I was visiting with an old friend the other day, and the topic of conversation began to range towards philosophy - as it seems like it frequently does when I get together with old friends. He said that he was beginning to believe that humility was a much more important virtue than he had previously given it credit for being. The more we talked, the more I began to see his point.
Being the way I am, I have to analyze everything down to within a logical gnat's whisker. So here is how I see it: God is in the business of running the world and he is very good at it. So the better I cooperate with him, the more smoothly my world will run. If I can manage to take it to the extreme & do everything exactly like he wants me to do it, then my world will run extremely well. God's highest goal, though, is His own glory. He ties these two things together quite nicely, though. When the world runs well, He gets the glory. When I make much of Him, I am working within his framework. He must increase and so I must decrease. ... You can see where this is going to end up. Eventually I conclude that my quality of life is dependent not on the recognition that I get for my work, but on the recognition that God gets for my work. Those old SS teachers were right all along!
I may change my mind tomorrow. But today I am thinking that humility is one of the more important virtues. (Thanks for nudging me down the path, Rocket.)
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I just read something (from James Denison) that made me think again about humility.
On Thursday of Jesus' last week before he died he washed the disciples feet. He did this as an example of servant-ness to them. We all know about that. What I hadn't thought about before, though is that Judas was in the group then. Jesus washed Judas' feet along with the others. He didn't just serve his friends - the ones who would be serving his cause in the future. He served his enemy, too.
Suddenly this humility stuff looks a lot harder than I was thinking.
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