Are you a humble person?

I was on facebook yesterday and on my friends page there was a post from Kris Vallotton KVMinistries.com entitled 15 Attributes Of Humility. I thought it was such a good list of ways to identify your humility, or lack thereof. I have never professed to be humble but I certainly don’t think of myself as arrogant…but on reading this list I am questioning if my attitude is in line with God on some of the points. I include the list below – be warned, it stings a bit!

1- you are teachable.

2- you are influenceable.

3- you can be corrected without defending yourself.

4- you rejoice when others are celebrated.

5- no job is too small for you.

6- you don’t have to be right.

7- you naturally seek the advice of others.

8- you actually do pray.

9- you freely admit your flaws, mistakes, and failures.

10- you live to help others succeed.

11- you are not easily offended.

12- you have thankful attitude.

13- you don’t live with a sense of entitlement…you don’t feel like any one owes you something.

14- you are quick to forgive and you don’t hold grudges.

15- you are confident in who you are and content with who you’re not.

I will go on record as saying I am doing ok with 4,5 and 7-14. That is not to say that I have them all sorted and am perfectly brilliant at them, for we are all flawed – but I understand them in my spirit and see the fruits of them in my life.  Numbers 1, 2, 3, 6 and 15 are the ones that really stung me.

1) You are teachable. Ultimately, as a teacher I love to be taught. I love learning and up until the last year in my walk with God I would have confidently said that I was teachable to the nth degree. And I would have been right, if we were talking of worldly things. When we speak of wordly things I have found this to be a different matter. My before-God experience and world-view memory still hangs out in the deep recesses of my heart. I know that it isn’t there for real as I was made new in Christ (2 Cor 5:17) but the memory can be powerful when I am put in a situation where a new perspective, that shatters my old one, is presented to me from the Word. I have been known to be stubborn and insist (in my heart, not openly) that the people bringing these messages are either false or  misunderstood, rather than allowing for the fact that it is true and I need to change my position. This clearly shows a lack of humility on my part, really I should be taking in the information, testing it in my own study (1 Thess 5:21) and when I find it to be true, accepting it because if I don;t I am not only showing a lack of humility towards the person who brought me the message…i’m showing my arrogance in the face of God!

2) You are influenceable. I have never considered myself ‘influenceable’ largely because it feels dangerous. To allow myself to be influenced means that I could be persuaded to believe something false and that I could fall prey to a false prophet! But I am coming to realise that this isn’t what it means. It holds the same premise as forgiveness – always forgive but in a way that is safe for you. For example, if someone had tried to kill you and still haboured murderous intent, then forgiveness would have to be at a distance, not face to face. It therefore had to be safe for you and the other person. Allowing yourself to be influenced is much the same – you don;t allow ‘just anyone’ to influence your thoughts and actions, you look to those who follow Christ and who can point you towards the Word in their actions. If anything feels odd about what they are teaching/saying then it is your repsonsibility to question it through study or trusted counsel. However, it is not for you to stand rigid against any new idea/thought – because that means that you are not influenceable and therefore you are stagnant, showing others that you think you are right, not them. This is not good testimony of Christ in you. This I need to work on because there is still an element of me that remains suspicious of people and their intentions no matter how much I don’t wish to be.

3) You can be corrected without defending yourself. I am guilty of this, lots of this. when I am corrected I feel like I am being attacked and I defend. Although I am much better than I used to be, my recent growth in Christ has led me to question and answer (sometimes wrongly) many things. When others who have seen my mistake have attempted to correct it, I have taken offence and resorted to defence. I am working on this one and very much aware of it but have a way to go to fully master this reflex to defend myself and my thoughts.

6) You don;t have to always be right. This feeds into the above point in that I don’t consider myself the fount of all knowledge and can quite happily admit mistakes, this goes through the window if I feel defensive. In these situations I have to have the last word, I HAVE TO BE HEARD! What an awful character flaw that it is! This point has reminded me of the importance of communication, that building relationship is sometimes allowing the other to be ‘right’; there is little point in arguing as no one really wins an argument do they? There is always hurt and sadness that has to be redeemed – better to not have that in the first instance.
That said, in all of these points you have to use some wisdom. If someone was saying something that went exactly against the Bible for example, you cannot accept it as truth or let the other person think you have. In this instance argument is not the answer either…but repsectfully disagreeing is.)

