Jun 07, 2024 Humility Is the Key to Accepting the Word of God – Words of Grace Blog – June 7, 2024
The calendar tells me it is Pride Month. Jesus tells me it is time to hear and accept his word, which is something pride will not allow.
Pride is nowhere in the Bible represented as a virtue. It is a heart disease that leads to death. It blinds our eyes to reality, deafens our ears to the truth, and causes our feet to stumble into all manner of destructive living and selfish treatment of other people. Most of all, pride opposes God and sets us against his word.
We should never take pride in sinful things, and the last thing we should celebrate is pride itself.
Jesus calls us to humility. The humble posture first looks up, outside of ourselves, to God. Then the ears of the humble turn toward and are tuned to the word of God revealed to us. At the sound of the word, the humble bow low in submission, receive it, obey it, and celebrate the life that flows from it.
Jesus said the word of God in a humble heart is like seed sown in good soil. In time, the peaceful fruit of righteousness sprouts forth in abundance. This humble person gives evidence of the Spirit of Jesus within. Others are blessed by the qualities the word of God produces in his humble servants.
This Sunday at Grace Community Church we will gather around the parable of the sower, the seed, and the soil given to us by Jesus in Mark 4:1-20. The message in this parable is that our discipleship requires a humble responsiveness to the word.
We will humble ourselves as we listen to Jesus speak to us. We will turn his word back to him in humble prayer for ourselves. We will humbly pray for the people in our world who are still imprisoned to the boastful pride of life.
Let’s give pride no place in our hearts. Today, this month, and as long we have breath, let us come worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. The Lord is our God, and we are his people by pure grace through faith alone. The Lord is our Shepherd, and we the sheep of his hand. As we hear his voice, let us not harden our hearts, but humble ourselves before him and choose life.
I am praying for you this weekend. Please pray for me.
-Scott