Main Idea: God uses the ashes of humility to transform our character.

This morning we begin a new series of messages on transforming our character. The series has been inspired by a book of a friend I met in the late 1980’s named Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic Southern Baptist Church in Los Angeles, CA. The book is titled Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul. I wrote Erwin and received permission to use some material from his book for this series. Today we want to talk about how God will use the ashes of humility to transform our character. Someone has said that our character is what we are when no one is looking. Dallas Willard says, "Character is revealed most of all in what we do without thinking" (Renovation of the Heart, p. 144). He goes on to say that our thoughts, feelings and our will give rise to our character.

If that is true, and I believe it is, then we are in trouble because our thoughts, feelings and our will have all been affected by the sinful choices we have made. Believers should want to think what God thinks, feel what God feels, have his passion and will what he wills. Yet, because of our own sinful nature, we think what we want to think, feel passionate about what we choose and will our own desires. As a result, our character needs transforming if we would ever have God’s character formed in us so that what he thinks, feels and wills is free to be realized through us. Erwin McManus says, "When you make God your primary passion, He transforms all the passions of your heart" (Uprising, p. 14). The question is, though, how do you get there.

The answer is that we get there through a process that takes time. You didn’t become the person you are overnight. Who you are is a composite of your experiences, natural traits, emotions and decisions. Your character has already developed for good or bad. What’s hard is that as a Christian you come to a place where you realize the very thing that’s stopping you from realizing and experiencing all that God wants for you is you! The person you are is suffocating your passion to be all that God desires. Paul knew what that feels like and said, "It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God's law with all my heart. But there is another law at work within me that is at war with my mind. This law wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 7:21-25a).

How does Jesus set us free from all the ruined parts of our character? How am I released from the chains of pride, selfishness and pretending? He does it by allowing us to experience true humility. In other words, God allows humility to grow as part of our character when we encounter humbling experiences. Jesus said in Luke 14:11 from The Message, "What I’m saying is if you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to fall flat on your face. But if you are content to simply be yourself, you will become more than yourself." The NLT says, "For the proud will be humbled, but the humbled will be honored." The truth is we won’t know honor without humility and we won’t know humility unless we are humbled. And God is ruthlessly persistent at giving us the chance to develop humility.

Parker Palmer, a Quaker writer, teacher and activist, wrote that he was taught humility most through a period of depression. He said prior to this almost two-year darkness of depression he was proud to think of himself as humble. But through depression he learned that the path to humility "goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretenses and defenses, and left feeling fraudulent, empty and useless—a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up." (Let Your Life Speak, p. 70). When God allows our pride to crash and burn, we find ourselves rising from the ashes of our humility with a transformed character.

That’s what Moses was telling the nation of Israel in Deuteronomy 8:1-5. It took them forty years to learn humility. I’m a slow learner but I would like to think I could get it a lot faster. But sometimes I don’t, so God is willing to take as long as He needs and as many times as He needs to teach me humility. The context of our text occurs at the end of the forty years of the nation of Israel wandering in the wilderness. They are about to enter into the Promised Land, which we know today as Israel. Moses wants them to remember the reason for the last forty years. He says they were to remember "how the Lord your God led you through the wilderness for forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would really obey his commands" (v. 2). Moses says, "Your time in the wilderness was to humble you, test you, to prove your character." The point? God uses the ashes of our humility to transform our character!

This morning what I want us to see is that these verses reveal a process that God uses to transform our character. Let’s start with a principle found in Deuteronomy 8:1 and it is this: God promises more to life than we could ever live. God wanted nothing more than to give the Hebrew people a land filled with all the blessings that he desired for them. That’s why it was called "The Promised Land." For over 400 years the Hebrew people had been slaves in Egypt. They cried out to God and he sent Moses to lead them out. Throughout the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy the goal was to get the Hebrew people to the land that God had promised to Abraham almost six hundred years before. The land was to be theirs and it held all the promise for prosperity and life that they could ever imagine. It is that idea of the Promised Land that still burns within the heart of the nation of Israel today. It was land, a place, promised to them by God and they will fight for it until there is no breath left in them.