15) You are confident in who you are and content with who you are not. This is a strange one because when I first read it I thought ‘If I am comfortable then I won’t push on, I’ll become complacent and lazy’. So a part of me thinks that a lack of contentment is needed in order to strive to be the best in Christ that we can be. However, to not be content with yourself and wish to be someone else breaks the tenth commandment of coveting and also shows that you think you know more than God. If you are not happy with your nose then you are saying that God created you incorrectly…and He didn’t. You are the only you on the earth and as Dr Seuss once said ‘No-one can be more you-er than you’.
I am definitely more confident in who I am since I accepted that I am in Christ – does that mean I have days when I doubt my worth and usefulness? Of course. This the area I need to focus on for this point. When I feel insecure or less than I need to pray and ask God and the Holy Spirit to bring to remembrance all the things that I am in Christ ‘I am loved, I am worthy, I am unique…’

In conclusion, I am not a fully humble person and neither am I arrogant outwardly, but some of my thoughts and actions inwardly show a certain degree of independence that speaks to an arrogance that I was not fully aware of until I read this list and felt the stab of realisation; sometimes my thoughts and my feelings vie for atention when they don’t deserve it, or when they could injure others needlessly. I hope this list proves useful to you to, please spend sometime looking at each point and deciding whether you need to work on any area, not for yourself but for God. as the post’s image says ‘Humility is not thining less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.’

Character Qualities #1: Truthfulness vs. Deception

Truthfulness: Earning future trust by accurately reporting past facts.

Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour, for we are all members of one body.

Ephesians 4:25

Truthfulness is a character quality that is present by its absence at the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis. In Genesis 3 the Serpent tells Eve that she will not die if she touches the fruit of the tree of good and evil and that she will become like God if she eats it. This is the deception that separated man from God. It’s the ultimate deception. It happened because Adam and Eve were willing to listen to a ‘truth’ that wasn’t of God, who is truth. This underpins the importance of truthfulness.

Telling the truth is important – we can all remember someone who regularly told lies, so much so that we started to disbelieve or give no credence to any of their stories. We learnt to take what they said ‘with a pinch of salt.’ That person would never become a close friend. How can you trust such a person? This is a person to be wary of, to be pitied and someone who could be a little dangerous – there is often no shield to what they will say to you OR about you. That is the most basic reason for truthfulness, without it we have no meaningful relationship with others. It builds a wall of independence that puts us in the centre of importance.

In addition it affects our reputation. Reputation is important because it allows us to communicate our ideas, and beliefs, ;if it is good. Conversely, I#if we have a bad reputation we tend to stagnate as people. Lies and deception breed bad reputations and hold back personal and collective progress. We can become the stumbling block for others.

This is perhaps why God puts a high price on truthfulness. In Exodus when He gives the Ten Commandments to Moses – it’s right there hanging out at number nine:

‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ Exodus 20

God felt it important to state that ‘we should not’ simply because we often do. The same remains true today, we may not tell an outright lie about someone but if we are spreading gossip by repeating what we have heard then we are giving false witness and it is a sin. Moreover, we are besmirching God’s reputation as one of His children.
If we build up a reputation for truth, we earn more right to speak freely and be accepted. When speaking of God, if we are known for our truthfulness then others will listen. In Matthew 28 Jesus gave the remaining 11 disciples ‘The Great Commission’ to go and make disciples of all nations. He told them to teach people to obey all that He had taught them. This is a tough task on its own – the disciples were entering a very hostile world and would face many trials and tribulations as they went to complete the task Jesus had set them. Consider this – how much harder would it have been if they had been considered intentionally deceptive by nature, as individuals? If they were known liars then no-one would have given them the time of day; God’s message would not have had the appeal that it ought. How would people have received God’s word if it came out of the mouth of a liar?

This is one of the reasons that we must cultivate a character of truth, if we are to reach others and bring Jesus to them then we have to be trusted. If we are saying things that are untrue and showing ourselves to be going against God’s commandment then how are others going to truly hear the Gospel from the same mouth? They aren’t! Every time you consider lying you are potentially alienating others from God – lies are that powerful.

And it doesn’t stop there. Truthfulness is not just concerned with speech, it is as concerned with action. If our actions don’t marry with our speech then we are being deceptive. For example, if we are preaching to others that we should be giving to the poor, sharing resources fairly and that we shouldn’t be greedy, but allow ourselves to be obese through gluttony, then our words lose their impact, not because of our appearance but because we aren’t practising what we are preaching. If a person detects hypocrisy then they will not hear the message that is being brought – no matter how true it may be.

