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August 2 - August 26, 2017
Instead of rejecting our resources, humility teaches us to receive them as gifts and to use them for God’s glory and the good of those around us.
And the very thing the servant fears happens: He loses his talent, not because he took a risk but precisely because he didn’t.
despite involving the same physical actions, burying and planting have very different results.
When the final servant buried his talent, he was trying to preserve it because he feared he would lose it.
When everything is gift and when we learn to trust the Giver of those gifts, we learn a kind of humility that makes us fearless and productive.
instead of either hoarding or rejecting our resources, we cultivate them. Instead of burying them, we plant them.
Our one thousand gifts are actually one thousand opportunities: the very means by which God intends to seed His world.
Like the servant with two talents, I wasn’t responsible for the resources I didn’t have; I was responsible for the ones I did have.
1. I will not overlook my privilege. I will take stock of the resources that God has given me including time, talent, education, and wealth. 2. I will not feel guilty about what God has put in my hands or attempt to earn it. I accept it as a gift and rejoice in it. 3. I will allow God to lead me in cultivating these gifts for His glory and the good of those around me.
He intends for you to become a humble, resourceful person, first by receiving His gifts with gratitude and then by cultivating them for the good of those around you.
in His wisdom, He’s crafted the world in such a way that you can’t do this apart from Him. You will regularly have to take risks, you will regularly feel pressed past your abilities, you will regularly feel like the husk of your life is being broken open and your seeds scattered to the wind. But this is exactly how He means to teach you humility. This is exactly how He means to relieve you of your burden of guilt and self-reliance.
So instead of asking “Do I deserve this gift?” humility teaches us to ask, “What has God given and what responsibility do I have because of it?”
While we may inherit blessing, other people inherit hardship.
How does humility teach us to cast the lot “into the lap” but still believe that “its every decision is from the LORD”? 2
“The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.”
Dreaming is the particular purview of the human condition.
But even as we dream, humility teaches us to never lose sight of who’s actually in control.
God is also the source of your desires. And through Jesus, He is actively redeeming those desires.
It is precisely through the process of learning to plan that we learn to depend on a God who makes our plans happen.
Pride, on the other hand, demands to know God’s will before it will act. It balks and halts and refuses to move until success is guaranteed.
to humble us, God only reveals the course of our lives one step at a time.
God does not offer us a map so much as a promise
By acknowledging your desires, you are embracing the truth that God has made you to be something very particular. And, ultimately, this leads to rest.
Suddenly you realize your own limitations; desire humbles you. And suddenly you are free from the tyranny of “keeping your options open.” You are free from the responsibility of feeling like you have to “do it all.” You are free to do only what you have been made to do.
I can use all that saved energy to love and serve others through my own legitimate vocations
we are not guaranteed a harvest simply because we worked hard and planned well.
Pride tells us that all we have to do is organize well enough, plan effectively enough, and work hard enough and we can achieve our dreams. Humility teaches us that it was never up to us in the first place.
If we are submitted to God’s hand, even our unfulfilled desires can be fruitful because our unfulfilled desires can be the very things God uses to draw us to Himself.
humility also means trusting God with our plans and submitting to the possibility that they will be fulfilled in ways we cannot imagine.
Humble people understand that their work is no guarantee of success; but the humble also understand that the possibility of failure is no reason not to work.
What if God can bring about good things without us? What if grace is true?
the act of preserving food is an act of humility and trust. We freeze and can and dry and pickle our green beans because we believe that God has a future for us. Winter will come and we will need them. At the same time, we know that our work doesn’t make the winter come. And it doesn’t make spring come again either. We know that even as we plan, an even Greater Planner is at work.
The grace to rest in the future that He has planned for us. The grace to work. The grace to wait. The grace to dream.
“The essential heresy [is] that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in service of society, but only something one does to obtain money and leisure.” —Dorothy L. Sayers
Watch yourselves. Watch out that in attempting to escape the cares of life you don’t walk right into them.
We are the ones caught in the weight of ownership.
We feel the weight of the pride that convinced us to rely on earthly goods to relieve a spiritual need in the first place.
If hedonism convinces us that we can achieve happiness on our own, sloth deceives us about God’s ability to make our efforts effective in a broken world.
Because pride leads us to reject God, we end up trusting ourselves. But it is only a matter of time before we realize how misplaced this trust is. And when we do, when the brokenness of the world presses in, when we feel the weight of our own helplessness, we succumb to listlessness and despondency.
But when it comes, when this acedia descends, it will stalk you
More subtle and beguiling than direct temptation, acedia creeps in and dulls the soul, making it almost impossible to care about anything.
The disconnect is simply too much. Without a strong understanding of God’s presence in our brokenness, without the humility to recognize His power, nothing matters.
what if He isn’t simply present but He’s actively defeating it?
What better way to diminish the King of the universe than to crown Him with the very curse that hangs over His creation?
What could be more humiliating than to have our brokenness rest on Him?
This is how humility overcomes the world: Humility trusts God.
We rest by saying, both to God and others, “I am not enough. I need help.”
The prophet Isaiah speaks of a day when “the light of Israel will become a fire and his Holy One a flame, and it will burn and devour his thorns and briers.”
She continues to forage for the sweetness that God has promised. She gleans where she has not planted. Along the fence rows and roadsides. Not in carefully cultivated thickets, but in the wildness of the waysides.
the cure for our pride is final and total humility. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Death humbles us by bits. It humbles us over the course of a lifetime
