Simple Spirituality: Humility James 4:10 John 21: 4-7

Simple Spirituality. Its a bit of an oxymoron isn’t it? At times it seems like there isn’t anything simple about our spiritual life - or at least not as simple as we thought it would be when we first accepted Christ into our lives. The truth is growing in our spiritual lives is hard - it requires us to consider things that we did not previously consider and to stretch past some of the natural ways we go about our lives in order to grow in our relationship with God. That growth doesn’t happen naturally. Like other types of growth in our lives, it takes hard work.

For the next four weeks we are going to be discussing simple spirituality - the simple practices we can works towards in order to grow in our relationship to God. Some of these things may not come naturally to us, but they are needed in order to re-orient ourselves to a new way of being through the grace of Jesus Christ. 

There is a saying that goes something like this: pride comes before the fall. It’s actually found in the book of Proverbs. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins - the sins that are thought to birth all other sins in our lives. In fact, pride is considered to be one of the most serious sins - the root of all other sin. Pride is defined as the belief that you are better than others - which leads us to feel more self-important than we actually are. Pride can lead us to believe that we don’t need God or our neighbor.

The legend of the Devil goes like this: Lucifer was an angel who was supposed to worship God. Yet, one day, he stopped worshipping God and instead gathered other angels around to worship him instead. As a result, he could no longer dwell in heaven with a Holy God who was to be worshipped alone - so he and his followers fell from heaven. As he fell he was transformed to the antithesis of God - the Devil. The one who led people astray from worshipping God, just as he did with the angels who worshipped him. According to the legend, Lucifer was the first to succumb to pride, believing that he was worthy of worship, that he was better than the other angels, even better than God. But many of us struggle with pride every day in a variety of ways.

The truth is that we all yearn for significance. We all yearn for other people to tell us how good we are, how needed we are, how worthy we are. If we are honest, to a certain extent we need that in order to build ourselves us. But if we are not careful, we can let such praises define us instead of our identify as a child of God. If we are not careful, such praises can quickly lead to hubris, or pride, that tricks us into believing that we are better than everyone else, and can survive on our own without others, without God even.

The spiritual practice we need to combat pride and help keep us in check in our lives is humility. The bible instructs ourselves time and again to humble ourselves, because when we are truly humble, our pride is exposed. Humility is a modest, or truthful, view of one’s importance. According to missionary and author Chris Hertz, “humility affirms our need for God.” Humility reminds us that we are not perfect - that we don’t have it together all the time, and that we are in desperate need of a Savior.

Did you ever stop to consider that there are differences between being a believer in Jesus and being a follower of Jesus? The scriptures tell us that even the demons believed in Jesus, but they didn’t follow him. We need to believe in Jesus in order to be his disciple, but following Jesus, that requires us setting aside ourselves and our agendas because we truly embrace that we are in need of Savior. Brothers and sisters, there are many people who believe in Jesus who haven’t set themselves aside enough to actually follow him. There are people who believe in Jesus but are so wrapped up in their pride that they want to go about life their own way on their own terms. That’s why we need a healthy dose of humility to lead us to the spiritually well-springs of life. We need humility to remind us that we actually don’t always know best and sometimes we get in the way of our own spiritually growth - through pride and arrogance, individualism and independence, excess and greed, power, control, and defiance - just to name a few.  Sadder yet, we don’t even always recognize how we get in our own way and how we are hurting ourselves in the long run spiritually.

There were times that the disciples, the original followers of Jesus, let themselves get in the way of Jesus’s ministry to others, Jesus’s ministry to them, as well. But there were also beautiful moments where they set themselves aside in order to trust God. In the gospel reading this morning we find the disciples after Jesus’s death. They aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves so they go back to the one thing they do know - fishing. They were trained fishermen, yet despite years of being on the sea they have not caught a single fish all night. Then a stranger appears on the shoreline and tells them to go against all of their training, to go against all of their years of knowledge and cast their nets on the other side of the boat. They could have let themselves get in their way - they could have deferred to their pride and said that would never work, that they had tried that earlier, but instead they so badly wanted to catch some fish that they were willing to be humble and try this suggestion. The results? Their nets were so full that they couldn’t even begin to drag them up. And the disciples recognized that it was the Lord who had instructed them.

Hertz states, “It’s humility that opens our eyes to the discovery of God”. It was humility that allowed the disciples to see Jesus on the shoreline that day. But how many times do we fail to recognize the presence of Christ in our own lives because we are so caught up in our pride? So caught up in thinking that we know the best way or that we have it all together?

However, if we are not careful our pride can morph into pseudo-humility. We can say things like “oh it wasn’t me, it was God” without truly believing it or knocking ourselves down a peg or two. False humility and false pride are still forms or pride. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said that humility is not pretending that you don’t have gifts - its recognizing that who you are is a gift from God and worshipping God alone for that good gift. 

Brothers and sisters, I have a fear that pride has deeply embedded itself into our hearts and into the life of the Church universal. I fear that instead of seeking the will of God together, sometimes churches simply resort to their own power and understanding and pride. I fear that the church wants new member not for kingdom purposes but so that we can be as prestigious as we once were. We, as individuals and as the Church, need a healthy dose of humility - true humility, not false modesty, in order to be reminded that we don’t just believe in Jesus, but we follow Jesus alone. Let us seek to truly humble ourselves before God, seeking to follow God fully, wherever God may lead, setting aside all that we once knew and once were, for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Amen.