The Lowly Walk, Part 4 B

Listen, beloved, Satan is going to tempt you to be proud in your abilities, your economics, your words that you say, your class, your strata of society, your appearance, the position you hold, your social desires, your spiritual life, your intellectual knowledge, and all of these things are going to tear right out of your hands, humility. And when you lose humility, you've lost ingredient number one in a worthy walk. In his classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie reminded his readers that when dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures motivated by pride and vanity. Yes, we're all bloated with pride, and if we don't resist that pride, Scripture says God will oppose you.

But practically, how do you battle pride? How do you make sure your relationships and your thoughts, your prayers, are all marked by humility? Find out today on Grace to You as John MacArthur continues his current series from Ephesians chapter 4, titled Getting in Step with the Christian Walk.

And now, here is John MacArthur with the lesson. Take your Bible, if you will, and let's look at Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians 4, beginning in verse 1, I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation to which ye are called, 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, as I've been saying to you, we are examining what it means to walk worthy. That is the heart of this entire second section of Ephesians.

Look what he says. All lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Listen, he's talking about the cultivation of basic attitudes. The worthy walk is predicated on the right attitudes, and Paul here is talking about you cultivating the right attitudes in the heart. Five keys to a worthy walk, five necessary keys, and they're progressive. You go from humility to meekness, and then meekness produces longsuffering, and then longsuffering produces a forbearing love, and where there's forbearing love, there is the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There's a beautiful logical progression. Now, we're still at point one, all lowliness. Beloved, it's so hard, isn't it, to be humble?

So hard. Humility, total humility is the bottom line in the worthy walk. Now, let me talk about it for a minute. I was trying to look at my own heart and say, John, what is it that tempts you in areas of pride? What are the areas that you see people being tempted?

I just want to be practical. This is kind of a word study on the concept of lowliness. Where do we fight to really be humble?

Where does Satan really hit us? And I just listed some things. Let me share them with you.

They're just practical. Where are we tempted to be proud? First of all, I would have to say there's a sense in which we are constantly being tempted to be proud about what we do. Ability pride, let's call it. You know, you're always tempted at the point of your strength, you know, to get pushed over into pride. Always.

Let's go to another area. Economic pride. Economic pride.

This is the boasting and the bragging and the parading and the throwing around of our riches, displaying them, trusting in them, exalting ourselves and our accomplishment by parading what we've gained. That's pride. This is the pride that says, look what I have. I must be somebody to have what it takes to have this.

See? So there's the pride that comes to us in our abilities. There is the pride that comes to us because of our economics. Thirdly, there's a temptation to pride in the verbal area. We call it verbal pride. Ability pride, economic pride, verbal pride. You know what this is?

This is just bragging. The Greeks had a word for it. It was the Greek word elazane. And elazane is the word used for the guy, in fact, this is an illustration from classical Greek, the guy standing on the shore looking out at this fleet of ships in the harbor in Greece. And a fellow walks up and he says, those are lovely ships.

Who do they belong to? He says, oh, those are my ships and I own those ships and we've sailed the seven seas and I've been here and there and we've carried the greatest cargo and he goes on and on with this big long deal about his fleet and the man is over awed at what he possesses. And finally the elazane walks away and the stranger is still awestruck and he says to a person standing by, did you know that all of that belongs to him? And he looks and says, oh, no, no. He says, that's the town fool. It all belongs to Mr. Sowins.

That's the word elazane. The guy who shoots off his mouth about the stuff he doesn't even own or do. A big mouth braggart.

That's verbal pride. You know, we get to the place where we say things about ourselves that aren't even true. Do you know that? You know, it's amazing how great we are the further we get away from the actual event.

Have you noticed that? How the story gets better and better year after year. Every time you tell it there's a new little wrinkle that just sort of, hm, see. You know, remember that conversation when you really stood up to your boss the first time you told it, well, you know, I did hold my own. The second time you told it, boy, I held my own.

Third time, did I ever tell that guy a thing or two. See, there's that progressive, hm, verbal pride. Boasting words, bragging words, words of arrogance, making sure you tell everybody what you want them to hear.

And it comes in two areas. We brag about what we have done. We brag about what we have done. This is something that's just a tendency in human nature to tell people what we've done.

Boy, I fight that. Everybody, you know, you come and say, well, let me tell you what I did. Well, you did that. Let me tell you.

Can you top this? 1 Samuel 2, 3, listen to Hannah. She says, Talk no more, so exceeding proudly. Let not arrogance come out of your mouth, for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed. You better keep your mouth shut. God's the one who knows what you really did. In fact, in Proverbs, the statement, Don't you talk about you. Leave that for somebody else.

Remember that? We want to talk about what we've done. Give you a good little test sometime. Try to go a whole week and never once talk about what you've done.

