PUTTING THE GOD-IN-US TO DEATH

The Genesis story reminds us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. I will not get into a debate right here about the gender of God or even about what God looks like. It’s a moot point. No one knows. And it is usually beside the point anyway. God is God. Because we are made in God’s image and likeness, we are to be like God and what we do is to reflect what God would do were God doing what we are doing.

For when we do Godlike deeds, what we are doing is keeping God alive in us and God alive in the world around us. The problem we encounter is that we tend to do some ungodlike deeds: we call them sins. The other problem is that we sometimes take all the credit for the deeds that we do, sometimes, even, the Godlike ones, failing to give God the credit for our being able to do the good we do. Sometimes our ego gets in the way.

It often happens, as someone wisely observed, that we put the image of God in us to death. When pride takes over, there is no room for God in our lives, none at all. We become the god of our lives because we did it, not God, not someone else.

The remedy to pride, of course, is humility. Unfortunately, humility can be as false as pride is real. That is the Uriah Heep self-effacing humility that makes everyone around us ill. And there is the self-serving humility that is used as an excuse to excuse us from doing what we should be doing. And there is real, honest humility.

Norman Vincent Peale once observed that people with real humility don’t think less of themselves; they just think of themselves less. That is difficult for a person whose pride leads her/him to believe that s/he is totally or mostly responsible for whatever is being praised. It is also impossible for those who use a false humility to escape responsibility.

Real Christian humility is an acknowledgement that God is truly seen is us, in what we say and do, how we live our lives. True humility is the awareness of how fragile we are, how easy it is for us to succumb to pride, how thankful we should be for the honor of making Gid known to others by our very lives. True humility understands how easy it is for us to put the God-who-lives-in-us to death.

The truly humble person thinks of others first, realizing that each one of us is called to follow Jesus’ example: and that is to live a life of service to others. In living that life there is a priority order: first, to serve God; second, to serve others; finally, to serve ourselves: love God, love neighbor, love self. If we live our life of service in that order, it becomes difficult for us to spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves.

When a humble person thinks about Good Old Number One, that person knows that God is Number One, others are Number Two, and self is Number Three. The temptation, of course, is always to reverse the order, and, sadly, we often do.