Humble and Meek

Linda. Without question. Yeah, my background is in nursing, so he’d have more tendency to have a sympathetic barfing himself. You know, it’s not his calling. It’s definitely not his calling. So when the kids are sick or blood is squirting, it falls to me, and that’s okay. I would say it’s probably a pretty group effort where both, you know, Matt may take Christian and I may start cleaning up or vice versa, but we just kind of really work together when it comes to really any project. So I think that thing would be similar. Yeah. I don’t I don’t think we really made a distinction of who’s got the dirty diapers and the clean up duty. It was just who’s ever there and who’s ever closest and who’s more available to do it. We were at our your brother and sister in law’s house and their child just vomited everywhere. Mostly, I would say you leapt into To action. I helped from afar. I don’t like throw up. I think we’d help each other. We feed off each other and work together to get it cleaned up. We’ve both been teachers, so you see plenty of it in the school hallways. And it’s not a problem in the classroom. I’d probably clean it up. I’d probably be the one to clean it up. Um, you’d probably leap into action to make sure our kid is okay. I’d probably clean up the mess. It might be the other way around. I don’t know, but as far as track record goes, I’m the only one who has cleaned up your puke. Yeah. So I don’t know. I think whoever’s there first would, whoever’s closest actually fight over who’s going to do it. Because, yeah, I’d probably say whoever is closest. Oh, Travis. Me,I’m clean up crew. I run toward it. He hears the sound and is like, oh no! And goes. And I will also, uh, toss my cookies if I’m the one who cleans it up, so I can’t. I can’t do it. I am there for moral support and to comfort the child when all of that is gone. Yeah, right. Yeah. The sick child comes to me in the middle of the night. They come to my side of the bed, they know, dad will help me. Mom loves me and will care for me and take care of me. But, dad, he’s first responder. That would be me. Because someone doesn’t like smells. And usually I would hear it in the middle of the night where he’s sound asleep. Yeah, she would hear the pre throw up sound and she would start running. And I was like, what are you running? It’s like, did you hear that? It’s like, not yet. And I was like, and then it’s like, oh, now I hear it. Well, I gotta just…. Ack.

I apologize for that right up front. When I wrote these questions, I did not anticipate the level of detail people would use in their answers. I just didn’t see that coming at all. I thought this would just be a fun question. That seems like a fun question, doesn’t it? I had no idea this would give Jay Meyer an opportunity to demonstrate pre vomit retching. Thanks, Jay. Jamie made the video and then he sent it to me this week. He’s like, hey, check this out. Maybe not while you’re eating. That was good advice. I was glad for that. So I won’t add my own experience here. You’re welcome but I will say cleaning up after sick kids is a pretty good visual depiction of the character quality that we’re going to look at today. This is our marriage series, Marriage Clothes. And in this series, we are looking at the list of Christ like characteristics that we find to put on as Christians and how they specifically affect our marriages. We find that list in Colossians chapter 3:12 – 14. So if you have your Bibles, you can turn there if you like. When you put on Christ, you become a new person. Your old self died when Christ died, and your new self is now alive because Christ is alive. And the Bible describes this as being spiritually reborn. You’re a new man or a new woman, and with this new life comes a whole new wardrobe, Metaphorically speaking, there’s a bunch of clothes that you have that you can’t wear anymore. You got to get rid of those things, those clothes. Last week we saw how we are to take off anger and wrath and throw them out. You don’t just keep it in your closet. Wait around, sometime I might need that. No we don’t do that with it. We actually get rid of. We put to death those characteristics, we get rid of those clothes and we replace them with new, compassionate hearts and kindness. Those are the clothes that you have to wear now because that’s who you are now in Jesus. Every new piece of clothing has an impact on your relationships with everyone, but especially your spouse. I’ve seen this really clearly over the last 20 years of ministry. When I’m talking to couples who are working through their problems. By the way, it is a really good and healthy thing to get some shepherding guidance on a regular basis. It’s a really good and really healthy thing, whether that’s from a one of the pastors here at Calvary, or whether that’s just from the people in your small group, just the Christians, the friends in your life that can speak into your life. It is good to have people who can counsel and guide and help. Proverbs 11:14, “Says where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.”

