WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

PRAYER: Lord do not let pride knock on my door. Give me a humble heart that I may do all of what you require and expect of me. Fashion my life so that it is a reflection of You and what you desire.

VERSE OF THE DAY: Psalm 36:11

A few days ago God placed in my spirit to read Psalm 36:11. “Let not the foot of pride come against me, And let not the hand of the wicked drive me away (NKJV).” As I read this, I was so confused. I simply said to myself, “that pride has never been an issue in my life. How in the world does this apply to me?” I thought nothing about it again until I spoke to my Bestie. (Notice: If you read my posts I have a Best friend and a Bestie, one from childhood and the other from a later part of my life). It wasn’t until I spoke to my Bestie and we were talking about transitioning in our lives and into our future. We spoke about what we wanted to do here in the upcoming future and how we were going to go about implementing this.

Well if you know anything about me, God definitely whispering to me what He wants and expects. I on the other hand, little miss know it all, have to be either in denial or rebellious against what is asked of me. I have no idea why I am like so. I have concluded that I don’t accept change very well up front. Furthermore, it is not the change that I do not accept it is processing what is going to go on and how it is going to happen. I am the type of person that has to have everything detailed and mapped out. It has to be step by step, in order, strategically well put together before I make the decision to go with it.

I was the child growing up that never hesitated in asking the question, why, and being totally frustrated with the response of, because I said so. I cringe at the thought of those words now to this day. Now, why do I need the details? I don’t know. I haven’t a clue. All I know is that I need all of the pieces to my puzzle in order for me to see the big picture. One missing piece completely throws me off and it causes me to make decisions that may not have been so accurate if I had that missing piece to my puzzle.

So as I wrestle with the voice of God in my head. It dawned on me that in order to further transition in my life there are some things that are going to have to take place. I had previously thought about these things and have strongly taken them into consideration but guess what? You named it! Pride comes knocking at my door. Who me? The one who doesn’t deal with pride because I have nothing to be prideful about, or do I? So I began to look into the seven deadly sins, pride being one of the ones on the list. I ended up noticing that pride was also notated as vanity or being vain. Am I being vain? Do I think that I am too good to do this? What Would Jesus Do?

I have realized that in the decision that I will have to make, I normally would not place two of the same things together, let alone in the same category. This to me logically just didn’t make sense. I mean I have seen the end results when you put the two of these things together. Let’s just say it is not good. It is really bad, so that made me ask the question. Am I being prideful or am I simply afraid? So then that is when the second part of the scripture came into play. As they say, clause b, “And let not the hand of the wicked drive me away.” The fact that I had fear creep into my camp simply tells me that the enemy (with his wicked self) is lurking around somewhere just waiting to try and devour me. So now I am afraid of this decision that I have to make and generally with me this means to forget it altogether as the door of anxiety tries to open. It simply seems to spiral all downhill from there.

At this point I no longer desire to think about the matter that is at hand. I no longer want to process all of what I need to do or get done. I simply don’t desire to deal with the change of transitioning into my future like normal. So now I have went from pride, to fear, to simply saying forget it all. Now what did I solve in fixing my issue? Absolutely nothing! I am still left with trying to figure out how I am going to handle these two things together. I finally reached the answer. I will tell you how I am going to handle these two things. I must humble my heart! The antonym for pride is humility. That is just it! The answer to what I have to face means that I have to humble myself. That means when I look at myself in the mirror (vanity), I must be humble enough to say, “Self you can do this! You can put these two things together and you can make them work.”

While I wrestle with the area of humility out of being prideful, I realized that in the end humility wins. It has the victory and it will always remain victorious. I must not be so vain that I don’t take the time to humble my heart and tackle my tasks at hand in the manner that God would desire for me to do so. When we begin to look at things the way that God sees them we realize that His thoughts and ways far exceed our thoughts and ways of thinking. That means that I must approach any problem and situation with humility and not with pride or vanity. I must recognize that this is not considered one of the seven deadly sins for nothing.

So I encourage you to let go of your pride (that includes your ego) and humble your heart when approaching situations, circumstances, issues, or problems in your life. Ask yourself, “What Would Jesus Do?” Jesus would more than likely make His decisions using humility versus pride any day. So you and I too must do likewise. Meditate on this thought for today and carry it deep within your heart as you take the time to search your own heart for areas of pride. Remember, I thought that I didn’t have any areas of pride within my heart. It wasn’t until I stumbled across a certain issue that I recognized my area of pride. It took God taking some time out to whisper gently into my ear on more than one occasion about the same issue, that I realized that it was pride. I need to be humble not just in my heart but before the voice of God too, as I approach my issue and ask myself yet again, “What Would Jesus Do?”