James 4:4-10 Humble Yourself

Observation: James draws a pretty hard line between "friendship with the world" and "friendship with God." If you're friends with "the world," you're enemies with God. I don't interpret the use of "the world" to mean literally the sum of all material things all around us. We're not supposed to hate everything around us. Instead, the Greek word for "the world" used here, Kosmos, means the inhabited world--our civilization as we currently know it. If we are perfectly happy with the way our society is ordered now, what counts for power now, the way people treat each other now, then we are no friends of God's. But if we long for something more, if we see earthly fame and the praise of our current world for what it is--temporary, and empty--then we are ready to befriend God. 

Application: Everybody likes positive affirmation. We crave it. We want the world to see something in us. We want to be known and celebrated, to have our "15 minutes of fame": maybe more if we can manage it. But the thing is, the world doesn't really know you. Not the way God does. The world can only see the outside. What the world may or may not celebrate about you is only the tip of the iceberg compared to what God sees. And more often than not it's not even the part of the iceberg that's truly worth celebrating anyway. 

Humbling ourselves doesn't mean pretending we are worse than we are, or that our gifts and our personality don't count. God made us this way on purpose, and every aspect of ourselves--even the aspects we're not especially proud of--can be used to God's glory, and for God's loving purpose for this world. Humbling ourselves simply means not making our lives about "us", not doing what we do to gain praise but because it's the right thing to do. It means relying God, who knows us best, to give us worth. It means doing our best, and knowing it still isn't perfect, but that God can use it anyway. 

 Prayer: God, thank you for putting me together in a unique way. Thanks for making me who I am. Take my life. Take me--the real me--and make of me what you will. Help my life not be about me, but about you. Amen.