“Enter into the rock and hide in the dust from before the terror of the Lord, and from the splendor of His majesty. The haughty looks of man shall be brought low, and the lofty pride of men shall be humbled, and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day,” (Isaiah 2:10-11 ESV).
There is coming a day when the Lord will be properly exalted. He will be lifted high. Every other thing will be humbled. I have always been taught to look forward to this day and I do. I cannot wait for it to be here and now. But as I was looking at this passage this time, I realized how much of our lives will be brought low, humbled, and destroyed on that day. Only the things I have invested in Christ will remain. I could probably say a lot more but I don’t think I need to. I think it would be better for us to take a few moments quietly and examine our lives. Look at how much of your time is invested in things other than God’s glory. How much of your energy is spent on things other than Christ. And how much of you, your thoughts, your work is spent on things bringing Him honor. How might we need to redistribute our effort so that a majority of our work is not humbled on that day?
Your thoughts?
What an awesome God we serve. This hit on the very thing that has been troubling me all day. How does my life reflect Christ?? It’s time for a renewal of why I am here to begin with. A time to be humbled. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow in Phoenix. Safe travels and may the Lord bless you and keep you.
wow, you are reading my mind it seems… ok, maybe it’s not that, maybe it’s that God is speaking and i need to listen… I just had this very conversation with someone the other day, wondering about the use of my time and how much of it is wasted and not everlasting for Christ. I had heard that 77 hours of the average child’s time per week is spent in TV, peer, and public schools. Most of that time isn’t spent in glorifying God. And that’s a lot of hours! So I had to ask my friend and myself, how many hours do I spend on things that aren’t eternal each week? It would be shocking if I wrote it down.
The fear of letting go of unimportant things in life can be very scary. We all have our ways of finding worldly comfort, and many times we will cling to the comforts like it’s our life. Pride, looks, food, attention, tv shows, gossip, our possessions. None of it really matters, but these things usually make up a large part of our lives. We can be doing more. A couple weeks ago at church, there was a visiting pastor from Mexico- Pastor Paul- and he was talking about the deaths he has seen in his lifetime. He said, “Life is like a vapor.” We’re here, we walk around trying to accomplish this and that, and then we’re gone. It’s such a short time that we get to live and make a difference. That sentence has stuck with me ever since, like an echo, life is like a vapor. What do i want to do with my time? Bring glory to God.
Todd,
God really used this blog to open my heart yet again to what He has been trying to teach me for the past 31 years. I am a man who struggles daily with pride, selfishness, arrogence, and place myself before Christ. So often God ends up humbling me because I allow myself to get in the way of the work He is trying to do through me. My desire is to point others to Christ whether that is sharing His word or singing His praises, and the more I am focused on “ME” than i am not really honoring Him. Thank you for being so vulnerable and real with what God lays on your heart, it has really encouraged me this morning to get back on my knees praise His name and be in His presence.
Richard Foster said, “To magnify something, you make it look larger, increasing it out of proportion. To talk about ourselves or our activities out of proportion is dangerous indeed, but when we magnify God, we are on safe ground. We simply cannot say too much about God’s goodness or love. The most exaggerated things we can think of will still be far below what is actually the case.”
Perhaps when Paul said, “I die daily,” he was aware of our constant need to allow God to reorient our thoughts and actions toward Him so our lives magnify Him instead of ourselves. How tragic to give God back a bag of ashes as a return on His investment in us instead of having a gold crown to lay at His feet! This scenario intensifies my need for personal contemplation and daily repentance.
I too struggle so much with pride daily. Too often I find myself thinking how special I am for doing something or another. Yet it is only through the Lord’s blessings that I am able to do anything. It should be so common sense and so easy, but no. I don’t spend nearly enough time doing what is truly important either.”For the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light” Luke 16: 8b. There are so many people of this world who devote their lives to a single purpose: buisiness owners sometimes work close to a hundred hours a week to make their millions. Olympians train all day every day for an event that occurs once every four years. And there are Christians. We have something infinitely more important than these things and yet, for me, I rarely spend (I would guess) even a couple hours a day serving the Lord. I don’t understand myself.