Ashamed: Fighting Shame With the Word of Godনমুনা

Day Two

Though my comfort-craving heart lies to me and tells me that a good life is an easy one, God has never skirted around the reality of His own holiness and the very legitimate cost of being one of His followers.

In the passage of Scripture we’re going to read today, Jesus was eating at the house of one of the leading Pharisees, a religious leader of the time. After observing their behavior, He taught them about humility.

The Bible talks about humility a lot. We must humble ourselves to know God. We must humble ourselves to recognize our need for Him in the first place.

The cost of following Christ is great. We must be willing to bear our own crosses—ready to give up everything to follow Him. This includes, but is not limited to, giving up our pride. When we recognize our need for Jesus, when we realize we can’t save ourselves or earn holiness, when we understand we will never be worthy on our own, that is humbling.

It might even sound humiliating. Well, one of the coolest things I ever learned was about how different “humility” and “humiliation” are.

Here are some synonyms for the word humiliate: dishonor, disgrace, mortify, shame, degrade, abase, debase.

On the contrary, here’s a list of synonyms for humility: modesty, meekness, lack of pride, lowliness.

Those are pretty different lists for two words that sound so similar and are so often mixed up.

One word suggests a sort of self-loathing, and the other looks a lot like Jesus.

The Bible has a lot to say about humility. (See Micah 6:8; Proverbs 18:12; Isaiah 57:15; and 1 Peter 5:5 for a few examples.) Frequently, God’s people are commanded to be humble.

Commands like these can be hard to wrap your mind around because with any fruit of the Spirit or Christlike way of being, if you pursue said good thing for the wrong reasons, you never find it. Like, if I say to myself, I WANT TO BE HUMBLE SO THAT I AM AWESOME AND APPLAUDED BY GOD AND PEOPLE, I’m doing it wrong.

Isaiah’s experience in Isaiah 6 and his awareness of the undeserved and dramatic forgiveness he received from the holy, perfect, true God is what humbled him.

As you close out this day, read Luke 14:7-14,25-33 and Isaiah 6:7. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you identify where you might be stuck in humiliation. Ask Him to help your heart move toward humility.