Are you proud or humble? Are you honest about the answer? Humility needs to be clarified: being humble doesn’t mean you walk around with your head down and back away from every challenge. Being humble means you know what your gifts are, but you acknowledge and know from Whom you received them. Being humble isn’t being weak…being humble takes strength! After the fall of Adam, man’s character and nature changed. What started out as pure confidence, quickly changed to pride. What started as love, changed to lust; what started as steadfast changed to stubborn. You get the picture! God created perfection, but disobedience led to separation from that, with the end result of something that is lesser. When we humble ourselves that puts us in an excellent position…that of being open to the grace of God. James 4:6 tells us that God gives grace and favor to the humble. 1 Peter 5:6 tells us to be humble under the hand of God and we will be exalted. It’s a win-win situation! (Listen to entire sermon below.) If you have never put your complete faith in Jesus Christ for your eternal salvation, why not believe what God's word says and call on Jesus Christ to save you right now? Click here and let us show you how you can KNOW JESUS.
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We continue with James 1:13 – here James tells us the sources of temptations. His main message is this: Don’t blame anyone but yourself! “Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.” (James 1:14) We don’t want to admit it, but we have to face the fact that our Adam nature leans towards sin and the only way out of that is to have the nature of God inside of you. You don’t automatically have that, it’s a gift, you have to humble yourself and ask God to forgive you of your sins and invite Him inside. That’s usually the stopping point for many people…they just don’t see that what they are doing is wrong – hmm…isn’t that the problem with being in the dark – you can’t see! James 2 then gives us the good news that faith removes discrimination. Sweet! God will take you, rich or poor, no matter what color or ethnic group, no matter what belief system you have had jammed down your throat. He will forgive you and take you as His own. You may not stay rich or poor but, for sure, your “belief system” will change to His system. The truth will surely set you free. Not free to sin, but to serve God and each other in holiness. That holiness coming from God will set you up for happiness. It doesn’t work the other way around. You can seek this whole world for happiness and it will never get you holiness…only Jesus Christ can do that. (Listen to entire sermon below.) If you have never put your complete faith in Jesus Christ for your eternal salvation, why not believe what God's word says and call on Jesus Christ to save you right now? Click here and let us show you how you can KNOW JESUS. Humility is a spiritual discipline. It does not come to us naturally. If we even understand humility, we are often proud we are humble…duh…I think we need a bit more understanding! Discipline is hard work, done in obscurity, for the sake of excellence. Those same comments apply to humility. We are often not as familiar with humility as we are with pride. The sneaky thing about pride, though, is that we often think we are humble when we are not. Our “humility” is full of holes! Humility is not having low self-esteem, feeling unworthy or inferior or being a nobody. Humility just means you know your gifts but you know Whom they came from, and it wasn’t you! Humility is knowing you are valuable, especially valuable to God, and that is not inferior to anyone. But our relationship with God is all because of Him and not because of us…and that should keep us really humble. If you have never put your complete faith in Jesus Christ for your eternal salvation, why not believe what God's word says and call on Jesus Christ to save you right now? Click here and let us show you how you can KNOW JESUS. Humility, true humility, would admit that we also could have been one of the worse dredges of the earth! When we stop and think of the twists and turns in life, we soon realize that short of a few different variables, we, too, could be that drug addict, bank robber, unfaithful spouse, brutal dictator, etc. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” The great preacher Charles Spurgeon had a few comments regarding true humility that helps set the stage for our sermon tonight. He said, “It is not humility to underrate yourself. Humility is to think of yourself as God thinks of you. It is to feel that if we have talents, God has given them to us. And let it be seen that, like freight in a vessel, they tend to sink us low. The more we have, the lower we ought to lie.” Humility doesn’t mean that you hang your head down and walk meekly on the earth being a doormat for everyone that comes along. No, no—that is not what God intended. Humility just means you know your gifts, but you know they didn’t come from you, they came from God. Humility is a protection against pride. Pride will get you all self-righteous when you see someone in sin; someone who has failed to reach the level of God’s directions. Rather, if you are “heavy” with God’s nature, you are lowly in heart and humble. You realize that all you have and all you are, have come from God and anything else ruling in you would make you one of the “dredges of the earth.” Scripture References: James 4:6, Matthew 11:29, Matthew 23:12, Colossians 3:12-13, 1 Peter 5:5b-6, Proverbs 15:31-32, Proverbs 15:33b, Proverbs 16:18-19, Proverbs 16:5 Audio: (Click forward button below to play audio of message and/or download mp3 file.)
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