HUMILITY IS NOT HUMILIATION
There is a big difference between submission and obedience. Christ learned obedience through suffering. He could submit to the will of the Father. Submission comes only of our free will. We can never say we submit to someone or something because we are afraid or oppressed. Submission means also to exhibit oneself, to make oneself bare, to make oneself naked. Many of us when we are bare and naked, we have a different opinion, than when we cover ourselves with knowledge. The first thing that Adam and Eve did after they ate of the tree of knowledge was to cover themselves. Many of us cannot be humble because our knowledge covers us and takes away the ability to yield to Christ, and in our nakedness we are not able to express who He is.
In Deuteronomy 8:2, “And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.” God says that He led, not to humiliate them, but that He might test or teach them through His kindness and love. The test is for us that we know that it is not our strength, our gifting, our will power, and our determination that brings us out of the desolation. If we have been slaves our entire life, we cannot know humility. We have seen in America, and we are involved with a great deal of black churches. These black men have broken down cultural barriers and ideas, which have been infiltrated through slavery. They have had a revelation of who they are in Christ, and they accept it in humility, so that they could have the ability to break down barriers, not in pride, but in the humility of Christ. It does not matter what we are proud of, whether it is our white culture or our black culture or our white history or black history. If we are proud of what we are, we can never become a reconciler.
We have to come to the place where the Spirit can lead us. When God led Jesus, and also the prophets and the children of Israel into the desert, it speaks of an uninhabited and solitary place. In the desert, God had to change the taste buds of the children of Israel, their appetites, their desires and longings, and they had to humble themselves to be led. In order to change their desires they had to be willing to depart before they could embrace something new. We can never be led of the Spirit without departing. One good illustration of that is when a man is to be married. God says that a man must leave his parents and cleave to his wife. We must leave some things behind, if we are going to come into something new.
I have had many departures in my life, and departing is not pleasant, it hurts. Only as God leads us into the wilderness, the wilderness of our emotion where our comforts and securities suddenly are stripped away, can we find what is inside of us. In that desolated and solitary place where we are stripped of what we have been and what we feel, we have the choice to follow Him to come into our possession. We can never come into the possession of God if we are not willing to depart.
In His Love,
Sigi
Devotions
Posted: April 2007