Try it. Try to go a whole afternoon for a starter. Don't ever talk with people around you. I don't mean sitting in a room all alone. Go a whole week without talking once about what you have done. You know, I noticed that by its absence in people. If I'm with somebody, I notice people who don't talk about what they've done.

The very absence of that says volumes. We have verbal pride in what we've done. Secondly, we have verbal pride in what we're going to do.

We do a lot of that. We boast about, well, I'll tell you, if I was there, I'll tell you what I'll do. Boy, when I see that guy, am I ever going to tell him a thing or two? Well, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Boy, I'm going to build the biggest business ever. I'm going to make a million bucks. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Boy, when I get done with this thing, I mean, anything like it in the world.

We do that. Boy, I'm going to do a number on this one. Listen to 1 Kings. This is good. And the King of Israel answered and said, tell him this, let not him that girds on his armor boast himself as he that puts it off.

Isn't that good? Don't tell the tale, folks, when you're getting the armor on. Tell it when you're getting it off. When the battle's over, you might have something to say. But we are so tempted about what we're going to do and about what we have done to brag and to boast. Psalm 12, 3 says, the Lord shall cut off all flattering lips and of the tongue that speaks proud things.

What a vivid thing. God will cut off the flattering lips. There's no reason for us to brag about what we've done or what we will do. No reason for us to have verbal pride.

There's another area I want to mention, fourth area. I don't know what to call this, but let's call it class pride. You know, the tendency is to look down on people at another level. You know, we get to a certain place in our society.

We get to a certain level of society. We just look down on people. We think of them as a sort of a lower class. You know, we don't want them in the neighborhood. We don't want to get them over for dinner.

We have a certain echelon that we've gone to, and we all fall into this. And, you know, we don't want to bring those people over. They might soil, you know, the place or something. You might have to sweep up after they leave.

You know, they have mud on their shoes. You know, we just sort of get into those little pigeon holes at all the levels. And when we have a feast or a dinner or something, it's only a certain strata who are allowed to fellowship with us. Maybe they just don't come up to our economics or our social standing or whatever.

Maybe they're not real good conversationalists. You know, I think that's a very common thing. We look down on people at another level. That's a sin. That's pride. That's pride. You've forgotten something very important, and that is that God loves poor people.

You know that? He made so many of them. He must love them. And when Jesus came into the world, He was one of them, wasn't He?

And that's the way it is. James says, he says, look, when a man comes into your church with a gold ring and fine clothes, and behind him comes a man in filthy clothes, vile raiment, and you say to the man in the fine clothes, hey, sit down here in the front seat, man, and make yourself at home. And you say to the man in the vile raiment, sit under my feet here and stay out of the way.

You are a respecter of persons. Have you forgotten, he says, James says, that it's the rich people that oppress you? Have you forgotten that it's the rich people that abuse you? Have you forgotten the royal law of love?

Listen, there is to be a recognition of equality among men. Jesus said He was no respecter of persons, nor are we to be. In the 10th Psalm and the second verse, it says, the wicked in his pride does persecute the poor.

That's true. And we may not say, well, I wouldn't persecute a poor man. You may do it by the fact that you don't let him in your world. You don't love him. You don't embrace him.

You don't take the much that you have and meet his need with it. Lots of ways to persecute the poor. Class pride, looking down on people at another social level from us. There's another kind of pride. I call it appearance pride. Now, I think people ought to dress nice.

I'm not saying that. We don't want you to look like Wanda Wallflower. We don't want you to go around, you know, like one guy said, every old barn needs paint now and then.

So, you know, we realize that there's got to be, you want to take care of yourself and there's a sense of propriety. In fact, you know, if you look too crummy, you'll call attention to yourself in a bad way. In fact, that's what the Pharisees used to do. Whenever they wanted to be really pious, they'd put on old torn shredded stuff and they'd dump ashes on their head and they'd go around looking so rotten. Everybody'd say, oh, they must be holy. They have no thought for the things of the world.

Now, that's piosity. That's sickening hypocrisy. There's a balance. But on the other hand, we are always tempted and particularly in our culture today to dress, to call attention to ourselves. We are stupid cattle led to slaughter by Madison Avenue. To buy all the junk they keep selling us, wastefully investing ourselves in needless things so that we may appear, we may parade ourselves, show ourselves off.

We want to be better than others. You know, in 1 Timothy, the Apostle Paul confronted that thing in those days when women wanted to get all dressed up. You know, you just basically wore a fancy thing all the way to the ground and so if you were going to put on any real riches, you stuck them in your hair. And so a woman let her hair grow real long and then she'd wind her hair all over the place and wind up everything she owned in it.

So it would be full of gold combs and tortoiseshell combs and stick pins and pearl things wrapped all the way through it and she'd literally have a fortune on her head. And that was the way she showed off. And so when you went to a party, you know, it wasn't a matter of comparing whether you got this dress at this place or that dress at this.