See, God has designed us to need each other, to help each other, to point each other to the gospel. So getting some good counsel in your life is not showing weakness. I think there’s a lot of folks that think that that’s showing weakness, and I got to put up a good front. I don’t want to show any weakness, but that’s not showing weakness. It’s being biblical. We’re told we’re to have these counselors. We need them in our lives. We can’t see everything. You can’t see everything. You need some outside perspective. We don’t always know when we’re still wearing the old clothes, and we need to put on the new clothes of the gospel. And someone else might be able to see that a little bit better and help you with it. If you’re open to receiving that, you’ll grow more in Christ. Sometimes when I’m trying to help a couple find where the problems are in their marriage, they struggle to see them even when they’re obvious, because they’re still thinking about how marriage should be and how it should work without Christ. Not how marriage is designed to work by God in Christ. So they say they’re submitted to Jesus with their words, but their hearts are still committed to their old way of thinking about marriage. They’re still wearing those old clothes. And by the way, that’s to be expected. That’s not strange at all.

If you know Jesus, all of us, to one degree or another, are working to put off the old self and to put on the new self in our relationships. But it’s a process. It’s a lifelong process. And so it takes a gracious, spirit empowered effort and nobody has fully arrived, not you and not your spouse. Which means one of the pieces of clothing that we need to put on early and often is the character quality that we’re going to look at today. Humility and meekness. Now, just like last week, Paul pairs a way of thinking and a way of doing so. Last week we saw that we were to put on compassionate hearts. Compassionate is an internal feeling that then gets expressed in kindness, in kind words and kind actions. Humility and meekness have roughly the same relationship, with humility being the way you see yourself and meekness being the way you now act because of your humility. Now let me be right up front with you this morning. If you want to cut to the roots of bitterness and anger in your marriage, some of you just you’re looking at your marriage and you’re going, we have a real problem here. And it’s a deep rooted problem, and there’s some kind of thing going on, and I don’t know how to get to it. If you want to cut to the root of bitterness and anger in your marriage, if you want to remove the roadblock and you want to get that, that traffic flowing again with your spouse, you’ll find the relief you’re looking for in Christ-like humility and meekness. This is very likely the piece that you are missing. This is probably what you don’t have. I have seen so many couples struggle because they cannot put on godly humility. And the reason they can’t put on godly humility is that they are still wearing an old piece of clothing they should have thrown out a long time ago. And we’ll look at that here in just a minute. The humility and meekness that was required for your salvation and new life in Christ must be brought into your healthy marriage. See, when Paul tells us to put on humility, he is not telling a Christian to do something strange or new for a Christian. He’s telling us to live out the humility that was required to become a Christian in the first place. Telling a true Christian to be humble is like telling water to be wet. It’s telling something to be what it already is. There’s no such thing as a Christian who is not humble, or at least did not go through humility to get where he or she is. And yet, just like with all of these pieces of clothing, humility and meekness can be a struggle to put on, particularly in our marriages.

So we’re going to look at humility and meekness from two different angles today. First we’re going to look upward at the role humility and meekness play in our Christian walk in our relationship with Christ. And then we’re going to look across. And we’re going to see how humility and meekness is to characterize our relationship with our spouse. So we’re going to look upward and then we’re going to look across. Here’s our verse.

First let’s look upward. Put on then as God’s chosen ones holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness,and patience. So Paul likes this combination of words humility, meekness, and patience. You can see all three of them in that order in Ephesians 4:2. It sounds very much like Colossians in Ephesians 4. So we’ll look at patience and bearing one another’s burdens next week. We don’t use the word meek very much, but it means gentle. Okay, so meek means gentle. It’s a way of of carrying yourself so that you’re not brash or rude or sharp or short with people. It’s a body posture and an attitude that flows out of humility. I thought a lot this week about humility and the definition of humility and how to define biblical humility for us today. I was trying to make sure to stay very close to the Bible’s description, and everything that I came up with sounds pretty unattractive.Everything I could develop in my mind about how to say this, every time I came up with a phrase or a sentence, it just sounded very, very unattractive. But then I remembered the culture we live in and how humility is not a value at all. So of course it’s going to not sound very good to us. So here we go.

