Humility

Humility Necessary. — He gives us temporal mercies, and then we presumptuously say, “My mountain standeth firm; I shall never be moved,” We meet with the poor saints, and we begin to hector over them, as if we were something, and they were nothing. We find some in trouble; we have no sympathy with them; we are bluff and blunt with them, as we talk with them about their troubles; yea, we are even savage and cruel with them. We meet with some who are in deep distress and fainthearted; we begin to forget when we were faint-hearted too, and because they cannot run as fast as we can, we run far ahead, and turn back and look at them, call them sluggards, and say they are idle and lazy. And perhaps even in the pulpit, if we are preachers, we have got hard words to say against those who are not quite so advanced as we are. Well, mark, there never was a saint yet, that grew proud of his fine feathers, but what the Lord plucked them out by and by. There never yet was an angel that had pride in his heart, but he lost his wings, and fell into Gehenna, as Satan and those fallen angels did; and there shall never be a saint who indulges self-conceit, and pride, and self-confidence, but the Lord will spoil his glories, and trample his honors in the mire, and make him cry out yet again, “Lord, have mercy upon me,” less than the least of all saints, and the “very chief of sinners.”

Humility in Prayer. — When we come to God, our prayers are little broken things; we can not put them together; but our Father, he will hear us. Oh! what a beginning is “Our Father,” to a prayer full of faults, and a foolish prayer perhaps, a prayer in which we are going to ask what we ought not to ask for! “Father, forgive the language! forgive the matter!” As one dear brother said the other day at the prayer meeting, — he could not get on in prayer, and he finished up on a sudden by saying, “Lord, I can not pray to-night as I should wish; I can not put the words together; Lord, take the meaning, take the meaning,” and sat down. That is just what David said once, “Lo, all my desire is before thee” — not my words, but my desire.