It Takes Humility to Receive

I've discovered both for myself and for those I have worked with, that humility is a necessity if we want to change. Living in humility means that our pride is put away (nailed to the cross) and we are ready to receive whatever the Lord wants to show us or do in us. Not only that, but we must be willing to act on it and live it out in obedience. So much pride had to be bled out of me to be able to see this clearly. So the Lord took me on a Dark Night journey. The Dark Night is a term coined by St. John of the Cross in the 1500’s. Lots of people misuse the term to describe a time of sadness or depression, but that is not really what it is. In the Dark Night the Lord removes His manifest presence and strips away any functional way that you once connected with Him, reading your Bible and praying and all other ways you felt connected to God instead feel quite useless and dead. This leaves you alone with yourself and feeling abandoned by God. Of course, He never leaves or forsakes His beloved ones, but nonetheless you FEEL like He has left you. He uses this ‘tool’ to test and to purge sin. For me, He used this to purge pride out of me so that I could receive the blessings He wanted to give me. Pride is the enemy of real healing… and I was full of it from years of working hard at protecting myself. I felt I needed to protect myself from all the trauma I had felt in my childhood, from shame, and from anything I deemed a threat whether it was or not. Pride feels like it is needed when we want to protect ourselves but the Lord knew I needed to learn to receive His protection, His healing, and do it His way. If I didn’t I was going to become a version of myself that only appeared to love Jesus but never really knew how to live in His love or to give it to others. That sounds really gross to me as I type it, I never ever want that.

I had asked Him to use me however He wanted to, but more so I wanted to be so close to Him. My heart longed and still longs even aches to be in His presence. One day, I read a prayer by Andrew Murray that talked about being taken to the grave and dying with Jesus so that we could be raised to new life in Him and I prayed that prayer and asked God to do that in me. He answered, but He did not answer the way I thought He would. He answered with the Dark Night … and His silence descended on me like a ton of dirt and I felt buried and I was left choking on the driest dirt on earth. I had no idea what was happening at the time … it took the Lord a year and a half to let me in on what He was up to. But even in the silence I knew that it was a test. Am I going to turn away and blow off God, or am I going to let Him do whatever He wants to kill off my flesh? In the years previous to the Dark Night, I had had such a grand-overflowing-full taste of God that nothing was going to keep me from Him. I didn’t care how crappy and awful I felt, missing God, and seeing my sin bubble up in such horrible waves…I would come out on the other side still seeking Him with all my heart. And so I did. In that process though I learned the absolute necessity of learning and then maintaining a posture of humility so that I could receive what God wanted to give. What He wanted to give was real freedom from huge patterns of sin. I was buried under it and it was keeping me from real fellowship with Him. 

While I was learning my need for humility I had to learn to receive from people around me who had important things to say that I was unable to hear at first. I had declared and appointed myself the only expert on me. And though that is true to a point … The Lord knows me better than I know myself and I needed to trust that some friends and mentors were sent by Him to help shepherd me. That doesn’t mean that all people were equally helpful… but there were some who could by the power of the Spirit speak into me in ways that I could not have gotten on my own. Outside discernment is monstrously helpful! We need other trusted godly voices listening to the Holy Spirit on our behalf. Their outside perspective sees things that we simply can’t because we are stuck in the middle of our sin and messes. 

We also need humility to be able to receive correction and the truth. Not just from outside counselors but directly from the Lord. This has been a major problem in the church in recent years … I have watched so many from afar and up close who are unwilling to admit their faults and unwilling to repent from not only the gross sin in their lives, but also the mundane sin that we often excuse. Jesus died though so that you and I might be free to walk in holiness with Him, not so that we can stay stuck in it! He actually died to set us free from the power of sin (Romans 6:11) so we do NOT have to live under its power anymore. But to come out from under it takes a lot of confession and repentance and that takes a lot of humility. This is true when it comes to deliverance too (the casting out of demons). Much of the work is coming out of agreement with the lies of the enemy, confessing and repenting to get rid of those footholds, and then finally casting the enemy out. Realigning with the Word, and letting God correct, tweak, lead, and lead into more correction, confession and repentance is a beautiful gift… but it takes humility to keep pressing in and letting God do things His way. This is the work of healing and transforming the mind so that it conforms to God and His Word.