You just looked at each other's head and you knew who was the queen of the whole deal. That's why in 1 Timothy 2, 9, Paul says that women should adorn themselves in modest apparel. And it doesn't mean only modest in terms of the way it fits. It means modest in the way it costs. Modest. And not with, he says, not with braided, it means plaited hair, this flopped all over with everything in it, hair.

That's a free translation. Gold, pearls, costly array, but let this woman be adorned with good works. I don't want to pick on the women. It's the same for men too. Man, we really have to be careful about this. I don't know about you, but I want to be God's men. And I know you want to be God's men and God's women.

This is one practical way. It's so easy for us. You know, Lucifer was the most beautiful creature God ever made. And his beauty was his downfall. And God has made some of you very lovely people, lovely to look at. And that can be the greatest device that Satan can use.

Very few people can handle that. The appearance pride where we become haughty, boastful, indulgent, and we want to show ourselves off as better than other people. It's an evil thing.

Read again the third chapter of Isaiah and read verses 16 to 26. It's all there. Then there's another kind of pride. I call it power pride.

Just a couple more. Power pride. This is the pride that comes from position. This is the temptation that comes and says, look who you are.

You deserve better treatment than that. You know, everybody's got some position and everybody's tempted to use it. Whatever we are in the world, we can find somebody that we can oppress. You know, when God gives you a position of leadership, whether it's in your home or whether it's in your job or whether it's just sort of a natural recognition of leadership in a group of peers.

You know, sometimes among women, there'll be five or six women that are good friends and it's obvious that they'll look to one or two for leadership. You know, in any of those kind of situations, whether it's the business, the home, in a social group, at school, wherever it is, you can always be tempted to oppress people with an over exaggerated sense of your own importance. Pride power.

Ruling and dominating and oppressing. Saying, I deserve better than this. You do that.

Do that. Treating people as if they were machines to serve you. You know, an illustration of this that's somewhat apt comes in the 18th chapter of Revelation where you have Babylon, this ultimate system, and it says of Babylon, how much she hath glorified herself and lived luxuriously. So much torment and sorrow give her. As luxuriously as she has lived, as much as she's glorified herself, that's how much torment she gets. For she said in her heart, I sit a queen.

I am no widow. I shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death and mourning and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

Here is the system that sits and says, I am the queen. And God says, that's all. Herod, who stands up in Acts 12 on Herod day and he gives a speech about himself and the people say, oh, he is a God and he eats it up and he loves it. And the Bible says, and he was smitten by an angel of God and eaten by worms on the spot. Nebuchadnezzar in the fourth chapter of Daniel says, look at the power of my might. Look at the strength of my majesty.

Look at the kingdom that I have built. And God says, that's all for you, Nebuchadnezzar. And God says, you're going out into the grass and you're going to be turned into an animal. And he was a raving maniac. His fingernails grew like the claws of a bird in his hair, like the hair of an animal. And he was wet with the dew, living like a beast. And finally in the 37th verse, he says, I will arise and give testimony to this. You must honor God, extol God and anyone who is proud, God has the power to humble.

Got the message. We're tempted to use the position we have to lord it over people. Ability pride, economic pride, verbal pride, class pride, appearance pride, power pride.

Can I give you some closing ones? Social pride. And this is kind of like class pride, just a little different. It's demanding a certain kind of treatment. As we move up in life, we move from one strata to the next.

And once you get up the ladder, you just, you know, you've reached a certain point in life. You expect a certain kind of treatment. And if your waiter's a minute late, what's he think he's doing?

Does he think he's just treating some ordinary person? You just come up the ladder and you, the world of people who are supposed to serve you gets bigger and bigger. You want the chief seat.

You want the best place, the nicest room, the best this, the best. It's a matter of a little bit of a wrong view of what you're worthy of so often. Nothing wrong with the nice things that God may provide.

It's your perspective. In Luke chapter 14, we find that the Pharisees always wanted the chief seats. They always wanted the best places. They always wanted to sit in front.

They always wanted to lord it over everybody else and have everybody recognize who they were. So Jesus said, let me tell you a little story. When you go into a wedding and you're invited to come, don't take the chief seat because if somebody more honored comes, they'll move you out and you'll be embarrassed. So take the worst seat in the place and wait for the guy to come and say, hey, you deserve a better seat.

Come with me and then you'll be all right. And Jesus in Matthew 23 says about the Pharisees, they seek the chief seats and the chief places and they expect everybody to call them rabbi and father and master and teacher and they love the pronouncements of men. Social pride, the desire to be lifted up, the desire to attain some worldly honor and some worldly glamor. It's a temptation to be somebody in society, to really be somebody. Famous, lifted up, exalted, front seat, most important. And then there's spiritual pride.