Humility is recognizing that you are not that big a deal and you never have been, and you are completely dependent on God for everything and on other people, for everything that you have ever accomplished and that therefore God gets all of the glory and you are merely a servant of the Lord. That’s humility. Humility is seeing yourself plainly. You are wonderfully made in the image of God, and you have tremendous value because God made you and says that you are tremendously valuable, and yet you are at the very same time, thoroughly sinful and in need of God’s moment by moment grace to guide you in paths of righteousness. Both of those are true at the same time. You are incredibly valuable. You are made in the image of God. You are incredibly sinful, and you need God’s grace every single moment. Humility means saying I don’t know everything. I don’t see everything. And what I do see, I see through the eyes of a person who struggles with old sins that God is still working on. And so my thoughts and conclusions aren’t necessarily correct just because I thought and concluded them. You’ve probably guessed the enemy to biblical humility and meekness. It’s pride. Pride is the enemy to humility. Pride is the anti-gospel. It’s what keeps those who hear the gospel from responding to Christ in faith. Pride is what drove the first wedge between God and humanity. When Eve reasoned in her mind that by eating the fruit, she could be God. Pride is what drove the ancient people of Mesopotamia to build a tower up to God so that they could domesticate him and display their power and their importance. It’s what made the kings of Israel even the relatively good kings of Israel, like David. It made them fall short of their duty to be good servant shepherds to the people. Pride is what drove the Jewish leaders of Jesus day, who were losing their status among the people, to reject Jesus and to kill him like a common criminal on a cross. Even though there are many ways that people describe their reasons for rejecting Jesus, you can trace them ultimately all the way back to pride. Think about this church. Think about the series of steps, the series of thoughts that you need to have about yourself in order to put your trust in Jesus. Just think about the sequential order of thoughts that you’ve got to have about who you are in order to trust Jesus. When you’re shown that the only way to have a relationship with God is to put your trust in a Savior who died for your sins, the first step toward accepting that truth is to say I am wrong. That’s the first thing, I am wrong. It’s got to be the first step. It has to be the first step to accept the gospel. You need to admit that there’s moral right and wrong, and that you’ve rebelled against God’s law by choosing the wrong. This is the first conversation you needhave with God would start with I’m wrong, but this is where pride gets in. Pride hates the phrase I’m wrong. Those are three pride shattering words that are incredibly difficult to put together, especially in a culture that consistently undermines the categories of right and wrong, and counsels you to surround yourself only with people who will tell you how right you are about everything all of the time. And if anybody tells you you’re wrong, you just cut them out of your life, right? That’s our culture. I am wrong is a non-starter for a prideful person. To say I’m wrong is to admit that you’re on the wrong side for the wrong reasons, doing the wrong things, and that as a result, God does not approve of you just the way you are. It’s a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, and that’s just the first step.

That’s just the first obstacle that pride puts in the way of the gospel. Because once you admit that you’re on the wrong side against God, the next thing you have to say is, I’m in need. If there is one thing worse for a prideful person than to admit that he’s wrong, it’s to admit that he’s not sufficient on his own. He’s not able to do it all himself. See, because pride hates weakness. Pride doesn’t want to admit to anything that would show a kind of weakness. It looks down on people who are dependent on other people. Pride drives you to a place where you can say, I don’t need anyone else. I’m not dependent on anybody else. I don’t care what you think of me, I only matter. The only thing that matters to me is me, and I provide everything I need. That’s pride is speaking to you in that way. I am completely self-sufficient a prideful person would say. Listen to these words that Jesus had for a church that had lost their focus on the gospel. This is Revelation chapter 3. This is Jesus talking to the church in a town called Laodicea. He says, for you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich and white garments. So that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness, may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love I reprove and discipline so be zealous and repent. Do you see how much self sufficient pride had crept into the hearts of these people? And this is a church. These are people who knew Jesus, right? H.ow much stronger is the grip of pride on those who have not yet trusted in Christ? You see, to follow Jesus, you have to admit your sin has made you wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Before God you’re in a state of complete dependence on him. Complete dependence. And then if I am wrong and I’m in need weren’t strong enough blows to to your pride well, the final step of the gospel is the kill shot. I submit. I submit to look to Christ, to bow your knee and bow your head, and to say to Jesus, you are Lord and I live only in accordance with your word, that is the final nail in pride’s coffin. I chase up against everything in our hearts and in our culture around us that says, you know what you do? You do life your way. You be your own person. Set your own course. Listen to no one who tries to tell you who you are. And if you have to, create your own set of truth in order to back all that up so that no one can speak into your life and tell you what to do.

