Week
8 Hope and Certainty
Day 53
From Inadequacy to
Humility
Acceptance of your
utter helplessness to save or change yourself fuels dependence upon God, and
thus inadequacy is transformed into humility.
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hat blessed relief floods our sin-sickened souls when we finally
accept that we don’t have to be sin-free to come to God; we only have to be
cleansed of sin. Pride makes us strive for righteousness ahead of receiving
God’s love, but humility brings a blessed willingness to be rescued. We don’t
need a personal trainer who will strengthen us so that we can deliver
ourselves; we need a Savior who, entirely in His own strength, will lift us out
of the hopeless mess of our own sin. It is the humility of having been
delivered with no contributing power of our own that enables us to be cleansed
of the sense of inadequacy that results from repeated failures to save
ourselves. Inadequacy focuses on self, but humility focuses on the Lord who has
saved us.
We can never be right before God
until we come to Christ for cleansing, and yet He loves us while we are still
in sin.[i] To
come to Christ for forgiveness just as we are requires the recognition that
being loved is much more desirable than being right; we enter into forgiveness
through the gate of His love. Because of this love that accepted us even when
we were ugly with sin, we are released from the terrible and frustrating need
to demand “rightness” from others. We
are free to love them even if they are not right.
It seems counterintuitive that it
is the humility of being completely dependent upon a Savior that paves the way
for our recognition of the beauty God sees in each of us. When—driven by our
own hopelessness apart from God—we draw near to Him, we begin to understand how
precious we are to Him; it is His light that illuminates our beauty. The Lord
has endowed every one of His children with gifts that His Holy Spirit will fan
into flame as we abide in Him. We each possess an ability to bring delight to
His heart through traits that are exclusively our own, and thus we are each
uniquely loved by our Lord. Other human beings whose admiration and regard we
crave may learn to express empathy for us (or not), but we do not need them to do so. The Creator of the
universe holds us each in special regard, and His favor satisfies the deepest
needs of our hearts for love and approval.
Pray: Lord, help me participate in
Your grace as I learn to constantly bring my mistakes, failures, and sins to You
for cleansing and forgiveness. In this way let the crushing sense of my own
inadequacy be transformed into the blessed humility of having been rescued by
Jesus Christ, my Savior. Father, prevent me from demanding that others are
right toward me before I will accept and love them. Open my eyes to the ways I
am precious in Your sight, and out of my confidence in how much You love me,
help me to love others with Your love. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.
~~~
We love because He first loved us.
1 John 4:19
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