d never be bribed into making compromises; he’d never shrink back from speaking the truth from fear that it might make him unpopular; he’d be the first one there at the monthly prayer meeting and the last one to leave; he’d be the most generous of your regular givers and would contribute hefty sums to that one off appeal to raise money for a new roof; he’d be on every committee, even the truly tedious ones; whatever religious works you find yourself tempted to take pride in, Paul would be there doing it better and more energetically, leaving you and your paltry efforts in the dust.

“But,” says Paul, “whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” After his conversion, Paul now sees all of his religious works as a complete waste of time – indeed, as loss, because all they did was put up a smoke screen that prevented him from recognising his need of the Lord Jesus. “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish (lit. dung) in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith”. By trusting in his own efforts, all Paul was doing was digging himself deeper and deeper into a godless hole. His own righteousness seemed incomparably cheap and shabby next to the perfect, spotless righteousness of Christ, a level of righteousness that could be found only by forsaking his own efforts to make himself right with God and trusting wholeheartedly in Christ’s finished work on the cross.

Even the mighty Paul, impeccable, immovable, incorruptible, even Paul recognised that his own religious works were but a pale shadow next to the righteousness of Christ. They were worthless, the sort of thing you’d take about as much pride in as a pile of horse manure. Boasting in your own works would be like taking a bunch of used nappies along to the Antiques Roadshow and trying to argue that they were worth as much as some centuries-old Ming vase: you’d be laughed off the show and told to never come back. “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him… that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” For all his religious works, even a zealous Pharisee like Paul would still one day die and rot, and without Christ there’s not a thing his good works could do to save him.

We see this same attitude of Paul’s played out in 2 Corinthians 11:21-33. Comparing himself to the false “super-apostles” who boasted in their works, Paul begins to mock them by adopting their own false logic:

“But whatever anyone else dares to boast of- I am speaking as a fool- I also dare to boast of that. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one – I am talking like a madman – with far great labours, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepness night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”

Paul shows that whatever grounds for pride the super-apostles of Corinth thought they may have had, he had more. Nobody had gone to greater lengths for the sake of the gospel than him. And yet there is nothing arbitrary about the list of things Paul has chosen to mention here. As heroic as they may make him look, there’s also something slightly pathetic about the list, don’t you think? Earlier the Corinthians have described Paul as a man whose “bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.” (2 Corinthians 10:10) and here we read of him being beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, cold and exposed. This small little man seems to spend his whole life in constant shame, always one step away from disaster, whilst the cosy super-apostles get on with their comfortable lives in Corinth at the expense of the church there. The explanation comes in v30: “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” Paul chooses to boast not of the things that show how great he is, but of the things that show how small and weak and pathetic he is. He boasts of the things that show that all he has accomplished could not possibly have been accomplished in his own strength, but in the strength and power of the Lord his God. The God who says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). When the human vessels that God works through are so obviously mere clay pots – cheap plastic cups that are used once and then thrown away – well it’s then that God’s infinite power is most clearly perceived. “Therefore,” says Paul, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

If you think you have grounds for pride, surely they are nothing compared to the apostle Paul’s? And yet he knew it was utterly vain to try and boast in his own righteousness – even as great as his was – and chose instead to boast in how utterly weak and pathetic and dependent on the God of grace he was.

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Pride and Christ’s Example

Why Jesus’ Example Removes Our Grounds for Pride

All of us love to feel good about ourselves. Some of even have a few reasons: perhaps we have a great skill or talent, perhaps you’re just a really stand-up chap. If there was one man in the history of the world who had grounds to be proud, surely it was the Lord Jesus Christ. There were many reasons why he might have been inclined to exalt himself:

Jesus could have been proud because of his earthly heritage. Firstly he was Jewish, a member of God’s chosen people to whom were entrusted all the oracles of God (Romans 3:2). He was born into a devout family who brought him up according to all the laws that God had instituted, such as taking him to the temple as a baby to present him to the Lord (Luke 2:22). More than that, he was “descended from David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3) – as if being part of the chosen people of God was not noble enough, specifically he was from the house and line of David, the great king of Israel to which all other kings were compared, the one after God’s own heart, and whose reign marked the glory days of Israel’s history as a nation. To David was given the promise that God would establish the throne of his kingdom for ever, and that one of his descendants would forever rule over God’s people. You can imagine people clamouring to establish direct descent from David and the substantial prestige that would be associated with that. My family once got really excited at the discovery that there might be a link between my Grannie and Lord Kitchener (the guy with the amazing moustache in the original “Your country needs you!” posters). Given my complete inability to grow a moustache I suspect there wasn’t much truth behind the claim, but we love the idea of being related to important people, and the more important the person the more pride we feel at being associated with them. As a descendant of Israel’s greatest king, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