Submission, church is a beautiful thing because it requires us to trust in the God who will fully care for all of our needs, including the needs that we don’t even know that we have yet. God anticipates our needs, things that we don’t think we need, he knows we do need things like to be tested and strengthened through adversity. We don’t think we need that, and yet we do. You trust in Christ and His goodness even when life is hard you obey Christ and His guidance, even when sin tempts you to go a different way. That’s submission. Listen to Peter describe this to the church. This is from 1 Peter 5:6-7, Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. That’s humility. That’s submission. Now you can fake this. It’s one of the most difficult problems with doing ministry in a church, actually, is the fact that you can fake this description. You can say I am wrong. That one time back when I accepted Jesus and I admitted it then. Back in the past, I’m past the wrong part of my life now. Back in the past, I was wrong at one point. You can say I’m in need in general of Jesus. I need God in my life. I need spiritual guidance. You can say in general that you have need of God, and you can say, I submit and you can do a few things in your life that look like that you’re submitting to God’s leading. You can really fake a lot of these things. You can say these words and fake a lot of this, and you can do all of that without having your heart changed at all. This is how you create a false religion. The Pharisees did this. The Pharisees would have agreed with everything I’ve talked about at this point. They would have said, I’m wrong. I’m in need. I submit they would have said those things. If you look at the end of Colossians chapter 2, you’ll see a whole description of a religion where you can seem very pious by following certain rules and practicing asceticism, which is actually the word humility, sort of a false humility to deny yourself of certain things and to look very pious to the people around you. You can create this sort of persona of humility. Paul says you can be pretty puffed up in your mind about how religious you are, and not actually be submitted to Christ at all. What’s really interesting is that you can be very, very prideful as you display your outward humility to other people. Paul calls this self-made religion. That’s his phrase for it in chapter two, verse 23, in Colossians. But here in Peter’s letter, Peter tells us what real humility and what real submission to God looks like. It means humbling yourself under the mighty hand of God and therefore casting all of your cares on him. And to do this continually, to do this daily. The Christian walk is a daily recognition that you are not your own. You don’t set the course. You’re not the captain of your life. You don’t make the rules. When Paul tells us that as the church to put on humility and meekness, he’s saying to take our status as sinners saved only by grace, sustained only by God’s mighty hand, and let that reality inform the way we treat other people. So let’s do that.

Let’s now turn to marriage. What does it look like to put on gospel shaped, Christ like spirit, empowered humility and meekness in your relationship with your spouse? Well, it has to start with remembering who we are before God. What we’ve been studying this morning, that we are sinners who are often wrong, entirely in need of God’s grace and therefore we are submitted to God. And not only that, we need to remember, and this is the harder thing to do, but we need to remember that our spouse is also a sinner who is often wrong, entirely in need of God’s grace, and is therefore submitted to be obedient to God. Now, obviously, I am describing a marriage between two committed Christian people. That’s what I’m describing here. But the spiritual realities change only slightly for non-Christians. In your case, this isn’t yet your identity, but it needs to be. It needs to be. See when you when you see yourself and your spouse as imperfect people growing in Christ, entirely dependent on the daily gift of God’s sanctifying grace, you can’t be proud. You can’t be proud and boast in your self-sufficiency if you’re constantly remembering this. And what happens is you start to see each other’s sins and failures as areas where God is still working on your spouse. And that makes you gracious because you remember that God is in the same way, still working on you. And so you recognize we are two imperfect people chasing after Christ. That’s what makes us humble.