But it goes deeper still. Deception isn’t just a public thing. It doesn’t exist only when someone has caught you out. It exists regardless. If you are doing something counter to God’s message in private then you do not possess truthfulness, no matter how excellent your outside, worldly demeanour is. Deception is what drove a gulf between man and God not long after the creation and it is the thing that continues to cause a breakdown in our relationship with God today. If we are ‘secretly’ doing something away from the world’s eyes, it is not hidden from God, He knows us better than we know ourselves (Psalm 139). He knows our heart and wants it to be in Him. If we are lying to ourselves about something we do then we are lying to Him. The real danger of this situation is that, just like in the Garden of Eden, when we deceive ourselves we are letting the Devil get a foothold that can quickly become a stronghold. We are allowing the Devil to speak in our ear like the serpent ‘It’s ok, keep watching that porn, it isn’t dangerous – what your wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her’, telling us that this is true when this couldn’t be further from the truth. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be guided by OUR definition of truth, or OUR assessment of a situation – there’s always that one time where a little white lie is needed isn’t there?! We should be guided by God, through His Word and His Spirit.

We will only find truth in that which is true – Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life, no one gets to the Father except through me.’ I know that I do not want to stand in the glory of God, in the absolute truth and know how often I turned my back on Him as I lied and deceived myself and others. To have a character quality of truthfulness is, above all else, a way of saying you are God’s, you live in His glory, by His strength because we don’t have the ability to live truthfully if we are not directly connected to its source.

Character Qualities: An introduction to the challenge

I have recently read (well, listened to) ‘A Love That Multiplies’ by Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar (of ’19 Kids and Counting’ fame). One of the things that they mentioned in regard to raising their children in a Godly manner was ‘Operational Definitions of Character Qualities’. Michelle Duggar explains that they choose one of these 49 character qualities to study and practice with their children, looking out for chances to praise their children when they exhibit character that is in line with God’s teaching in the Bible. This intrigued me so I went on a researching trip and found the 49 Character Qualities that the Duggars were referring to.

I must admit that when I first heard Michelle talking about ‘Operational definitions’ it sounded worryingly legalistic, but I was completely wrong! The character traits are those that God wants us to have both for our own benefit, but also for the benefit of others. As I read down the list I was amazed at the breadth of ways that we can show God through our thoughts, because these are the things that develop into our speech, our works and then finally our character, to others. This is what prompted me to take on what I shall call the ’49 character qualities challenge’, in which I will meditate on one of the characteristics at a time and consider why it is important to God, how I can ensure that I am mindful to promote the quality and what the Bible teaches about it.

I hope by the end of the challenge I will know myself more by knowing more of what God desires me to be. I hope that the posts will encourage you and give you pause for thought. At the end I shall reflect on how we could use these to help work with Youth and children in a Christian setting.

The 49 Character Qualities:

Truthfulness                                                                        Punctuality
Alertness                                                                             Humility
Self-Control                                                                         Compassion
Wisdom                                                                               Boldness
Resourcefulness                                                                 Flexibility
Orderliness                                                                          Dependability
Attentiveness                                                                       Love
Obedience                                                                           Tolerance
Hospitality                                                                            Decisiveness
Reverence                                                                           Gentleness
Discernment                                                                        Forgiveness
Thriftiness                                                                           Availability
Initiative                                                                               Security
Sensitivity                                                                            Creativity
Sincerity                                                                               Cautiousness
Generosity                                                                           Determination
Diligence                                                                             Deference
Faith                                                                                     Persuasiveness
Contentment                                                                         Endurance
Responsibility                                                                        Patience
Justice                                                                                   Enthusiasm
Virtue                                                                                    Gratefulness
Joyfulness                                                                             Loyalty
Thoroughness                                                                       Meekness
Discretion

Please accept my invitation to join me in this study and leave your comments as to what God has revealed to you.

Teaching children…

I was taking a journey around the blog world and found myself at TextsinContext where I came across this post about a poem you can use to help children (and adults) to learn the 10 commandments. It struck a chord with me.

Above all else love God alone;
Bow down to neither wood nor stone.
God’s name refuse to take in vain;
The Sabbath rest with care maintain.
Respect your parents all your days;
Hold sacred human life always.
Be loyal to your chosen mate;
Steal nothing neither small nor great.
Report, with truth, your neighbour’s deed;
And rid your mind of selfish greed.

How amazing is God’s Word? So deep in it’s truth but so simple that a child can grasp it; we are all His children and indeed, Jesus told us to come to Him like the children:

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them.  And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:2-4

So today I am choosing to come back to God as a child and enjoy spending time with God, my father reciting this simple, yet deep, poem.