The Lowly Walk, Part 3

If you want to walk worthy and be blessed by God in your life, then you're going to have to walk in humility. And if you're going to walk in humility, you're going to have to be honest with who you really are. You've got to see your faults and confess your sins and deal with those things daily. But as John MacArthur has been showing you in his current study, if you're a Christian, you are not called to a life of self-confidence. Politicians are considered great leaders when they display a high view of themselves and their abilities.

Parents, teachers, and educators are encouraged constantly to remind children that they can be anything they want to be. It's clear that we live in a culture that values self-worth, that encourages you to have an unshakable belief in yourself. But as John MacArthur has been showing you in his current study, if you're a Christian, you are not called to a life of self-confidence.

Far from it. Christ calls you to live a life of self-denial, to demonstrate meekness and humility. So what are some practical steps we can take to cultivate that kind of character?

John MacArthur has answers. Here he is to continue his study called, Getting in Step with the Christian Walk. We're looking at the fourth chapter of Ephesians and talking about the worthy walk. What does it mean for a Christian to walk worthy? And we've been suggesting to you that walking worthy means living a life that matches your position in Christ.

The first three chapters of this wonderful epistle deal with the position of the believer, the last three the practice, the first three the doctrine, the last three the duty. How do we really learn to live up to who we are? How do we walk worthy? We said the word worthy has to do with balance.

It's a word that's used of equalizing a scale. We are to equalize our behavior in accord with our identity. We are to live as who we are.

This is a basic principle of the Word of God. We are to live in accord with who we are. We are to live up to our position.

Now how do we do that? How do we really walk worthy? Well the answer comes in verses 2 and 3.

Let's look at it. With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Now the way we walk worthy is in all lowliness and meekness and longsuffering and forbearing love and unity. Those five things are the characteristics of the worthy walk.

That's where it all begins. Now humility is basically the overarching principle. It's as if the first word, all lowliness, really encompasses the remaining four. They all sort of fit in and yet they're different and there's a progression. Where there is all lowliness, there will be meekness and there will be then longsuffering, resulting in forbearing love with the end result of unity.

So there is a sense in which they are tied together almost like synonyms in a way, although there are shades of difference, and then there is also a sense of progression. But the key to the whole thing is this concept of humility. Now humility is a very elusive thing and we want to talk a lot about humility, but sometimes we really don't understand it. Just exactly what is humility? You know, it's that thing that when you've finally gotten it, you've just lost it.

It's very elusive. When you finally say, I am now humble, you just forfeited it. So maybe it's when you don't know you've got it that you've really got it. But that isn't always true either because some of us know we haven't got it because we know we're proud.

It's a very elusive reality and yet it's a very necessary thing. You can see here that it is at the heart of the worthy walk. If you're to walk worthy, humility must be a reality in your life. Now Jesus came into the world as the High Exalted King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He came exalted above any human being who had ever lived. And yet the Apostle Paul says in Philippians chapter 2 that He humbled Himself, that He was found in fashion as a man, that He took upon Him the form of a servant and humbled Himself. So even the Lord Jesus Christ was humble. In Matthew 11 29 He said, For I am meek and lowly in heart.

The exalted Lord Jesus Christ, meek and lowly and humble. He was born in a stable. He never had a place to lay His head. He possessed no property. He owned only the garments on His body. He was buried in a borrowed tomb. He was always a stranger.

His only home was the Mount of Olives where He would retire in the evening in quietness with the Father. He was humbled. The One who, as the song said, left the ivory palaces and came into a world of woe, humbled Himself. And He set a standard for us because in 1 John 2 6 John says, He that saith He abideth in Him ought to walk even as He walked. So however He walked is how we're to walk. And if He walked in humility, that's the way we are to walk. But that's foreign to our world. Our world is not a world that accepts humility. Our world is a world that exalts pride. We don't hear great talks about humility. In fact, in our society, as in all of society that is generated by Satan, all of human nature throughout all of history has looked down on humility as weakness. As infirmity, as something to be despised, something ignoble. We think of the humble person as the proverbial Casper milk toast who's afraid of his own shadow, who's the inevitable Mr. Peepers complex. What is true humility?

Is it that? We like to talk about the things we're proud of. You hear people say that constantly. Well I'm very proud to say, you know, just go to a luncheon sometime and you'll hear it about 50 times. We're so proud of so-and-so. Well I'm proud of this. Well I'm certainly proud. This is a part of our society.

