How To Be Humbled And Exalted

How to be Humbled and Exalted

Stand and lift up your bible and repeat after me.

This is my Bible.

I am what it says I am.

I can do what it says I can do.

I am going to learn how to be what it says I can be.

Today I will learn more of the word of God.

The indestructible, never ending, living word Of God.

I will never be the same.

I will never be the same.

In Jesus Name.

Luke Chapter 18

Jesus comes on the scene as a rabbi, as a teacher, and He starts to turn everything upside-down and inside-out. And He takes what people have been told and what’s been reinforced to them, and He says, “Let me give you a new way to look at it.”

So much of the religious establishment…they didn’t know what to do with Jesus. He starts preaching His first sermon, and He says to the people, “You’ve heard it said.” In other words, “I know your spiritual leaders have told you this, but I tell you…”

And He turns things around, or He raises the bar. And He gives us a way of looking at life that is not just countercultural, but it’s counterintuitive. It goes against how we feel sometimes. It just doesn’t seem right.

He’s going to do that for us again today as we study this passage of Scripture together. What I want you to catch in this message is that, specifically, many of the people of His day put the focus of faith on the outside. No different than today. They thought that following Jesus or having a faith in God was about outward appearance, about looking the right way, dressing the right way, following the right rules, keeping the right rituals, having your stuff together. They had turned it into that. And Jesus comes on and He says, “No, look, it’s the inside that I’m looking at.” It’s the inside. Faith is an inside-out job. It begins with the work God does in us, and then what He does in us comes through us.

Matthew 23:27, is where He of brings His indictment against the religious leaders of His day, and He says (paraphrased), “Look, you are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside.”

It’s like going to a cemetery when my wonderful wife and I have traveled, and we see lots of beautiful tombs that are clean, have been painted. Everything looks good, but on the inside it’s full of dead men’s bones and everything is unclean.” He says to the religious leaders, “In the same way, on the outside you appear…Just looking at you from the outside it looks like you are people who are righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and you’re full of wickedness.”

If you have your Bibles go ahead and open to Luke chapter 18 and say, “Amen” when you are there.

Years ago, the news reported the tragic story about the grandson of the founder of the Vail Ski Resort in Colorado. The man’s grandson died in an avalanche. I read about it on the Weather Channel’s website. I was surprised to read that this is not as uncommon as you would think (and) that some thirty people a year in the United States die from an avalanche.

Part of this article that I read had a little section on “How to survive.” Should you ever find yourself in such a horrific situation, what do you do? How do you survive something like that? And apparently one of the common mistakes people make when they get caught in an avalanche is they get turned around and they start digging the wrong way. They think they’re digging up to survive, but they are really making the situation worse and they’re digging down.

Popular Science Magazine gave an example of a guy who was found dead from an avalanche, and it was determined that he had actually dug thirty feet deeper into the snow. The whole time he thinks he’s going up, but he’s actually going down. And there were some tips (on) what to do. It’s just not that uncommon. You get turned around. You can’t trust your instinct. You can’t trust what feels right. Here’s what they said you should do. You should get your hand free, and you should scoop out some snow right in front of your mouth; and then you spit. If the spit comes back down and hits you, then you’re facing the right way. You can start digging up. If it doesn’t come back down, you need to get yourself turned around, right? Because you need a reality check. You think you’re facing one way, but you may be facing a different way completely. You think you’re going up, but you may be going down.