Humble Servants
Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:4
Humility invites the blessings of God. Pride removes them. Moreover, God Himself is close to the humble, but very far from the proud.
Jesus used the example of a child – who has no credentials to his name, no certificates, no degrees, no accomplishments – as a picture of greatness in the kingdom of God. This theme of humility is consistently emphasized in God’s word.
Isaiah 57:15: For this is what the high and exalted One says—
he who lives forever, whose name is holy:
“I live in a high and holy place,
but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly
and to revive the heart of the contrite.
Proverbs 3:34: He mocks proud mockers
but shows favor to the humble and oppressed.
James 4:10: Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
But humility is to be first our concern for ourselves – not to first give us license to judge another for his lack of it. The first and greater need is to remove the beam in our eye and not to see the speck in our brother’s.
On our knees we must go with [our sin] to Calvary and see Jesus there and get a glimpse of what that sin cost Him. At His Feet we must repent of it and be broken afresh and trust the Lord Jesus to cleanse it away in His precious Blood and fill us with His love for that one - and He will, and does, if we will claim His promise. Then we shall probably need to go to the other in the attitude of the repentant one, tell him of the sin that has been in our heart and what the Blood has effected there and ask him to forgive us too. Very often bystanders will tell us, and sometimes our own hearts, that the sin we are confessing is not nearly so bad as the other’s wrong, which he is not yet confessing. But we have been to Calvary, indeed we are learning to live under the shadow of Calvary, and we have seen our sin there and we can no longer compare our sin with another’s.[1]
But yet we often stop here, as though all that the Scripture emphasizes is self-inspection. The Bible clearly condemns judgmentalism but it also insists that we let God use us – if we are truly broken and spiritual – to help others grow and mature. Jesus did not merely say that we should remove the beam first from our own eye. He also said, “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). And Paul wrote that those who are spiritual have an obligation to seek to restore others (Galatians 6:1). The point is not just to be humble and then lose all sense of what is right and what is wrong. The point is to be cleansed and restored to God and then to be His instruments to be used in the lives of others, just as Paul, “the Chief of Sinners” was used to teach and rebuke.
But as we take these simple steps of repentance, then we see clearly to cast out the mote out of the other’s eye, for the beam in our eye has gone. In that moment God will pour light in on us as to the other’s need, that neither he nor we ever had before. We may see then that the mote we were so conscious of before, is virtually non-existent - it was but the projection of something that was in us. On the other hand, we may have revealed to us hidden underlying things, of which he himself was hardly conscious. Then as God leads us, we must lovingly and humbly challenge him, so that he may see them too, and bring them to the Fountain for sin and find deliverance. He will be more likely than ever to let us do it - indeed if he is a humble man, he will be grateful to us, for he will know now that there is no selfish motive in our heart, but only love and concern for him.[2]
Prayer:
Lord, we humble ourselves before You and see our sin. Restore us and cleanse us. Use us to be agents of grace to others. Amen.