Humility and Grace

On December 14, 2021   /   Word of the Day   /   Leave a comment

Proverb 3: 34            The Voice

God treats the arrogant as they treat others, mocking the mockers, scorning the scornful, but He pours out His grace on the humble.

Yesterday’s proverb spoke about the arrogant person, that they stir up strife and that failure follows in their wake. Today we find this explanation. God abhors the arrogant. Wow! That is a bit frightening. He, Yahweh, scorns the scorners and mocks the mockers. Therefore, being scornful, arrogant or mocking others sets us up in opposition to God, a very frightening position to be in. If you look at the footnotes for this verse in the NLV Bible, you find the Greek version of this verse. It reads, “The Lord opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

Grace is the unmerited favor of God. So, this verse reveals that God gives favor to the humble. Grace is that intangible blessing that follows you around making life click into place a bit better. God’s favor affects other people so that they see you and treat you as a VIP. Humility gives us what arrogance cannot. We can posture and act big trying to get people to treat us as important, but it is actually humility which yields that kind of favor. The minute we begin thinking or behaving as if we deserve it or that we really are special, it dissolves. A person can be humble at church and see the favor of God blessing them but act arrogantly at work and find that the grace just isn’t there.

Humility is not being a doormat for others. Sometimes we think it is. Humility is best understood in the scope of worthiness. In ourselves we were not worthy of God’s love or Jesus’ sacrifice, but Jesus has made us absolutely worthy, in him. We can be humble in our greatness because we know that it has nothing to do with our strength, skills or intelligence. Any gifts we have are from God. When we set our eyes upon Him and this truth, we can stand very tall in the fullness of God’s greatness understanding that we are here because Father decreed it and Jesus bought it. If your Father gives you a position, one you didn’t earn, you still get the position but perhaps you wouldn’t be so arrogant knowing that it is only by His grace that you stand in royal shoes.

God wants to shower His favor upon everyone. Truly, He wants everyone to be treated as someone special. We, however, either opt in or opt out of His plan. Interestingly, thinking we deserve it or that we are more special than others opts us out. Knowing that we are deserving as long as we stand in Jesus’ victory keeps us rooted. This is the great dichotomy which confuses so many. We are the unworthy worthy ones. We earned nothing, deserved nothing but as long as we are in Jesus – standing and abiding in him, we are kings. You have to know that you are deserving but humble because you know your worthiness is only in Jesus.

Arrogance is for the fool. The favor of God and man is for those who humbly receive all that God has for them.

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Grace Extended

On October 17, 2019   /   Word of the Day   /   Leave a comment

Proverb 3: 34

Though He scoffs at the scoffers, yet He gives grace to the afflicted.

While the simplest, and perhaps most functional, description of the word grace is “unmerited favor” it is far from a full understanding. If you run a search on the word grace and read all of the verses in which it appears, you will see that for yourself.

That which began my look into the word grace was actually an observation about judgment. I wrote in my journal, “there can be no grace where there is judgment.” That was my epiphany at that moment. It began me thinking about this “grace” we hear about. Two outstanding revelations have shown themselves as I have studied this word. The latter will be the subject of tomorrow’s Word of the Day. Today, the meaning of the word “grace” which has me mesmerized is, “acceptance.”

Lying on my writing desk right now is my Strong’s, my Bible, a Vine’s and Nelson’s Bible Dictionary. They are threatening to collapse my desk under their combined weight. The weightiest of all, though, is their exhaustive description of grace. I will refer back to them in a moment but there is another book here in front of me. It is a by Dr. Jim Richards and Chaim Bentorah and features ten words explained in the original languages. In the chapter on the word grace, Bentorah wrote, “There is one other definition of Chen and even Charis other than grace, it is acceptance.” Chen is the Hebrew word for grace and Charis, the Greek. Bentorah identifies one of the other synonyms in English as “acceptance.” That is a stunning, but then again, intuitive disclosure.

As I searched Chen and Charis in this mountain of resource material beside me, I saw that the scholars agree with that assessment. God’s grace includes acceptance. That rings true intuitively because how meaningful is “unmerited (unearned) favor” without acceptance. God called out to each of us inviting us into His family. He accepted us, as we were, and poured the righteousness of Jesus’ blood over us so that we could enter into His peace and dwell in His tent.

This chain of thought leads right back to judgment. It is logically impossible for either us or God to extend grace and acceptance while criticizing and condemning. We must choose. Either God is grace and mercy, or He is judgment and condemnation. Which is it? As applied to me, I choose to accept God’s grace. That isn’t a difficult intellectual question, theologically. The challenge is when I, or we, extend our theology towards others. Then we must either retract our judgmental approach towards others or evaluate if we really believe in a God of grace. Here is where the modern church often comes off the rails. We are challenged to keep the symmetry between ourselves and those “heathen” out there. We forget, sometimes, that we were once they. This is exactly why you hear theology of a God of love coming out of one side of the church’s mouth and a God of wrath coming from the other. We become very schizophrenic in our theology.

Let me make this simple. Our God is not only a God of love, He actually is love. He can do not thing which is inconsistent with love. That is why He is grace, mercy, kindness, forgiveness and acceptance. That is why He put His son on a cross for us. He knew our shortfalls. He knew our ridiculousness. None the less, love compelled Him to take all that judgment you hear about and heap it onto Jesus’ back. Only then could He express Himself towards us. He had to remove the judgment problem so that He could show His acceptance and shower us with favor.

In order, then, to heal the church from its emotional schism, we must extend the same acceptance to others, all others. This is the way, because Jesus is the grace of God. “We believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are,” (Acts 15: 11). By grace we have been led to the throne of God. By grace we help others find their way too. Therefore, we will refrain from judgment and extend our hands in acceptance. In this way, we will show, and share, the grace of God.

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