"The Place of Humility"

John Schroeder quotes three stunning paragraphs from another blog. Read them and John's reflections, then go back to the original piece to which John links.

I love this:

"The fountain of the spiritual life is humility, not self-love."

That's a great challenge to today's watered down, hope you're feeling good about yourself, grace without faith, redemption without discipleship, pseudo-theology.

The fountain of the spiritual life isn't what I feel. It isn't what I think. It isn't what I have experienced. It isn't undue regard for what "my journey" has taught me.

It's humility before what God has already done in Creation, in Israel, and, above all, in Jesus Christ. It is humility before the immutable call to repentance. It is humility before the reality of grace. It is humility before a faith which I could never manufacture, but which a gracious God creates, fosters, and deepens in the life of those willing--like the man who prayed to Jesus, "I do believe; help my unbelief"--to let God dispossess us of our self-love and replace it with faith, trust no tin self, but in God in Christ. It is a faith that allows me to do what I could not otherwise do, grasp the grace that would otherwise elude me. Grasp the Savior I could not reach were He not reaching down.

Forgive me for all the ways in which I have failed to live my faith, Lord Jesus, and help me to follow You in the future.

"The fountain of the spiritual life is humility, not self-love." It is forever and forever, humility, the only sensible attitude by which to face a holy, perfect, blameless, crucified, risen, compassionate, just God.

I have seen such humility in others, but never yet touched the hem of its garment. But still I follow, willing to be what I can't make myself become, willing to be what only Christ can make me.

Willing, Lord. At least my spirit is. Make my quaking, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-absorbed, self-obsessed flesh willing, too.