The last four blogs were meant to show a balance between how we think of ourselves. We must realize that God loves us but doesn't need us, and we must realize that we have a extraordinary amount of potential, but others do as well.
I tend to be a very simple person, and these four blogs are entirely too much for me to handle. I can't keep that much information in my head all the time. So I want to summarize these four in a way that may help make the information readily accessible on a daily basis.
What does all this look like from the inside? What are we supposedly trying to be, and feel, and think on the inside? I think we could sum up all four of the previous blogs into one word: humility.
Again, I find myself going back to C.S. Lewis for the answer. This next quote is from 'Screwtape Letters'. And for those of you who don't know what that is, let me briefly explain to avoid confusion.
'Screwtape Letters' is a book of fictional letters written by an older demon to a younger demon on how to tempt humans in general and Christians in particular. So everything is written in reverse. The Enemy refers to God, and things that we would be horrified at, they love. The brackets will be my additions to help clarify.
"You must therefore conceal from your patient [the human] the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be....The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into a heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in and effort to achieve the impossible."
The idea C.S. Lewis is trying to get across is this: God doesn't ask us to believe lies. Where have we gotten the idea that humility involves denying your own talents. Where is that found in the Bible? That is like the servant who buried his talent. He was in denial.
"The Enemy [God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbors talents...."
The key is SELF-FORGETFULNESS, not self-deprivation; being able and willing to enjoy our own talents as much as another's. We should just be happy that GOOD IS BEING DONE. Who actually does the good, whether it is us or another, doesn't really matter. Just the simple fact that good has been done is adequate enough to make us joyful.
"His [Gods] whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man's mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or great poet and then forgot about it, than he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one."
Again, the central theme here is one of self-forgetfulness. That is what humility is all about. Not worrying about who you are so much as who He is and what you can do for others.
May God help us to be truly humble.
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