In the same way God has promised that he offers life to us that is more than we could ever live. Jesus said, "My purpose is to give life in all its fullness" (John 10:10 NLT). That is what every person wants—"life in all its fullness." Now that is not what we experience but that is what we want. I don’t meet many students who say, "My goal is to be really messed up!" I mean even people who are really messed up still don’t want to be really messed up. There’s something within a person that longs and dreams of breaking free from everything that holds them back and living life to its fullest. That’s why we pursue all kinds of experiences just to feel alive. That’s why so many TV shows now are "Reality TV." I really can’t believe that Fear Factor is still on TV. I mean, why in the world would people want to do that junk? They do it for money and for the thrill of feeling alive by overcoming their worst nightmare. They are all the same—The Bachelor, Amazing Race, Survivor, Big Brother—they all are driven by the human desire to be fully alive and they will pay any price to have it. And we as Christians don’t need to kid ourselves because we want the same thing!

Yet God promises us that He alone is the fulfillment of that passion to be fully alive. He promises more to life than we could ever hope to live. Paul said in Ephesians 1:16-19, "I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the wonderful future he has promised to those he called. I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance he has given to his people. I pray that you will begin to understand the incredible greatness of his power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power." That tells me that there is more life that is promised to me than I could ever live! In fact it is life that is so great that it will take all eternity to fully experience it!

If all that kind of life is promised to me, then why am I not experiencing it? Why am I not living it? Simply put, our pride prevents us from fully living the life God promises (Deut. 8:2a). Moses tells them to remember why they were in the wilderness for forty years. The reason was because their pride wouldn’t let them experience God’s Promised Land so the pride had to be confronted through the experience in the wilderness. What happened that caused them to lose the opportunity to enter the Promised Land? Basically, after leaving Egypt and crossing through the Red Sea they traveled south through what we know as the Sinai Peninsula for several months. Finally they got to the southern tip of modern Israel. Everything is ready. God says, "Go," but God also tells them to send in spies to check it out. They send in twelve spies. Ten come back and say it can’t be done while two come back and say it’s just right. The doubters won out and the people refused to obey God and enter the Land of Promise. As a result, God said that no one from this generation who rebelled would enter except for the two who believed. Moses told them earlier it was because "you refused to trust the Lord your God" (Deut. 1:32).

You say, "Bruce, where does pride come in here? It sounds to me like they were scared!" The answer is if they refused to trust God, then they were trusting themselves. If they were trusting themselves, then they believed they knew better than God and when I believe I know better than God—that’s pride. I Peter 5:5 says, "God sets himself against the proud, but he shows favor to the humble." It is our pride, our arrogance, our confidence in our own abilities that prevents us from fully living the life God promises. We just refuse to believe that trusting God is sufficient so we spend our lives creating an image of what we want to believe we must be. The more we spend our time maintaining our pride the less we can spend enjoying God’s provision. Why? Because God is opposed to the proud!

What is it about our pride that makes us so unwilling to resist the truth about ourselves? Newsweek described in December of 2003 the dethroning of Saddam Hussein: "In a part of the world where pride and dignity mean everything, the images were clearly intended to shame. A nameless doctor or medical technician, wearing rubber gloves, was seen closely examining the man’s hair, perhaps looking for vermin. Prodded with a tongue depressor, the man opened his mouth; the doctor peered at the pink flesh of his throat and scraped off a few cells for DNA identification.

"Then the world saw the man’s face. Haggard, defeated…meek and weak. The Glorious Leader, Direct Descendant of the Prophet, the Lion of Babylon, the Father of the Two Lion Cubs, the Anointed One, the Successor of Nebuchadnezzar, the Modern Saladin of Islam had been brought low, forced to bow down…to contemplate his fate while waiting to stand trial" ("How We Got Saddam," Newsweek, 12/22/03, p. 23-24). Yet in 2004 when he went on trial he was still as defiant, belligerent and unbroken as he was before. Pride has a tenacity about it that refuses to let go even when all reason tells us we must.

Erwin McManus writes, "Ironically, when we are most full of ourselves, we are most likely to make fools of ourselves. And when we are full of ourselves, we leave no room for God to place in us the very things we need the most. Pride fills up the space where integrity needs to reside. When we are arrogant, we may lash out in violence, but we will not live genuinely courageous lives" (Uprising, p. 44). And I will add that neither can we live fully the life God promises.

If pride is preventing us from fully living the life God promises, then the obvious reality is our pride has to be removed. Just as pride caused the nation of Israel to spend forty years in the wilderness to learn humility, so God will allow us to enter our own wilderness to burn away our pride. What we learn is that the fire of humility reduces our pride to ashes. (Deut. 8:2b-4). Moses says that the way God humbled the Hebrew people was putting them in a place where they could depend on nothing else but Him.

