Grace - A Look At True Humility

God is God, and you're not.

God is Holy and we must rise to His standard.

It's prideful and arrogant to say we're saints.

I've heard the above statements--and more--all said by believers with the purpose of convincing other believers to prostrate themselves before a God Who is infinitely greater and holier than themselves...lest God would get angry and make something bad happen to them.  While I do agree with the first statement, God is God, and you're not, with the others I must take exception.

Can we really rise to God's holy standard?  Is it arrogant and prideful to say we're saints, even when we occasionally sin?

The answer to these questions is patently NO!  So, why do we still lean toward this type of Christian walk?

We have been convinced that it's holiness to be preoccupied with our sins and failures and strive to better our behavior.  But this effort doesn't stop at behavior.  Even our thought-life is under surveillance and the Thought Police are ready to crash in at the slightest notion that we had a dirty thought.  We must constantly be on guard for our dirty thoughts...or so we think.

We are so sin-conscious.  So much so that, in fact, we are not Christ-conscious.  We continually view ourselves in terms of how well we're managing sin and we've lost sight and awareness of the truth and reality of who we are in Christ and who Christ is in us.

Here's a shocker for you:  What do you call it when we replace (substitute) the truth of our life in Christ with our performance?

It is anti-Christ!

"Anti" means "in lieu of", to replace or substitute, in place of, over against, or to exchange.

So...those unbelieving believers who refuse to believe the truth of who they are in Christ and who Christ is in them have believed a spirit of antichrist!  Crazy, but true!

So then, what is true biblical humility?

Well, it's not real humility to consider who or what we are without Christ; true humility is to believe what He says about us now.

Neither is it holiness to muse upon our failures.  We have been set apart; we have been made whole; we have been sanctified.  And this next point is most important:  Pride can mask itself as humility.  To ponder and rehearse our former lives is to believe this following statement, an arrogance above all arrogance:  that the Father has not accepted the blood of Christ.

We are not evil sinners at heart, for we ARE new creations.  It is not our hearts that need to be changed (for they already have been), it is our minds that need to be renewed to the truth of who we are in Christ, not who we were in Adam.  The plowman must not look back.

For more on this, I encourage you to read a recent blog of mine:  http://jdkrider.blogspot.com/2013/08/grace-will-you-believe-heavenly-things.html

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy