Faith, Righteousness and Eternity

Pride and humility are two things that we believe we can easily identify.  We think of pride as loud, arrogant and "me" centered.  Humility on the other hand is quieter, self-effacing and willing to be unseen.  It sounds easy enough but the truth behind humility and pride are deeply rooted in the motivation of the heart.  For example, what if you heard someone say, "I can do anything!" What would be your impression?  It would probably be, "what arrogance."  In the same way if you heard someone say, "without the Lord I can't do anything!"  Certainly that would be humility!  Not necessarily.  The first statement was essentially what the Apostle Paul said in Phil. 4:13, I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me."  Certainly he added, through Christ, but still he  believed that the Lord could accomplish anything through him.  The second statement, "without the Lord I can't do anything", could really be pride.  It is all about the attitude of the heart.  In reality the only two people that know the attitude of the heart would be the person making the statement and God.  Only God knows our hearts.  There are even times when we don't truly know our own hearts.  We often deceive ourselves in order to move forward with something we want or want to accomplish.  

Pride can sound like humility when it is faithless and passive and not willing to obey God and risk the possibility of failure, thereby bringing humiliation on itself.  Humility can sound like pride when it is confident of Christ leading and empowering and willing to be aggressive in obedience to the will of God.  Why would such inward musing matter?  It matters greatly and even has a bearing on eternity.  It has been said, "if you can't trust God now in this life, how do you know you can trust Him with the promise of heaven when you die?"  Faith is the "evidence of things not seen."  I once knew a man who truly loved the Lord. He had lived a life of sin and rebellion before the Lord saved him.  Many years after he became a follower of Jesus he would say often, "there is none good, no not one."  It sounded right and very humble.  Yet, it bothered me.  He also liked the quote "I'm just an old sinner saved by grace!"  I would challenge him and say, "no, we were old sinners but now we are made righteous by the blood of Jesus."  I could tell he was very uncomfortable with that statement.  In his latter years he began to express anxiety about heaven.  He would doubt that he could be accepted into heaven because of his past life.  There it is!!!  All those years of words that sounded like humility were really symptoms of a weakness in faith relating to his salvation that comes only by the blood of Jesus.  He was saved but his consciousness had never been fully redeemed by the works that Jesus did on the cross. His consciousness was still stained with a thought that his former life actions had something to do with entrance into heaven.  Our lesson here is to truly accept by faith what Jesus did and abandon every thought of what we did before our salvation.  Our lives before Jesus has nothing to do with heaven. Let it go and grab what Jesus did and never look back!