Ostentation, boasting, parading, demanding, exalting. We're forever and a day pinning awards on everybody and his uncle. You know, I look at my kids and from the time my kids have been little enough to pick up a baseball bat or throw a ball, they've been stacking up trophies to the point where it's almost absurd. Everybody gets one, you know? Just everybody.

They pass them out like peanuts. I have a box in the garage with all the broken trophies that came off the shelf in the earthquake. My wife said it was the greatest day at our house. She's right. You know, pride was the first sin ever committed, you know that? The very first sin ever committed was pride. And it was committed by an angel by the name of Lucifer who decided that he would exalt himself above God. Read it in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, the whole story is in both of those texts. I will, I will, I will, I will, I will, he said five times and once God said, No, you won't.

Throw him out of heaven. Pride was the first sin. I will be exalted.

I will lift myself. And in Proverbs 11, 2, the Bible says, When pride cometh, then cometh shame, but with the lowly is true wisdom. In Proverbs 16, 5, it says, Everyone that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord. In Proverbs 16, 18, pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. In Proverbs 21, 4, it says, A high look, that's the external, a proud heart, that's the internal, is sin. Humility is always the virtue of the righteous and pride is always the mentality of the unrighteous. And it's a grief to the soul of anybody who knows Jesus Christ or should be to see Christians engaged in pride, to see ourselves engaged in it. I'll never forget, we had a meeting at my house one night and all the seminary students were there. I was sitting on the fireplace and sitting on the hearth and talking and they were asking questions and one of the students, very serious, said to me, he said, John, he said, How did you finally overcome pride? Isn't that great? Such naive. How did you finally overcome...well, it was two years ago when I finally licked it.

Yes, and it's never been a problem since then. So wonderful to be constantly humble. In fact, it's just glorious. How did you finally overcome pride?

Folks, I don't know how to tell you this. I have not finally overcome pride. That's a battle every day, isn't it?

Every day. Satan keeps that one at you all the time. But just so you get God's perspective, look with me back at Isaiah chapter 2, verse 11. Well we better go back to verse 10, Enter into the rock and hide in the dust for fear of the Lord and for the glory of His majesty. Listen, when you start comparing yourself with God, you better get under a rock.

You're a bug in comparison. You better crawl in the dirt somewhere when you see the majesty of God. When you're compared with the glory of majesty of God, you better get under a rock.

Watch. The lofty looks of man shall be humbled. The haughtiness of men shall be bowed down. The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.

Now people, here's the crux of the whole issue. Pride is a sin because it is the sin of competing with God. Pride lifts me up and steals from God His glory and God says, I will not give my glory to another. And so He says, You'll be bowed down and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. God alone is worthy of exaltation. God alone, I'll say it again, there's nothing you've ever done, there's nothing I've ever done, there's nothing we ever will do that's worthy of glory, that's worthy of honor in comparison to God. We are a worm.

We ought to get in the dirt and get under a rock. That's what He's saying. For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon everyone, verse 12 says, who is proud and lofty, upon everyone who is lifted up and he shall be brought low. And here He uses metaphors to speak of proud people. Upon all the cedars of Lebanon that are high and lifted up, all the oaks of Bashan, all the high mountains, all the hills that are lifted up, upon every high tower, upon every fortified wall, upon all the ships of Tarshish and all the pleasant pictures and the loftiness of man shall be bowed down and the haughtiness of men shall be made low and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.

You see? He is simply saying that God is going to judge pride. He's going to judge haughtiness, loftiness. Setting an exaltation on man is going to be judged. And you know, dear Isaiah the prophet confronted this in the nation Israel in a very, very evident way.

The people paraded like we do in our society. You know, our society is so proud and we all can get engulfed in that. You know, we want to get the best clothes, the fanciest clothes, the fanciest car, the fanciest house, the nicest stuff and we are appealed to all the time sensually to do that. And we exercise our pride and the reason we buy those things and the reason we have those things is so that we can be better than somebody else.

So much of the time that's true. Now there are things we need. There are things we need to accommodate our families and our needs and our travel and all of those kinds of things. But there's a fine line between what we need and what we want that's better than something else for the sake of self-exaltation, self-creature comfort and having it over somebody else. And you know, as we begin to get things at a certain level, then we begin to despise the people beneath our level and aspire to the ones above us constantly. This is pride, the wrong perspective. It manifested itself in Isaiah's day in chapter 3 verse 16 in some very specific ways. And here he confronts the daughters of Zion, the women in Israel. He says they are haughty, they walk with stretched forth necks. Now that's more than good posture, that's just that cockiness, that lording it over people by your look. They walk with wanton eyes and actually the Hebrew says painted eyes.

