This morning as I was getting ready to go to work, I received a call from the hospital saying that they needed to put me "on call", a.k.a. "sorry we can't use you right now but be ready to leave your house within 15 minutes if we call you." So, instead of going back to bed as I usually do when I get these calls (it's 5:30 a.m.), I decided to do a "hard thing" and have my devotions extra early.

After making myself a strong cup of green tea I started in reading my Bible. I asked the Lord to meet me right there as I read. Not picking up anything particularly insightful during my Bible reading, I pulled out this little book I've been reading entitled, Humility by Andrew Murray. Here is what grabbed my attention...

[Speaking of Christ's life and work while on earth] "Christ found this life of entire self-renunciation, of absolute submission and dependence upon the Father's will, to be one of perfect peace and joy. He lost nothing by giving everything to God...His humility was simply the surrender of Himself to God, to allow the Father to do in Him what He pleased, no matter what men around might say of Him, or do to Him...This is the true self-denial to which our Savior calls us - the acknowledgment that self has nothing good in it except as an empty vessel which God must fill."

"He lost nothing by giving everything to God." Wow. I often think just the opposite will happen to me if I give up everything to God. I'll lose things that I love the most. But no, this is not so.

As I read more about Christ's humility in the gospels, it is like a mirror showing me my true fallen state and ugliness before God. I become discouraged and weighed down with my total inadequacies and become fainthearted. Murray goes on, "If we feel that this life is too high for us and beyond our reach, it must, even more, urge us to seek it in Him. It is the indwelling Christ who will live this life in us, meek and lowly. If we long for this, let us, above everything, seek the holy secret of the knowledge of the nature of God as He every moment works all in all...The root of all virtue and grace - of all faith and acceptable worship - is that we know that we have nothing but what we receive, and bow in deepest humility to wait upon God for it." What a relief to know that if I reach out to God realizing that I am not strong enough on my own, that He then, will live this life in me.

Murray ends this chapter with a challenge, "Brother or sister, are you clothed with humility? Ask your daily life. Ask Jesus. Ask your friends. Ask the world. And begin to praise God that there is opened up to you in Jesus a heavenly humility of which you have hardly known, and through which a heavenly blessedness (which you have possibly never yet tasted) can come into you."

I praise God that I can come before Him in my ugliness, asking for His humility, then finding Him enfolding me to Himself, enabling me to follow His example.


 - joy