Sermon Note: Gospel Humility

Bible reading: Romans 12:2-3; 1 Corinthians 4:3-4, 6

After we offer our lives to be a living sacrifice, what’s next?

In v. 2 Paul is speaking about God’s will. He begins with the negative counsel: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world.” Then he continues with the positive one: “Give your life to be transformed by the renewing of mind.” The renewing of mind is a continual process. For us to know the will of God, it is not going to be a one time event. It needs to be a learning process.

How is it like to have a renewed mind? How does the renewed mind think?

Paul also speaks about the mind renewing in a negative and positive structure. v3 Negative: do not think with hyper-minded, beyond what you must think. Positive: but think soberly; think in the right mind, with proper judgment and moderation.

Now this is remarkable! From all the things he could possibly say about human mind, and how it works, he chooses to speak about pride (hyper-minded). Why?

The answer is: Because Paul believes that the root cause of all divisions, of why we can’t get along, and of war are boasting, pride.

Pride

Read 1 Corinthians 4:3-4, 6. The discussion on pride in this section will be helping us understand the problem of pride.

v. 6, interestingly, the word he uses for pride here is “puff up.” That’s actually the English translation for the Greek word, Physioo. If Physioo is the image he uses to explain what pride really means, it suggests 3 things: the proud is empty, sick, and busy.

Empty

- Proud ego has nothing at the center of it.

- Soren Kierkegaard says that our natural ego tries to build our own identity around something beside God.

- The thing is, the place made only for God can’t be filled with something else. It will always be too small.

Sick

Ego that unceasingly draws attention - how do I look, how are we treated? O I feel ignored, my feeling hurts - is a sick ego. Compare to our body parts. They only draw our attention if they have problems, or if something is wrong.

Therefore, the proud ego is busy.

The proud ego tries to fill its emptiness, that's why it's busy every day. And how it usually does is by comparing and boasting (v. 6).

C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says:

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about.

When we compare ourselves with other people, there are 2 possible outcomes:
1. If we believe we won, we will boast.
2. If we believe we lose, we will be envy or hate ourselves.

More concrete example? Read what Madonna had to say about success when she was interviewed for Vogue magazine.

My drive in life comes from a fear of being mediocre. That is always pushing me. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being but then I feel I am still mediocre and uninteresting unless I do something else. Because even though I have become somebody, I still have to prove that I am somebody. My struggle has never ended and I guess it never will.

How does the Gospel change us? How does the renewing of mind transform our way of thinking?
Read Romans 12:3 again. My paraphrase: “Measure your self with the right standard, the standard you must use to measure human self, namely, according to the standard of faith, distributed by God to each of us.”

This is what Paul and I believe: Living according to faith standard will save us from pride trap. How? Two reasons.

1. Faith is a gift of God. Read Ephesians 2:8-9 and 1 Corinthians 4:7! You see, pride has no place here.
2. Faith is looking away from self and from the world to Christ. 

Read 1 Corinthians 4:3-4! There Paul speaks about being judged or judgment. The context of that word is courtroom. Therefore, it is more appropriate to translate "judge" as "verdict," a decision made by a jury: guilty or not guilty.

So what Paul is actually saying is you, the church of Corinth, set a standard for me; the world does the same - the human court; I do have my own standard. In the past I measure my self-worth according to those standards, but now I don’t care about all of them. I don’t measure my self, my life, according to the human standards any longer. Even though my conscience is clear, it doesn’t mean that I am not guilty. My judge is the LORD! Not you; not even myself. He is the one whose words I care about. If He says I am sinful, that’s who I am. If He says I am free by the blood of Christ, then I am free.

The world says, "You perform first. If we happened to like your performance, you got the verdict: you are justified; you've passed." Christianity is totally different. Before God, the Judge, your performance is bad; you've failed; you're deeply depraved. But the verdict He makes is NOT GUILTY, JUSTIFIED. How come? It is because Jesus took our place. He is the perfect one; his performance has no stain. His perfect and righteous works have been imputed to us. Now we are deemed innocent.

Application

Friends, we can only be a humble person if we really are freed by God. Because, apart from that, our ego will be busy taking care of ourselves, drawing attention to itself. We can’t do any good deeds out of pure motivation. We are not free to love.

C. S. Lewis once said, if we ever meet a humble person, we will not immediately feel that he or she is a humble person. In other words, we will not be impressed by his or her humble deeds or good deeds. What we will feel is that this person is totally interested in us. He or she really cares about us.

That’s what I call self-forgetfulness. Gospel humility means self-forgetting.