Sunday, May 28, 2017

The Law of the Kingdom


UV 2282/10000 The Law of the Kingdom
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time:
I Peter 5 v 6

Humbling oneself before God implies obeying the word of the Lord. Humility under God is trusting Him implicitly and obeying Him explicitly. It is an attitude of our hearts. To humble oneself under the hand of God is to realize that all that one is and has is from His hand. This enables us to rise to realize our highest potential, fulfil our highest calling from the Lord. In order to humble ourselves, we need to know that our power, talent, ability and intellect is nothing in comparison with the infinite glory, power, grace of the Lord. We need to trust that the Lord will not turn His power against us willingly. He resists the proud. It implies that He does not fight the proud. He merely ignores the proud and indifferent. As He turns His back on them, they lose His protection, His mercy, His grace and turn themselves into the merciless, ruthless hands of the enemy of their souls.

The Lord never rejects a broken and contrite heart. A broken and contrite heart is one that has realized that only the Lord’s will prevails. It surrenders one’s future and all his hope to the Lord. He finds grace and mercy in the eyes of the Lord. In contrast, a person who is full of himself, who is vain and conceited is opposed by the Lord. Such a person will be brought low by his own pride and arrogance. He thinks that might is right, that his success and pomp will justify his life. The glory that he receives in this world will surely fade. The humble and faithful in contrast believe that the purpose of life is to subject their desires to the beliefs, values, principles enshrined in the word. The infinite power of God is subjected to His infinite justice, mercy, love and grace.

This uni-verse echoes one of the fundamental laws of the kingdom of God. Humbling oneself is a conscious and willing act of the heart of man. It is committing one’s life entirely into the hands of the Lord, accepting what He sends our way and rejecting what He ask us to reject. It is the willingness to walk the way of the cross as Jesus did all the way in the expectation that the Lord will exalt us and glorify us in due time, not sooner or later. When we humble ourselves before the Lord in this manner, exaltation is certain. Only the timing is not known, whether it is in this world or in the life to come. Committing our hearts and lives to Jesus is a once in a lifetime humbling. Confessing our ongoing sins and failings are a daily necessity. Trusting God is a lifetime humbling process. We should not resist the Lord when He re-directs our steps or when He attempts to smoothen the rough patches in our character. We should lie still and yielded like moist clay in His expert hands. We should be ready to give up any treasured goal, any ingrained habit, any offending practice or any baseless belief.

Prateep V Philip

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