Grace to the Humble
Pete’s friend Buck Murphy was a man who was successful by the standards of the world. He started a popular and practical magazine called the Pennysaver. Buck also built and staffed dental centers as a profitable business venture. He decided to dedicate his life to Christ and became involved with Junior High children’s ministry directing camps at Hume Lake for about 10 years. After many years in ministry, Buck moved to Hawaii to start dental practices. He did not plug into a church and instead bought a Penthouse and joined a local tennis club. At the club he started dabbling in the use of cocaine. Once someone came up to him and asked Buck if he would get him a bag of cocaine. Buck was eager to please and hated to say no, so he sold a bag to the person that asked him. The buyer turned out to be a narcotics officer. Although this was his first offense, Buck was convicted and spent two years in prison. Before his conviction, people perceived Buck as the life of the party… gregarious, engaging, and an easy conversationalist. Buck wrote, “please hear what I’m saying… you think that I’m confident and self assured, but I’m hiding behind a mask so that you won’t think of me what I think about myself. In reality, I’m insecure, hiding behind a facade of false bravado… I’m afraid that if you laugh at me, I’ll be devastated because I need your validation. You alone can break down the wall and the mask behind which I’m hiding. However, a lifetime of building strong walls is difficult to penetrate.” Buck used his prison time as a time of solitude and reflection… to set his heart upon the things that really matter in life. He found deliverance in an Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program at Pete’s church and by returning to fellowship with other men who knew that they were sinners who were broken. Shame and humiliation produces humility to turn from from darkness to the light of the Word and the fellowship of believers.
Men in times of introspection, understand that “in my flesh dwelleth no good thing.” Men who profess to believe often are burdened beneath a load of guilt and shame. Even though the Bible says we’re worthy, our own hearts often condemn us… However, according to 1 John, “even if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things.”
Humility results from the brokenness in the flesh. God has made us as jars of clay, vessels that need to be broken in order for God to mend us and reconcile us back to himself. Therefore be sober, be vigiliget for your adversary prowls about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. The question is not whether we will fall but what we allow God to do in us and through us when we fall. God will allow the devil to bring us down when we allow pride to lift us up. Pride goes before the fall. God resists the proud but gives grace unto the humble.
O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this dead body? The answer is that there is no pit so deep, but that the love and grace of God isn’t deeper still. Therefore, because of the debt Jesus paid with the price of his innocent blood on our behalf, there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit. For the spirit of life in Christ has made us free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin condemned sin in the flesh that the righteousness of the law may be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit.
According to Philippians 2, put ye on the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ is the mind of humility, for Jesus humbled himself, took upon himself the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God has highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every other name. That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the father.
The prayer of the humble says I must decrease that he may increase. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves but our sufficiency is of God. A humble heart allows us to be not conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds that we may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
May God richly bless you.
Your brother in Christ,
Michael