And I just, you know that above all, this is the worst one. Jesus just literally blistered the Pharisees in the 23rd chapter of Matthew for their horrible hypocrisy. Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. He said, you hypocrites, you love the upper most places at the feasts and the chief seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplace and you want to be called rabbi, rabbi, and you want to be called master and father and yet you are inside rotten. You are the biggest spiritual phonies there are. Jesus said all throughout the gospels, He condemned the sin and loved the sinner. But in this case of hypocrites, He condemned the sin and the sinner together.

The only time He literally blasted them because they sought to be intellectual or rather spiritual when they weren't. You know, you can do that. You can look real spiritual. All you got to do is carry a notebook and a new American Standard Bible with tabs and nobody will ever know. That's right. Take a few notes.

That'll just anchor it. And we all have our games that we can play now. That isn't wrong. But what's the attitude of the heart is the issue. Don't be spiritually proud. That is the worst kind of, as if you've arrived spiritually, as if you've got it.

Well, there's one other one, intellectual pride. And I love that verse. Job says in chapter 12, after listening to all the stupid advice of his friends, he says, well, you are the people and wisdom will die with you.

Isn't that great? Well, it's too bad when you die, we'll all be ignorant forever. You are the people and wisdom will die with you. Oh, it's so easy to be intellectually smug and think, well, I've got all my theology. I've got all the answers.

I know it. Listen, beloved, Satan is going to attempt you to be proud in your abilities, your economics, your words that you say, your class, your strata of society, your appearance, the position you hold, your social desires, your spiritual life, your intellectual knowledge, and all of these things are going to tear right out of your hands, humility. And when you lose humility, you've lost ingredient number one in a worthy walk. Listen, walk worthy. And it all begins with humility.

Let's pray. Father, I'm reminded of the words of Jeremiah when he said, thus saith the Lord, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches, but let him that gloryeth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me that I am the Lord. Father, we have nothing to glory in, but that we know thee and thou art the Lord, the God of the universe. We have nothing to boast in, but in thee humble us, Father, do what must be done to break us of ourselves, that we may with all lowliness walk worthy of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. Along with ministering each day on the radio, John is also chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, both in the Los Angeles area. He's titled his current study, Getting in Step with the Christian Walk. And John, near the end of today's lesson, you warned against intellectual arrogance. You noted how a merely academic study of the Bible can cultivate pride like that of the Pharisees.

They knew the Scriptures, but it hadn't penetrated their hearts. And so with that in mind, I'm wondering, how can we be sure that our reading and our study of God's word is producing true humility and not intellectual pride? The reality is, we are prone to be proud. That is probably the most defining sin of fallen humanity. Self-promotion, self-protection, self-elevation, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction—I mean, that's what it essentially is to be a sinner. And even though you've come to Christ and you have been given eternal life and the Spirit of God dwells in you, you still have some of that residual pride in your fallen humanness. So the default position of a human being is to be proud. And the only way you can overcome that is basically to be in the hands of God, to be in the care of God who produces humility.

And I think it happens in two ways. One of the ways it happens is through trials. It is at the height of your confidence that the Lord may break you, may shatter your self-confidence and your trust in your own ability and your power to get through anything and solve any problem. In addition to that, I think the tool that you as a believer will find the most humbling is the Word of God. When you submit yourself to the Word of God, it is a humbling, humbling experience.

I suppose for some people, they don't experience that because they have a Bible, but they maybe use it just to look up a verse here or a verse there, a proof texting one thing or another, and they don't subject themselves to the depth of Scripture. What the Word of God will do, the Word of God will first of all convict you of your sin. It will convict you of your failures. It will convict you of your lack of love for the Lord. It will convict you of your self-centeredness.

It will strike blows at your pride. The Word of God is just that. It is a word from heaven intended to humble the sinner. And by that, I mean if you faithfully study the Word of God with any sense of seriousness or any depth, it is a humbling experience consistently. One of the benefits, and I can say this because I've been doing this for a long time, 60 years of studying the Bible, is that you can't avoid the humbling that the Scripture produces in your life as you expose yourself to it. And how can you have a Bible in your hand that's going to help you to be humble to start with? Get a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible, 25,000 footnotes explaining the text.

This will put you in touch with all the truth of Scripture, including that which is very humbling, and then it will lift you back up again to glory. Available in hardbound leather. And by the way, a special offer for Christmas. All MacArthur Study Bibles are on sale at 25% off the regular price, and that includes all the non-English editions, the high-end leather editions, and every MacArthur Study Bible. With the delays in shipping that we all have experienced over the last couple of years, I encourage you to place your order sooner rather than later. Yes, and friend, this makes a great gift for helping anyone understand God's Word page after page.

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One more time, GTY.org. And now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Keep in mind, Grace To You television airs this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings for Channel and Times. And join us tomorrow when John continues his look at how you walk worthy of your calling as a believer. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.