Humble Pie...Anyone?

Have you ever had a day when multiple situations and or people pointed you in a certain direction? Today was one of those days...

First it started off this morning at church when my pastor specifically pointed out these cards that he put in the bulletins with little prayers for each day of the first week of Lent. Today we were supposed to pray for a humble heart. Next to the caption was James 4:6 (God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble). After I read it I thought to myself how it was such good advice and kind of placed it on the back-burner of my mind.

This evening I was "venting" to my little sister about a situation and she said to me,

"Emily, I know you don't want to hear this right now, but you should be the bigger person and humble yourself in this situation..."

Those words were not exactly the ones I wanted to hear when I was up on my high horse and filled with just a little bit of...dare I say the word, PRIDE? The verse I had read earlier did pop up into my mind and I backed off a tad with my anger, but of course not totally.

After I hung up I decided to catch up on some of my bible study on Esther (Beth Moore). BAM! There it was again, right in my face, word after word about honoring myself and my own "presumptions and entitlements". She had us look up verse after verse about honoring oneself and asked us to relate it to ourselves. Reading these scriptures really hit a sore spot,

Phillipians 2:3-4
"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others."

Easier said than done, I KNOW! But for some reason, I am being smacked over the head with all of this humility stuff today. Maybe I need to choke down some pride and bite back my words that are on the tip of my tongue and do the complete opposite of what I REALLY want to do! (...an especially hard thing to do when I KNOW I'M RIGHT!) This whole excercising my faith thing is a lot harder than I thought!

Humbly I'll end with this very interesting verse that also just happened to be in my homework today,

John 7:18
He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth, there is nothing false about him.