Isn’t it amazing how many people that are ambitious criticize people in prominence of having the same appetite they do?  I think it comes here with this look into the heart of Moses.  And James, Chapter 4, verse 10, says, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He shall lift you up.”  Someone said, “I think too many people think that humility is something that we try to achieve so we can be exalted and ultimately get what we want.”

We are misunderstanding what God’s saying here if that’s the conclusion that we’re drawing.  God is not saying here, “Humble yourself, and I will make you great in the eyes of the world.  And I will fulfill all your lusts.”  James, in this same fourth chapter, if you’re there and looking at this before we get to that tenth verse.  Look at what he’s saying here in this fourth chapter.  He said, “Where do wars come from in your midst, and conflict, strife?  Isn’t it coming from your own lust?” (James 4:1).  And he goes on he says, “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.  Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world…” (verse 4).  Now what friendship is he speaking of?  You can just look up a couple of verses in the context of what’s still being said here.  He said there’s an earthly wisdom that does not descend from God, but it is carnal.  It “is earthly, sensual, devilish.  For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.  But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy, and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy” (James 3:5‑17).

So, he says, anything that’s gendering strife, anything that is self-promoting, anything that is excluding others, we can never allow in our midst.  Exclusivity, a seditious spirit of separating.  A viewing in our own hearts and minds that we might not verbalize of different classes.  Nor can we act like little junior high schoolers and say, “These are the popular kids, and these are not the popular kids.”  If that’s not an adolescent mentality...  Let’s remind ourselves, that we are accepted in the beloved, hallelujah.  We are friends of God.  We are bought with a price, this precious blood of Jesus.  That’s the worth that we have upon ourselves.  And very frankly, we don’t need anybody else to acknowledge it, but Jesus.  And if we’re not secure in that, then we are carnally minded.  We’re seeking the wisdom of the world.  We want their endorsement.

In the Lord, in the kingdom, in the church, there is not Paul, Apollos and Cephus (1 Corinthians 1:12).  In the church, there is not male or female, Jew, or Gentile (Galatians 3:28).  We all receive with humility the recognition, the gifting, and the placing of God, in our midst, and He’s done a good job; amen?  He doesn’t make any mistakes.  And it’s so tragic that while the world is caught up in body image and in this science as we talked about of beauty, wanting somehow to meet the standards and requirements of men.  We heard about how “He hath made everything beautiful in His time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  God made you just like you are.  Stop hating your body.  It's not humble.  It is not humility to hate your body, to be governed and dictated to by body image.  God has made us who we are; amen?