07 Obedience is the Key to Humility.
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In this series so far, we’ve established the four pillars of humility, essentially laying out its importance and our desperate need for it. Again, those four pillars are:
Humility is necessary to battle sin (and sanctify us).
Humility is the foundation for all righteousness.
Humility distinguishes the believer.
Humility is the most important virtue.
My hope is that those of you reading have grown significantly in humility the past few weeks, and that these pillars are starting to become engraved on the tablet of your heart. Because if we don’t continually remind ourselves of our need for humility, we just simply won’t humble ourselves. But, if at worst you only have greater knowledge of the need for it, these next few weeks I’m going to be explaining deliberately how we can grow in humility.
There is no need to drag this out or make it complicated. The key to growing in humility is so simple. It is obedience. We grow in humility by growing in obedience.
In Philippians 2:8 Paul writes that Jesus,
“…being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
The key to humility through the life of Jesus is so evidently in that verse. Paul says Jesus humbled himself by doing what? By becoming obedient. And He became obedient to who? The Father’s will. That is the essence of humility that we have been learning about the past few weeks. Let God be all and us be nothing. Not our will but His be done. That’s humility. And that is exactly what we are called to do as a believer. We’re called followers of Jesus for a reason. We’re following Him. We’re not following our heart or our will but His, because we recognize that what He has planned for us is far better than what we have planned.
Obedience for us looks like full commitment to the Father’s will, regardless of how we feel. Abraham is a great example. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to go to the land of Moriah and offer up his only son Isaac as a sacrifice to the Lord. Then Abraham embarks on a three day trip with the intent of doing just that.
Can you imagine what was going through Abraham’s head during that three day journey?
Just a few chapters ago God told Abraham that He would father a child, that child being Isaac, and that Isaac would father 12 princes, and God would make him into a great nation.
We can already assume the heartache and sadness Abraham felt, but can you imagine the confusion? He is trying to be obedient, and I’m sure he is conflicted. On the one hand God said his son Isaac will father 12 princes and be made into a great nation, but on the other hand how can that happen when God tells you to kill him?
I’m absolutely sure Abraham wrestled with questioning the will of God.
Have any of you ever related to Abraham in that way? Just to ask God why? Why would God have you move your family from the city you’re in? Why would God have you go through that breakup? Why would God have you lose your job you believed He’d placed you in? Why would God have you struggle with your relationships with friends and family that you thought He provided for you? Why let that family member die? Why let you struggle financially?
Why God?
Obedience becomes really hard when we don’t understand the why.
Abraham’s story reminds us, however, that the why doesn’t matter when we know Who is behind it. Abraham did not question God…Verse 3 of Genesis 22 says that when God told him to go sacrifice his son he woke up early the next morning and went on his way. He did not sleep in, he did not wait, he went.
God spoke, Abraham moved.
That’s obedience. It may feel blind, it may seem like it doesn’t make sense, but it's God. With God there is nothing too crazy or outlandish, and we need to trust Him. For Abraham, he recognized and understood that God was in control of everything, and he chose to trust the will of God over the will of self and the perspective of self. And you can see him live that out in that chapter, and God ends up having Abraham sacrifice a ram instead.
One of the pillars for humility we’ve talked about is that it is the most important virtue.
In that episode I said that the most God honoring thing we can do as believers is live with complete dependence on God. This is because at the end of the day that is what God wants from us. He wants us to put Him first and foremost in all that we do, regardless of how we feel. That is exactly what Abraham did, and something we ought to do.
Obedience is not rooted in our feelings. Obedience is rooted in reverence.
Abraham without a shadow of a doubt did not want to kill his son. Nobody would.
But his obedience to God was not founded on feeling, it was founded on faith. Abraham was subject to God’s will and not His own. Even in a moment where I’m certain Abraham would have rather had his will done, and everything in him wanted to not go to the land of Moriah, he went anyway. It was a test by God to see if He was of most importance in Abraham’s life. It was a test of Abraham’s dependence upon Him. But Abraham was obedient. He was humble.
Let me challenge you for a second.
Can we all agree God’s ways are better than ours? Which is why we seek to live in complete dependence upon Him and His will?
If you can agree on that, why is it that your language doesn’t reflect that? If God tells us not to let any unwholesome talk out of our mouths, why is it that you won’t speak kindly and honorably? And if we can agree God’s ways are better than ours, why is it that you are sleeping with your girlfriend? If God tells us not to have sex before marriage, why are we not honoring that? If God tells us to give Him the firstfruits of our money, why are we spending that paycheck firstly on groceries or gas? If God tells us to be involved in a church community, why are you not going?
Now so many people hear these things and immediately think of legalism. It is not legalism, its honor. When we do these things I’ve mentioned we are revealing our distrust in God and His will and His way being best and that actually we find our way and our will to be best. We are being prideful. We are being independent. We are being disobedient.
I say these things because not everything in the Bible is going to make you happy and not everything in the Bible you will agree with. There are some things in the Bible that I don’t necessarily agree with or want to do but because He is God and I am not, because I love Him, I abide by what He says. That’s obedience.
We cannot be subject to how we feel or what we think is best for us. We cannot pick and choose what about God we want to follow and what about Him we don’t want to follow. Following Jesus doesn’t work like that. He requires all of you.
Jesus Himself gives us the model example of obedience before He died on a cross for our sins.
He says in Luke 22:42:
“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
I think everything in Jesus wanted for our sins to be atoned for in any other way possible. The gruesome death He took that He didn't deserve was looming in His mind and He wrestled with that to the point of sweating blood. But Jesus was not subject to His feelings or His will, but the will of the Father who sent Him. That’s obedience. That phrase “Not my will, but yours be done” is what obedience is rooted in.
“Not my will, but yours be done”.
Does your life reflect that phrase?
Can you say your life has been about doing the will of the Father?
In other words…what are you subject to? Who are you subject to?
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Now an aspect that has been present throughout this whole episode that I have not deliberately mentioned is the denial of self. The death to self.
At the very core, we grow in humility and we grow in obedience by dying to self. Saying ‘not my will but yours be done’, is death to self. Going to do what God told you to like killing your son even when everything in you doesn’t want to is death to self. Death to self is so important if we want to grow in obedience and humility.
Dying to self is how we become obedient.
Jesus says in Luke 9:23,
‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me’.
If we are to follow Jesus and be obedient to Him, we are to deny ourselves and pick up our crosses DAILY. We must die to ourselves every single day.
Look back to our model of obedience in Jesus in Philippians 2:8,
“…he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Jesus proved His full surrender to the Father’s will through death, and so should we.
I’ll say it again.
Jesus proved His full surrender to the Father’s will through death, and so should we.
I’m not talking physical death, I’m talking death to self. The dying to self is resignation to God and His will, and that is how we are obedient, and that is how we humble ourselves.
Next week I’ll unpack the dying to self more and how we can go about doing that daily, but in the meantime, you guys have a wonderful week.
I love you all.
God bless.