Now don't panic, ladies, that's right here in the Bible. It says they walk with stretched forth necks and painted eyes, walking and mincing as they go. It's just the idea that they strut, see. These women were so proud and boastful, look at me strutting with myself all dolled up and they even put bells on their feet.

That's in case the sight wasn't enough to attract you, the noise would. And to find out what happens in verse 17, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion and uncover their secret parts. God will drop His sword right down the middle of them.

Pretty serious. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling anklets, their headbands, their crescents like the moon. Apparently they were wearing some crescents around their necks shaped like a half moon. The pendants, the bracelets, the veils, the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, the amulets, the finger rings, literally in Hebrew, and the nose rings. Now I notice that's even coming in our society. Now I see women with a ring through one of their nostrils. The festival robes, the mantels, the cloaks, the handbags, the hand mirrors, the linen wrappers.

That has to do with undergarments, special undergarments. And the hats or turbans and the veils. Now you say, oh, I got it. In verse 18, in verse... Well, this is definitely a picture of an attitude, not necessarily saying that anybody who has any of these things has that attitude. But the people who have that attitude manifest it in the overabundance of these kinds of things. There's a loss of simplicity. There's a loss of propriety. There's a godliness. There's an overdone-ness, if that's a word. And it shall come to pass in verse 24 that instead of sweet fragrance there shall be rottenness. Instead of a girdle, a rope.

Instead of well-set hair, baldness. Instead of a robe, a girding of sackcloth and branding instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall by the sword.

They aren't without guilt either. You see, here was a society that was a whole bunch of show-offs that were lording it and exalting themselves and fixing themselves up to attract attention to themselves, when the fact of the matter is everyone in that society should have been simply an instrument to point to God, the God of Israel. At the end of the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah talks of something of the same attitude in verse 31. Behold, I am against thee, O thou most proud, saith the Lord God of hosts, for thy day is come, the time that I will punish thee and the most proud shall stumble and fall and none shall raise him up and I'll kindle a fire in his cities and it shall devour all round about him. And the Old Testament closes with the little book of Malachi, a tremendously important book. The fourth chapter, the last chapter of the Old Testament begins this way. For behold, the day cometh that shall burn like an oven and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble.

And the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. When you come to the New Testament, you hear James in chapter 4 verse 6 say, God giveth grace to the humble, but God resisteth the proud. And you hear John say, For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world and the world passes away and the lust thereof. Pride God is against. Humility God is for. Humility is always, as I said, the virtue of the righteous. Throughout the Scripture, we don't even have time to begin to touch base with every Scripture dealing with humility.

But listen to a few. Proverbs 15, 33 says, Before honor is humility. Proverbs 22, 4, By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor of life. Proverbs 27, 2, Let another man praise thee and not thine own mouth.

It's pretty practical. And if you ever get the feeling that you're hot stuff, Isaiah 51, 1 said to that same generation of people in Israel, Look to the rock whence you are hewn and the hole of the pit from whence you've been dug. Have you forgotten where you came from? If you have any tendency to be proud, go back to Ephesians chapter 2 verses 1 to 3 and read about yourself being dead in trespasses and sin, walking according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that worketh in the sons of disobedience. Read that you there were guided by the lust of the flesh and of the mind and the desires of the flesh were the things that motivated you and you were by nature a child of wrath. Remind yourself of who you are when you want to be proud. Humility is a basic ingredient for all spiritual blessing. Before any honor is humility. The Proverbs are right. God will only bless the humble.

You know, I think sometimes that we forget how important this is. Every sin, I don't care what it is, has as its root pride. Because all sin is a defiance of God and His right to be God and to have holiness.

All sin is pride. And I really think that sometimes we grapple on the periphery and never deal with the issue. For example, there are families that have problems. Their kids are problems. They have problems. Mom and dad, husband and wife have problems.

And maybe the guy has a problem at his work and there are people with just a lot of problems and sometimes they'll come in and they'll want to, how do I do this? Give me a better method to reach my family or how do I construct a family devotion or how do I do this? Or how can I get my family fixed up when the real issue is just pride? Because there'll never be unity in the family. There'll never be honor in the family. There'll never be the grace of life in the family.