It also takes humility to let yourself be loved and learn to live in your God-given, Jesus-bought identity. Sometimes this part is harder for people to grab hold of, because often people think humility is equal to self-deprecation. It simply isn’t. Self-deprecation is just a backwards form of pride. Pride is spending too much time looking at yourself, whether it is good or bad. Many people (even Christ-followers) spend their time wallowing in lies about who they are. God wants to heal those things too. He wants to teach you to stand in His freedom, and help you revel in His love. He thinks you are worth dying for and He wants you to recognize that. Humility is really about coming to view yourself rightly, to see yourself through the eyes of Jesus. And man, does He love you. He wants you to know it, but also to experience it! Ephesians 3:14-21 says this so beautifully, “May it be the bedrock where their lives are founded so that together with all of Your people they will have the power to understand that the love of the Anointed is infinitely long, wide, high, and deep, surpassing everything anyone previously experienced. God, may Your fullness flood through their entire beings.” If you haven’t spent time there in a while, ask God to flood your soul with His love like this! 

Let me share a story from many years ago about my friend Wanda (not her real name!). She was a gal who came to me because she was stuck in a terribly unhealthy relationship. She didn't want to be in it, but didn’t know how to get out. I myself was in a very hard place at that time and had very little energy to give but I knew the Lord wanted me to help her. I would wake up each day she was coming and cry out to God, “I need You to show up for her, because I have nothing to offer her!” The Lord was so immensely gracious. Just as I would be praying that, Wanda was ready. She was full of humility and ready to receive whatever the Lord wanted to give. She was desperate like the woman with the issue of blood, who knew that she just needed to get to Jesus and then all would be made right. Since we both were so desperate to have God meet us, man did He ever meet with us! It was like an explosion of His love and provision each time we met. The Lord would fill my mind with questions to ask, and I would know her answers before she spoke them. He led and directed through every bit of her story and every place He wanted me to speak the truth. Wanda received and received and received and I watched her confess, repent and come into alignment with God’s Word. I watched her come to understand her identity in Christ. I watched the Lord transform her from a caterpillar into a butterfly. It was magical, it was the work of the Holy Spirit. This work that I originally had no energy for became one of the most profoundly impacting stories of my life, because I saw what God can do when we completely bow down to Him. His love pours out like crazy in that place. That’s the power of receiving in humility. That’s where God can get so much done in us.

If you feel stuck in the same crazy sin pattern again and again… perhaps the place you need to start is by welcoming the Holy Spirit to come and show you all the ways that you are blocking His work in you with pride. Ask Him where your pride is pushing Him away. Ask Him where your pride is at work ‘protecting’ you. Ask Him to correct wrong beliefs and to teach you how to come into alignment with His Word. Ask Him what it looks like to confess and repent with another person and to begin the process of purging so you can be free. And ask Him what it would be like to be free and walking in your true identity in Christ…. And receive the truth and learn how to walk in it. 

I had to learn the hard way, through the Dark Night, to receive the good things the Lord wanted to give me. Not everyone has to do it like I did. But I do believe that everyone needs to learn to receive with humility. That is the starting place for walking into true transformation. I didn’t want to stay stuck in the same sin year after year… and I wanted to experience more beauty and fellowship with the Lord. And now here I am years later grateful for the Dark Night and all that the Lord has taught and purged from me, because it has given me so much meat to share with others. He and His gifts are worth dying to self, dying to pride. Press in and see all that He wants to do in you, His goodness and grace will hold you as you release everything to Him.