Glorifying God: The Freedom of Humility

So as human beings what's stops us from giving the glory to God. What is the biggest stumbling block in our pursuit, say, of making sure God gets the glory? Well, I think it's pride. Pride stops us from wanting to give glory to God. They say that pride comes before a fall. [00:08:41] (30 seconds)  #PrideBlocksGlory

You see pride operating in work, don't you, those people that want to make a big noise about all that they have done for their company and how great they are and how the company wouldn't have survived without them. Pride says that you are the greatest. Pride encourages us to look to self, to base everything on how great we are, on how much glory we get and where does pride come from? Well 1 John 2 .16 says the following, for everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life comes not from the Father but from the world. [00:12:51] (59 seconds)  #WorldlyPrideExposed

But there is an antidote to pride. And the antidote to pride is humility. Philippians 2 verse 3 says, Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves. [00:16:48] (31 seconds)  #HumilityHealsPride

Humility is the antidote to pride. Now we have to be careful because there is a thing such as false humility, isn't there? Where we can deliberately, you know, try and play ourselves down. So we're not talking about false humility. We're talking about humility that raises others up. [00:18:01] (27 seconds)  #LiftOthersHumbleHearts

When somebody comes to your work and says, oh Jeff you did a fantastic job there. That's nice but humility says that Jeff says, yeah but it was a team effort. It was all of us or it was it was Sandra over there did a fantastic job.job on this part of it. Humility raises others up. [00:18:30] (24 seconds)  #GloryToGodAlone

Being humble means that you don't look for the glory. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that if you're humble and if you direct, people still notice what you do. But you take that pressure off of yourself of trying to make sure you are the one that gets the glory and gets the respect and strives for more and more. If you don't worry about it, God will see you right. [00:18:56] (32 seconds)  #MiraclesPointToGod

And as followers of Jesus, we want people not to say how great Living Springs is. Heaven forbid I don't want them to say how great a preacher Adam is. Or how great it is that we do Restored. Or how great it is that we support the food bank or we have a youth group or all of those things. They are good, you know, apart from the preacher. I'm trying to be self -humble here and it's not working. we want God to be glorified that's what that verse in Matthew is saying we can do good deeds we can do good things as a church but not to say how great living experience is but to say how great God is we want people to be pointed towards God [00:19:33] (51 seconds)  #FreedomInHumility

``If we look to give God the glory, when we're in church, when people say, why do you guys do that, or you're so good, and we point people to God. If we're humble in our workplaces, if we're humble in our families' lives, if we're humble in our friendships, then we become free from pride or from arrogance. We rightly say, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Imagine what freedom you will have if you are not worried about who gets the glory. And if you do think about who gets the glory, it is God that gets the glory. [00:21:22] (50 seconds)

So, how do we apply this to our lives? How do we put this into practice? Well, we give the glory to God. And if you're taking notes, can I encourage you to look at Revelation 4, verse 11? To go home and to look that up and see what that says. So we give glory to God. We need to reject pride. Satan wants us to be proud, wants us to seek the glory for ourselves. So we need to be practicing rejecting that in our lives. And we need to practice genuine humility. Humility is the antidote to pride. It points people to God. Those are the three things we need to take away today and put them into practice in order to give God the glory. [00:22:14] (64 seconds)