In verse three Moses reminded them that God created the experience where they would be forced to depend only on him. How? By stripping away from them what they could not live without—food. When they lost all sense of hope for survival, God gave them the manna in the wilderness. There are all kinds of theories about what the manna actually was but, regardless, it was enough of a nutrient provided daily that, gathered properly, would sustain them. His purpose was to cause them to see that He would be their only source of life. Moses said, "He did it to teach you that people need more than bread for their life. Real life comes by feeding on every word of the Lord" (v. 3).

Have you encountered "the wilderness of humility" in your life? It may be that you have lost a job that you thought you couldn’t lose. It may be a marriage that you thought would never end. It may be a problem you thought you could solve. It may be a business you thought you could manage. It may be a relationship you thought you could keep. It may be a habit that you thought was under control. The "wilderness of humility" is wherever God puts us to remove everything we would naturally depend on and forces us to depend upon him who alone gives us the strength to survive. It’s interesting that God does not oppose the weak, the broken, the hurting, the depressed, the lonely, the poor or even the sinful, but He does stand in opposition to the proud. (Uprising, p. 47) He will allow us to stay in the wilderness until we learn humility. Until the fire of humility reduces our pride to ashes we will never learn that He is all we need.

The beauty of the fire of humility is that it burns away what prevents us from experiencing God’s best. It is painful; all fire is painful. Yet the pain we are receiving from our humiliation becomes the ashes from which new life is born. It is not God’s desire to humiliate us to drive us from him but to discipline us through the fire of humility and transform our character. If I could have gotten over my pride without being humbled, I would have. The truth is I would never be forced to deal with my pride until I am placed in experiences that turn up the heat and ignite my pride with the fire of humility. Moses said, "So you should realize that just as a parent disciplines a child, the Lord your God disciplines you to help you. (Deut. 8:5) Peter admonishes us, "So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and in his good time he will honor you."

You see you rise from the ashes of humility when you fall in submission to God. Erwin McManus calls this "rising downward." Parker Palmer says that the paradox of "humiliation is that it brings us down—down to ground on which it is safe to stand and to fall—eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self" (Let Your Life Speak, p. 70). Peter says the same thing by telling us that when we humble ourselves under the mighty power of God then he can lead us to a place where it is "safe to stand and to fall." A place where the only honor that matters is God’s. What God wants is our absolute surrender to His will and abandonment to His purpose. Surrender and abandonment are the only paths to the life God promises us. Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it" (Mark 8:35. Paul himself came to this very place of submission and surrender when he said, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20).

Parker Palmer wrote a poem that came at the end of God’s burning away his pride with the fire of humility. He writes: HARROWING

The plow has savaged this sweet field

Misshapen clods of earth kicked up

Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view

Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.

I have plowed my life this way

Turned over a whole history

Looking for the roots of what went wrong

Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.

Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be

Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.

I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—

The farmer plows to plant a greening season. (Let Your Life Speak, p. 72)

What has the "plow" of God’s fire of humility turned up in your life? Sooner or later—and he has all the time in the world—you must say, "Enough. The job is done." But it is not done until you say, "I surrender." You rise from the ashes of humility when you fall in submission to God.

The Greek myth of Narcissus tells the story of a beautiful and handsome young man who never knew how handsome he was until he saw his reflection in a pool of water in a stream. He bent down to kiss the image of himself and, in turn, shattered the image. The myth says that Narcissus spent the rest of his life looking at his image in the pool. The myth adds that a nymph named Echo joined Narcissus. Each time Narcissus would speak of his own beauty Echo would only repeat his self-centered praise. (Uprising, p. 23-24).

That is a picture of each one of us—in love with ourselves, listening to what we only want to hear and all the while becoming more lost to the life God has waiting for us. Our pride will never lose the suffocating grip on our character without the lessons taught by humility. How much longer are you going to refuse to surrender to the one who longs to give you real life? How much longer are you going to allow your pride to prevent you from fully living the life God promises? The fire of humility has the power to reduce your pride to ashes. The question is: Just how hot does it have to get? The quest for character begins when you rise from the ashes of humility!

(Series inspired by: Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul by Erwin McManus. Used with permission.)

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Dr. Bruce Tippit, Pastor

First Baptist Church

Jonesboro, Arkansas

btippit@fbcjonesboro.org