Humility and Gifts (part I)

By Odon Bulamba (summary only - 04 May 2007)

Romans 12: 3&4

So the small verse is telling us to not think of ourselves as being superior or higher than others and in order to serve God, the first thing we have to do is to humble ourselves. Whoever will try to humble themselves, God will raise him up. If you don't want to humble yourself, if you think it is a humiliation you have to be 100% sure that God will never use you. You can have gifts and all the ministries but God will never use you and you won't have the opportunity to use them if you don't know how to humble yourself.

Sometimes to humble ourselves is hard because it makes our physical body to feel like this isn’t where we are supposed to be. We feel like we are supposed to be somewhere above, and we ask ourselves, why does God try to push us down?

Sometimes someone can do something wrong against you. Let me say Immanuelle will fight against Zoe for an example, and maybe Immanuelle was right and Zoe did something wrong against Immanuelle, and after fighting Catherine will tell her daughter Immanuelle go and say sorry and Immanuel will say no. She is the one who started she is the one who fought against me, but Catherine will push Immanuelle and tell her you must do it. She'll be forced to go, but in her heart she will feel it is not fair the way she is pushed.

When you serve God, this is how it mostly works. If you really, really want to discover what humility means you will find God is pushing you exactly like in this example and you will think it’s not fair because sometimes you are right but God wants you to push you to be lower.

Once, Jesus told his people whenever someone smacks you on the left side, you have to also give the right one. And that example is really tough to talk about, that is easy to think about but it is not too easy to practice. That is harder. Imagine someone becoming so angry that they slap you. Will you easily say, “thank you” and ask for the second one? Usually we prefer to become angry back and even multiply the anger so it’s bigger than the person attacking you. Once we reach that level, it’s very difficult to forgive and you will find it humiliating what they did to you. I think that it won't be too easy. This is where you must not revenge and you must thank God for what happened. And that's the hardest thing.

One day there was a pastor praying for people, one after another and when he reached a certain man, that man punched him in the face and then said, “pray for me now”. The pastor had a choice to call the police, to run away or to pray. He humbled himself and prayed for the man and the man gave his life to Christ.

Humility is the hardest thing to do and if you are not ready to be humble you will never be able to serve God. If you are not yet humble, then the first step is to ask God to teach you how to be humble. If you are not humble, God will be far from you because God likes all the glory and He doesn’t like it if we take all the glory instead of him and because God is a God of order. God is not a God that we must make deals with or make compromises with, He gives orders and we must answer yes.

3/4 of Christians don't have humility and that's why the Church is in a very deep sleep. That is the main reason for the church today not to feel the power of the Holy Spirit and that is why the church today doesn't experience miracles.

You can ask yourself today, am I really humble, and the answer will come straight, “yes you are”, or “no you are not”.

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