Chilling at the cross roads along the Appalachian Trail
Humility—Evidence of Godliness
“Not to us, LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.” (Psalm 115:1, NIV)
Someone wrote to the godly Macarius of Optino that his spiritual counsel had been helpful. “This cannot be,” Macarius wrote in reply. “Only the mistakes are mine. All good advice is the advice of the Spirit of God, His advice that I happened to have heard rightly and to have passed on without distorting it.”
There is an excellent lesson here that we must not allow to go unregarded. It is the sweet humility of the man of God. “Only the mistakes are mine.” He was fully convinced that his own efforts could result only in mistakes, and that any good that came of his advice must be the work of the Holy Spirit operating within him.
Apparently this was more than a sudden impulse of self-depreciation, which the proudest of men may at times feel—it was rather a settled conviction with him, a conviction that gave direction to his enter life.
The spirit of humility is conclusive evidence of vital godliness. It enters into the essence of religion. Here the new nature eminently discovers itself. The humble spirit is that childlike, Christlike temper, which is exclusively the effect of the almighty power of God upon the heart.
A. W. Tozer and Marilynne E. Foster, Tozer on the Holy Spirit: A 366-Day Devotional (Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread, 2007).
Chilling at the cross roads along the Appalachian Trail
Humility—Evidence of Godliness
“Not to us, LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.” (Psalm 115:1, NIV)
Someone wrote to the godly Macarius of Optino that his spiritual counsel had been helpful. “This cannot be,” Macarius wrote in reply. “Only the mistakes are mine. All good advice is the advice of the Spirit of God, His advice that I happened to have heard rightly and to have passed on without distorting it.”
There is an excellent lesson here that we must not allow to go unregarded. It is the sweet humility of the man of God. “Only the mistakes are mine.” He was fully convinced that his own efforts could result only in mistakes, and that any good that came of his advice must be the work of the Holy Spirit operating within him.
Apparently this was more than a sudden impulse of self-depreciation, which the proudest of men may at times feel—it was rather a settled conviction with him, a conviction that gave direction to his enter life.
The spirit of humility is conclusive evidence of vital godliness. It enters into the essence of religion. Here the new nature eminently discovers itself. The humble spirit is that childlike, Christlike temper, which is exclusively the effect of the almighty power of God upon the heart.
A. W. Tozer and Marilynne E. Foster, Tozer on the Holy Spirit: A 366-Day Devotional (Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread, 2007).