We were talking about this need to let the humility become practical in our lives.  And I asked the men, as it pertains to humility, how many are finding it easier for themselves to solicit wisdom from their wives, and input, as it pertains to the direction of the household?  To be able to receive from their helpmeets readily without any kind of trying to justify yourselves or blame shift or anything else?  To accept with humility, the Word of God that’s being spoken from those gifts that God has given us?  Or is there still working in the lives of many leaders of homes a haughtiness, a lordship?  We do not lord it over our families; we serve our families.  To be great is to be servant.  To be great is to prefer and to look to how we can best see our loved ones, our wives, our children conformed into the very image of Jesus.

It’s going to be done by our example, not by our teaching, our admonishing, but to be able to look to our families and say, “Follow me, as I follow Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1); amen?  The humbling aspect is so necessary to be great in the kingdom of God.  How do we really see ourselves?  We were talking in the last session about Peter and how God humbled him through a number of processes in his life so that he could stand in that latter day as Peter, the elder, Peter, the proven one.  Peter, the one who’d been refined and was able to embrace the love of God and the mercy of God.  As Jesus said, following His resurrection, “Go tell the apostles, the disciples and Peter, that I’m risen,” (Mark 16:7) praise God.

We talked about the encounter that they had in Galilee, and how the admonition came from Jesus to Peter to go and feed His sheep.  And Peter, humbling himself, followed that declaration.  In that 40-day period, as Jesus was revealing Himself to the church, He admonished them to go to Jerusalem and wait for the promise.  We see him standing boldly, on the day of Pentecost, proclaiming the resurrection of the Lord.  With boldness, he brought forth a message that brought very clear realization, that it was Israel, it was your sins that crucified Him, but God has raised Him from the dead and is establishing the church endued with power.  Aren’t you glad for what the infilling of the Holy Spirit does toward working true humility in our lives?  Amen?  That death of self is an exciting aspect.  We were going to talk a little bit about the life of Paul and in Paul’s life, of course, you read, Paul—I can remember years and years ago as I was encouraging my mother to get into the Word of God.  And I remember her, in one of our conversations, saying, “I’ve been reading through the epistles, and I really don’t like Paul.”  Now, this is an unregenerated mind reading through the epistles.  And her observation was, “He’s pretty full of himself.  He’s very sarcastic.”  These are just observations of a sinner reading through and trying to draw a conclusion of who this guy was.

We need to remind ourselves who Paul was.  Many of us forget who he was prior to his regeneration.  He was a seeker of self-glory.  He was seeking position.  He wanted to be preeminent.  He had ambition and goals, and worked at them to where he could say, “There are none of my peers that meet my commitment to this task at hand of representing Judaism and defending the law of God.”  He was pretty proud of himself and very motivated, as we know.  And we also know that upon regeneration, Paul was not automatically, instantaneously turned into the great apostle that we see.  Paul, after his conversion, had a lot to learn.  He had to go through the same experience of sanctification that you and I are going through and had the same inner battles that you and I have.  Paul had to learn to humble himself before the wisdom, the timing of God; amen?  He had this great revelation that we’ve talked about before and saw things that no one had ever seen in the spirit realm before.  The great plan of redemption that we know of was being unfolded unto him.  It was a mystery.  It was desired to be known from the ages.  It was hidden from the angels.  The prophets of old did not have that revelation, and it came in its fullness to Paul, even things that he did not pen.  We read all the great revelations here in these epistles, but Paul saw things that he couldn’t even write down.