He Scoops

To be honest, I winced at the first topic I was assigned to teach the group: humility. Great topic. But unless you want to be a hypocrite, you gotta live what you’re gonna teach, and there’s always more to learn. I groaned. Teaching on humility, I figured, is in the same category as praying for patience. It can train-wreck into a self-inflicted pummeling that comes complete with rigorous exercises. What’s inspiring about humility?

As I journeyed through a morning Psalm or any other passage of scripture for the next days, however, He wasn’t showing me stuff about humility. I kept seeing His greatness. Every. where. I. looked.

I began to write the verses out as one long, flowing thought of praise.

Your righteousness, O God, reaches to the high heavens. Who is like You? Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who alone does great wonders. The whole earth is filled with His glory! For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In His hands are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for He made it. And His hands formed the dry land. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God. Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns!” His right hand and His holy arm have worked salvation for Him. Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool; holy is He! I saw the Lord seated on His throne, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. ‘Is there any other God besides Me? Is there any other Rock? I know of none.’ And men shall speak of the power of Your awesome acts, and I will tell of Your greatness.

Wow. We could go on and on, couldn’t we? There is no end to the praise appropriate for the One who is as high as He is.

Our God is awesome.

Majestic in holiness.

Awesome in praises.

Working wonders.

And really, we could stop here, ponder and chew on this for the rest of the day, and we would have a much more accurate sense of why it is right for us to live in humility before a God this great. Perspective.

But there’s more.

Holding all of that, listen to one more verse about Him:

And she wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

What?!

The same God?

The same God who says the sea is His because He made it. The same one who stretched out the heavens, who causes the earth to tremble and the foundations to shake. Who split the sea and reigns over the nations. Who is mightier than the waves and uses the earth for a place to prop His feet.

The same God.

This same God would go so low as to enter our world as a naked newborn.

That is the definition of humility, to go low.

If ever we could say about someone, “He deserves better than that,” it would be the Lord Jesus. Yet no one went lower.

Even lower than a feed trough. As low as death on a cross, Philippians says.

And this is the hope of His humility. He went as low as anyone could go, for my sake. For yours.

That means He is always able to come under you and lift you up. To scoop something off the floor or to excavate something buried in the ground, you have to get under it.

The good news is no matter how low you are, He has gone lower.

He can come underneath you and lift you up.

Corrie ten Boom preached her sister Betsie’s parting words, “There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.”

When I think of the “height and depth and length and breadth of His love,” I think of how high and exalted He is in heaven. And how low He stooped to come underneath us so He could rescue us. He spanned the WHOLE distance!

He bears the name above every name. No one is above Him. And no one went lower. That means the highest and the lowest and everything in between is His domain.

You are within His domain. Every fragment of your life falls within His realm.

Nothing above Him. Nothing below Him. Therefore, you are never beyond His reach.

He went all the way to the bottom so He could lift us up.

That is the inspiring beauty of Christ’s humility. The Highest of All reaches across eternity and scoops us up.