Jesus could have been proud because of his existence since times immemorial. Before the foundations of the world Jesus existed along with his Father: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2) He existed before all others and so is greater than all others. Coming after King David was enough to receive the reflected glory of his ancestor, and yet how much more is coming before David? As Jesus points out in Mark 12:35, even David submits to the Christ as his Lord. That would have been a shocking idea to the people at the time, since in Jewish thought the order in which you were born establishes a hierarchy: children must always honour their parents, and the eldest child always received the largest share of the inheritance. Yet Jesus existed long before David, in fact he never had a beginning, and so David calls him his Lord. Or take the most revered figure in Jewish history: the patriarch Abraham, from whose line came the whole Jewish race. In Jesus’ day, just as now, the Jewish people took great pride in their relationship to Abraham, and yet Jesus says to them, “Before Abraham was, I am”. Jesus precedes all the greatest figures of Jewish history by virtue of the fact that he existed long before them. In a game of Bible hero Top Trumps, Jesus would win hands down against all the others. As the one who alone was with God since before the world began, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

Jesus could have been proud because of his eternal destiny. He is the anointed king to whom God promised: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” (Psalm 110:1) His position as God’s Christ makes him the ultimate king before whom none can stand: those who continue to oppose his rule he shall break with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel (Psalm 2:9).
He is the one at whose name every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:10-11). He is the lamb upon the throne, before whom shall stand for all eternity a great multitude that none could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, forever praising him and giving him great glory. These are things which he knew full well throughout his earthly life, and indeed we are told that it was because of the joy set before him that he was able to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus’ favourite way of referring to himself was as “the Son of Man”, a phrase which brings to mind Daniel 7:13-14, and the one like a son of man presented before the Ancient of Days, to whom was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. Imagine how Barrack Obama must have felt the night after he was elected as the President of the United States of America – and yet that was only for four years, and as much as he might like to pretend, Obama doesn’t really have control over America’s enemies. Even Obama has a long way to go before being nominated as the President of the Whole World throughout all of time, and yet that’s exactly what Jesus is, with supreme authority over everything and everyone. As God’s supreme king, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

Jesus could have been proud because of his magnificent works. He was the author of all creation: “For by him, all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities- all things were created through him and for him.” (Colossians 1:16) We’re told that through him God created the world, and that even now he upholds the universe by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:2-3). Think of the most majestic thing you have ever seen in all of creation – maybe it’s an incredible sunset, or a stormy day on the Cornish coast, or a geyser spewing out steam, or that amazing “pop” you get when opening a jar of marmalade for the first time, or a mighty blue whale, or an exotic bird of paradise, or maybe your husband or wife – Jesus created that in all of its glorious intricacy and beauty. As John 1:3 puts it: “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Whilst on the earth, Jesus demonstrated his lordship over creation again and again. He stood on a boat in the middle of the perfect storm: as the winds howled around him and the mighty waves threatened to sink them, Jesus merely had to speak and the storm immediately ceased, running away with its tail between its legs. He healed every kind of sickness and disease, such that those who moments before were at deaths’ door were suddenly running around serving him dinner. He even raised the dead, calling the rotting corpse of his friend Lazarus out of the grave so that he might live again. Not surprisingly, Jesus attracted huge crowds who were constantly banging on his door and hoping to see what he might do next. As the mightiest miracle worker of all time, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

I hope you will agree that the Lord Jesus Christ had every reason to be proud. Yet the great surprise is that he was not, and indeed was the humblest man ever to walk the earth, and came to the human race as a servant. “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6-7). If you think you have grounds to be proud then I can assure you that they are nothing compared to the reasons that Jesus had to be proud, and yet he felt no need whatsoever to boast or stand on his rights. Instead he emptied himself of all that he was, condescending even to come in to the world as a naked, screaming baby born into a smelly stable. “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45) Even this mighty king, the eternal ruler, the one who was and is and is to come, greater than Moses, mightier than David, more majestic than the Grand Canyon – even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many by his gruesome execution on a Roman cross. It should make us ashamed for all our pathetic attention seeking, to think that we have more reason to boast than the Lord Jesus, to think that somehow we deserve recognition, when even the King of Kings lived and died in such obscurity and shame.