Let’s create a scenario. It’s a little easier sometimes if you can kind of picture this happening. Let’s say that you get home from work and it has been a rough one. You’ve had a rough day at the office or wherever it is you work and you’re not in the mood for any kind of pleasantries. You don’t want to come in and all joyous or anything. You just you come in, you throw the bag down, you kick the dog out of your chair and you sit down and all you want is to be left alone. And then your spouse comes in and says something totally normal, just totally normal. Like, you know, how was your day? Or what do you want for dinner? Or can you get out your calendar, I’d like to go over a few dates with you and you lose it. You lose it. Why are you always on me? Can’t you see I’m tired? Why do I have to be in charge of dinner? Why do I have to sit when dinner gets made? Why aren’t you cooking it right now? I can’t do calendar time. Do you see how tired I am? By the way, I chose this scenario because it’s probably never happened in the history of mankind. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. So actually I chose it because in this scenario, there is very clearly someone in the wrong here and very clearly someone in the right. And I’ll explain why that’s important here in just a minute. Yelling at your spouse is never okay. It’s never okay to do it. And yelling at your spouse irrationally, even less so. What does God’s call on us to be humble and meek require in that scenario? Well, for you as the yelling spouse in this scenario, it requires you to mute that little voice in your head that says, I’ve had a bad day and so I’m right and so I’m going to win this little fight that I’ve picked. I’m going to win it. Or maybe that little voice is saying, you know what, you’ve had a bad day. You’re just venting a little bit and as long as everyone steers clear of you, we don’t even need to bring this up again. We’ll just pass on by this little incident. There are endless little justifications that we can make in our heads to pridefully protect our view of ourselves. That’s just pride that’s telling you to do that. But gospel shaped humility and meekness won’t let it be this way. Humility before Christ means going to your spouse and saying I’m wrong. I’m in need of God’s grace and my spouse is forgiveness. I’m submitted to God who tells me not to let the sun go down on my anger. Going and making it right. Humility and meekness should move you to gentle repentance. But what about the spouse that didn’t do anything wrong here? What about that side of things? What about the one who got blasted with irrational rage? What does humility and meekness mean for that half of the marriage? Well, church, I’ll tell you having lived on both sides of this scenario, on the what did I do side of of this scenario on that side, there’s a tendency to put yourself on a pillar. There’s a tendency to go, oh, I didn’t do anything wrong in this case. I’m the winner of this scenario, I won. I didn’t even know I was competing, and I’m already the winner. And so you start to pat yourself on the back. I didn’t do anything wrong here. I’m not at fault. I’m on the side of righteousness. Well, yeah, in this one isolated scenario, you are on the right side. You are not at fault. You are in fact the victim of your spouse’s sin. But here’s where we go wrong church. It’s right at this moment that we often go wrong we think winning the scenario, being vindicated in our victimhood is the most important outcome of the situation. But what happens when we are faithful to put on humility and meekness toward our spouse, who right now is in this temporary moment, is sinning against us that’s what we need, right? That’s the question we need to answer. If we remember that, we are also often sinfully wrong. If we could just broaden out of this one isolated scenario for just a second and recognize we are also often in the wrong and in need of God’s grace and submitted to God’s Word to guide us in all of our relational situations, including this one. What’s going to happen? We’re going to go forward with empathy and gentleness and humble understanding. Why do we so desperately want to be the one who’s right? Why is that? Why is in it seems like in marriage that these two people think that they’re on some kind of game show where they’re trying to win so they can be the better one. They’re the ones that knew better. They’re the ones that had the best argument. They’re the ones that they got their way because they know better. What are we playing at exactly? Why does the relationship so often look like that? I’ll tell you why it’s so often looks like that, pride. Pride. Marriage goes wrong when a husband and wife forget that they’re both broken sinners saved by grace, in need of God’s daily guidance, and that they’re called to work as a team to be more like Jesus. You can’t operate that way if what you really want is to win. It takes humility and meekness to build a great marriage.

I worked with a pastor many years ago, at one time, who was telling me about a problem that we were having with two couples in the church that we were serving in together. This was not a marriage issue. This was four people, actually two married couples who ran a ministry together. They were both in leadership in the ministry and they were fighting each other. These two couples were fighting each other. And my pastor friend spoke with them for hours getting all the details. Hearing both sides go round and round and round about who was wrong, each couple slinging accusations against the other. And he said something at the very end of that conversation that he shared with me. And it stuck with me for all these years of ministry. Now, that must have been 15 years ago now. And it stuck with me all this time. It’s a question that I have carried with me as a pastor because it so helpfully sobers us to the reality of our need for gospel humility. He looked at both couples and he asked, who’s going to be wrong here? Who’s going to be wrong here? Now, I want you to think about that question. The question isn’t who is wrong here. Okay, that’s not the question. If that were the question, the answer is obvious. Both. Everybody in the room. Right. Both couples. Everybody is wrong here. Everybody contributed to the problem that was being addressed there. Friends, I can’t think of a single marriage situation in my entire life, whether it’s in my own marriage or with folks that I’ve had the opportunity to counsel with, or even just when I’m an outside observer of seeing something happening in a marriage, I don’t think I have ever seen or experienced a problem that wasn’t caused in part by both the husband and the wife. It is always the case. It is always both. The question isn’t who is wrong here? The question is who is going to be wrong here? Who’s going to have the humility to own their sin, to repent, and to turn from it? Who’s going to stand on the side of I was wrong here? Who’s going to own that? And who then is going to receive that repentance with the humility of a person who knows just how often he or she has also been wrong because of a struggle with sin? Who’s going to restore a sinner like Christ restored us with gentleness. And instead of declaring themselves the winner in the case. That’s humble, Christ like servant leadership to our spouse in a time of need. You both need to serve each other this way, and if you both will serve each other this way, your marriage is going to flourish and you will have a marriage that is a model of the relationship between Christ and His church. It’s going to be a model of the gospel itself, just like it’s supposed to be. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church and gave himself up for her. That’s Ephesians 5. That’s the picture of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to celebrate and magnify the gospel of Christ. We can’t do that without gospel shaped humility. We can’t love and respect or lead it and submit in the complementary, self-sacrificial way that the Bible describes unless we clothe ourselves with humility and with meekness. Would you pray with me?