Soapbox

"Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love." (Ephesians 4:2, NIV) [1]

Today’s’ message is really a message on humility as the pathway to spiritual significance and fulfillment.  To walk humbly

1. The Problem of the Premature Preacher

a)     Everyone has sermon that they want to preach or that they preach often – a hobby horse or a pet peeve.

[     Ideology – untested beliefs.

[     Impatience

"There is another problem that we need to be aware of.  Some Christians find it very tempting tobe so very certain about what is right that they start laying down the law.  Often it is difficult to be both firm and loving.

A.W. Tozer put it this way:

"It requires great care and a true knowledge of ourselves to distinguish a spiritual burden from a religious irritation.  Often acts done in a spirit of religious irritation have consequences far beyond

what we could have guessed.  It is more important that we maintain a right spirit toward the others than that we bring them to our way of thinking even if our way is right.  Satan cares very little whether we go astray after false doctrine or merely turn sour.  Either way he wins."

 Do you know what Tozer means by "sour Christians"?  Often they have a good grasp of doctrine and a clear analysis of the situation, but seem to lack gentleness and peace.  Any follower of religion can have a religious irritation: . . . It is very easy to right in the wrong way."

Here's another great quote:

Please beware of a cynical spirit in any area.  Don't be cynical for any reason.  Don't be cynical even toward yourself.  For every Christian who is troubled by pride, I suspect there is another whose opinion of himself is so low that it hinders him from seeing that God is bigger than his faults.

Tozer offers some good sense on the subject.

 "In this world of real corruption, there is a real danger that the earnest Christian may overreact in his resistance to evil and become a victim of the religious occupational disease, cynicism.  The constant need to go counter to popular trend may easily develop in him a sour habit of fault-finding and turn him into a critic of other men's manners, without charity and without love.  What makes this cynical spirit particularly dangerous is that the cynic is usually right.  His analyses are accurate, his judgments are correct, yet for all that he is frightfully, pathetically wrong.  As a cure for the sour,  fault-finding attitude, I recommend the cultivation of the habit of thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving has great curative powers, and a thankful heart cannot be cynical

[     Immaturity

b)     Everyone has their turn to preach their message at a point in their lives when the impact will be the greatest.

c)      The message is missed because people are unable to see past the messenger.

d)     The messenger is permanently marked or dismissed because he wasn’t ready to deliver his message.

2. The Pitfalls of the Proficient Practitioner

When we devote ourselves to the task at hand without aspiring for greater things, they have a way of coming to us.  A person who is always wanting to be somewhere else, doing something else, something greater that they believe they are suited for, can be of little help to their family their children, their church.  They are restless nomads breeding their own restlessness to the next generation.

[     When people are successful, they have earned a platform to speak to their area of expertise.

[     Many times pride creeps in and the seductive influence of the attention that they are given, makes them secretly believe that they “know better” than others.  They lose respect for other people and become blind to their own inconsistencies as though their success excuses their arrogance.

[     In this process they also lose appreciation for the worth of other people and become almost psychotic in their treatment of other people.  In the best case scenario, they become careless in the way that they treat others.  They make pronouncements of worth that devastate people

3. The Prospects for the Passionate “People-Builder”

This is what God has called us to do brethren.  We are to be engaged shoulder to shoulder with God, the Holy Spirit as he does his unseen work in the hearts of men and women.

When you begin to realize that the measure of success that you have achieved or the blessings that you enjoy are gifts from God that better reflect His goodness than your talent or ability or sufficiency, then God is best able to use you as a change agent in the lives of others.

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[1]  The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984 (electronic ed.). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.