Meek Before God, Gracious to Others: James 4:11-17
Welcome to Timeless Truth with Pastor Jim Thomas. In this episode, we continue our study with James 4:11-17.
“Being a big deal is a burden. Humility, in contrast, means you don’t interpret everything in relation to yourself, and you don’t need to. It is the death of the narrow, suffocating filter of self-referentiality.”
Gavin Ortlund, Humility: The Joy of Self-Forgetfulness
“The meek man is the one who has stood before God’s judgment and abdicated all his supposed ‘rights’. He has learned, in gratitude for God’s grace, to submit himself to the Lord and to be gentle with sinners.”
Sinclair Ferguson
“The thing we would remember from meeting a truly gospel-humble person is how much they seemed to be totally interested in us. Because the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less. Gospel-humility is not needing to think about myself. Not needing to connect things with myself. It is an end to thoughts such as ‘I’m in this room with these people, does that make me look good? Do I want to be here?’ True gospel-humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation, with myself. In fact, I stop thinking about myself.”
Tim Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness
“It is a wonderfully liberating experience when the desire to please God overtakes the desire to please ourselves, and when love for others displaces love for self. True freedom is not freedom from responsibility to God and others in order to live for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves in order to live for God and others.”
John Stott