There'll never be happiness in the family until there's humility in the person involved. I don't care what you've done for the Lord. I don't care if you've founded churches, founded missions, had great ministries, gone to church all your life, read your Bible, prayed. If you've never walked in humility, you don't know what it is to walk a worthy walk. That's what God's saying to us because the worthy walk begins with all lowliness. You can't even be saved without humility. In Matthew chapter 18 Jesus said, Except you become as a little child, you count it into the kingdom of heaven.

And then He said, You must humble yourself as this little child. You can't even be a Christian unless you come in humility until you come to God and say, I'm a sinner and I deserve nothing and I'm worthy of nothing. You can't be saved. You can't go into God's presence and say, God, it's me, you know, the one you've heard so much about.

Here's my press release. I have my master's degree, my doctor's degree and I have a benevolent merit award from the... No, you approach God in humility as a sinner. That's the only way to be saved. There is no other way in to the family of God and there's no other way to walk once you're in there. That's the only way.

That's the only standard. In Luke chapter 18 and I think it's verse 13, I'll read it to you. You don't need to look it up. And the tax collector, remember, the publican and the sinner in the temple, standing afar off would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven but smote on his breast saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, said Jesus, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone that exalted himself shall be abased and he that humbleth himself shall be... What?

Exalted. Humility is the standard of salvation. Now let's go back to Ephesians and look at the text itself. We know now that the Bible emphasizes humility as over against pride. And people, it isn't easy in our society, really it isn't. You know, I see...I see and I look at our society and I see the temptation in my own life to just continually pile up stuff that exalts me, that lifts me up, you know, having a better this and a better house or a better car or better clothes or more recognition or fancier stuff of one kind or another to sort of put me up. And then you get the mentality that starts looking down and despising people underneath you.

So wrong. And you forfeit God's blessing. You don't walk worthy.

You're not going to know His blessing. So He calls us to the worthy walk in verse 1. He says, I beseech you, really, I the prisoner of the Lord, that you walk worthy of the vocation to which you call. That's the call to the worthy walk. I want to share with you the characteristics of the worthy walk. The characteristics of the worthy walk. Now I want you to realize something as we look at this verse 2 and 3. He says, now you're going to walk worthy and all of us are saying, okay, I want to walk worthy how?

He says, all right, here's five ways, five keys. Lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing love and unity. Those are the five characteristics of a worthy walk. And the goal of it all, verse 3, is the unity of the Spirit.

Let's look at one, the first step. With all lowliness, with all lowliness. The word passai in the Greek means all, total. And the word simply means total humility. I mean nothing else, no exception, total humility. Not just lowliness, but all lowliness. In everything, in every relationship, in every attitude, in every act, in every deed, you always manifest lowliness. So to begin with, true humility springs from self-awareness.

People, you've got to be honest with who you are. You're never going to know humility. By the way, I'm talking about a worthy walk. If you want to walk worthy and be blessed by God in your life, then you're going to have to walk in humility. And if you're going to walk in humility, you're going to have to be honest with who you really are.

You've got to see your faults and confess your sins and deal with those things daily. You're listening to John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, as he explains how you can walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. It's part of John's series titled, Getting in Step with the Christian Walk. Now, John, with so much writing on how we live as representatives of Christ, it's comforting to realize just how comprehensive Scripture is in its instructions. When we talk about the sufficiency of Scripture, this is it.

There really is no spiritual challenge, no difficulty that isn't addressed head-on by the Bible. Well, of course, because God has given us His Word, and He declared to us that this is the once-for-all delivered to the saints' faith. In other words, it's complete. And the book of Revelation closes by saying, if you add anything to it, it shall be added to the plagues that are written in it.

If you take anything away from it, the same thing is going to happen. It is complete. It is the complete revelation of God that contains everything we need for life and godliness. It's all there between those covers. But to access it is the issue. And to help you with that, I just want to mention again the MacArthur Study Bible.

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Something else to keep in mind. Our website, GTY.org, has all of the messages from John's current study, Getting in Step with the Christian Walk, and they're free in MP3 and transcript format. In fact, all of John's sermons, 3,500 total, from nearly 54 years of his pulpit ministry, all of them are free at our website, and you can download those sermons anytime at GTY.org. And to keep you up to date on the latest news from Grace To You, find us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV Channel 378, or check your local listings, and then be here Monday when John looks at the crown jewel of Christian virtue, humility, and how you can grow stronger in it. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.