Moses at the Burning Bush and The Context of Humility

By Art Katz

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Table of Contents

Moses at the Burning Bush and The Context of Humility

Table of Contents

Moses at the Burning Bush

The Context of Humility in the Cosmic Purposes of God

Moses at the Burning Bush

Now Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of the bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed.

So Moses said, “I must turn aside now, and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”

When the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush, and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3:1-4)

“And now, behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to Me; furthermore, I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians are oppressing them. Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt” (vs. 9-10).

This is more than just an episode out of the life of Moses. There is something here for our deepest consideration, and I hope it will be for some as much a confrontation as it was for Moses. We have as much a requirement to be met by the God of the burning bush and be sent by Him to deliver a people out of bondage. There is unquestionably a second ‘Exodus’ ahead for Israel. It will not be confined to a single nation, Egypt, as alluded to here. ‘Egypt’ is all the nations into which Israel will be sent, and she will need to be brought out in the purpose of God by someone who will come to her out of God and His authority as deliverer.

There is no prospect of our being sent at all in any true sense unless we are first willing to be prepared by God in the wilderness, just as Moses himself was. The fact that Moses was Jewish, a Levite, and a prince in Egypt counted nothing as qualification for being the deliverer of a nation. However impressive things were humanly, he had to be emptied of them in order to be qualified. It is a remarkable paradox, that in order to be sent of God, we have to be emptied first of our qualification.

It may not seem as though present-day Israel or world Jewry are experiencing oppression under a ‘Pharaoh.’ In fact, things have never been more comfortable and affluent right now. It will not long remain so. Let this message be put on a shelf and taken down at a later stage when things begin to unfold as we anticipate. This people will be exceedingly oppressed worldwide in a final attempt of ‘Pharaoh’, who is the statement of Satan, to extinguish or annihilate them from the face of the earth. Their restoration at the end of the age to the purposes of God signals the release of the Lord from heaven. He is contained in the heavens awaiting the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began, namely, that this people would be restored in the Last Days out of ages long apostasy. A surviving remnant of them, which will stand for the entire nation, will be the focus of the theocratic Kingdom of God in the earth.

There is only one government that is true government and that is the government of God. It is called THEO-cracy (The rule of God). It is the coming rule of Jesus as King. He can only rule from one place the throne of David, on the holy hill of Zion, which is in the city of Jerusalem. Not the Jerusalem that is now, but the one that will come when both it and the people who occupy it will be restored of God by a process that will take place throughout all nations in a remarkable sifting of a Last Days’ trial and tribulation. This is not unlike them being brought into the Land the first time by a deliverer named Moses (through a wilderness trek that not many survived). There will be a second Exodus.

The critical question that faces the church is whether there is a ‘Moses people’ being framed and formed in the hidden part of the desert, who can receive the call of God to be sent, to bring Israel out of the clutches of ‘Pharaoh’ that they might be brought in. If there is any unsavory and unwelcome place from which charismatics shrink, it is the backside of the desert. Mt. Horeb is the Mount of God. And that mount is only found in one place the backside of the desert. In other words, you never find it on the front side. The front side is where the ‘religious’ action is, with all of its glass cathedrals and movements and excitement and glittery personalities. The backside is obscure, dreary, hot, and full of reproach. It is for failures. It is for those who have taken a shot at it and missed, and have left behind the testimony to their failure one dead Egyptian in the sand. Moses was full of well-meaning intentions, but well-meaning intentions will never be the instrument of God. God may even allow you to be moved by the knowledge of the plight and distress of His people that you might act out of your own human response. But our humanity has no place in this. God wants to emphasize, “I have heard the cries of this people now, therefore, I send you.” You don’t go because you know their condition; you go on one basis alone, and that is that God has sent you.

Do you have an appreciation for the word ‘sent’? Do you know that the word ‘sent’ is at the heart of the word ‘apostolic’? If we dismiss the deepest meaning of that word ‘sent’, then we take away the thing apostolic also. And if we remove apostolic we remove everything. Apostolic means power and authority. It means something in keeping with the very character of God Himself, who is also the High Priest and Apostle of our confession. To be sent is the ultimate thing; but God does not send just any old body. He sends that one who has been fashioned at His hand after a profound period of forty years of wilderness testing. The one who is content to be lost to obscurity and hidden-ness is the one who is devoid even of his own ambition to save his people until his God encounters him out of a burning thorn bush. The word ‘Horeb’, the Mount of God, literally means ‘desolate.’ It comes from the root word meaning ‘to be parched through drought, to destroy, make waste, dry up, and make something utterly waste. What a mount! What a forbearing mount! That is the place where God waits to meet His man. In fire! We all need to be eternally grateful that Moses turned aside to see.

If Israel had not been brought out of bondage through a man who was sent, because he turned aside to see, Israel would have perished in her captivity and would never have entered the Land. The whole genealogical development that resulted in the birth of the Messiah would not have taken place. One man turned aside to see. God called to him out of the midst of the burning bush. I wish I had the ability to say why turning aside to see is so remarkably important. Not everyone will. Not everyone has the stomach to look into something that burns and is not extinguished. It usually signifies some troubling thing that we would just as soon avoid and make as if we did not see it. We would go on our way. It might constitute for us not only an interruption but also an intervention in our lives. It would wreck our own intentions. Have you ever done that? Have you ever turned away so as not to see and therefore not be accountable for the sight? You had a prickly and uncomfortable feeling that if you turned aside to see, it might have made a requirement of you that you were unwilling to accept.

I very rarely quote Rabbis, but I have to say that a rabbinical interpretation of this verse is full of insight. What they say is that when one turns aside to see a sight of this kind, one will never be the same again. It has a certain ultimacy about it. The concept of burning brings with it a sense of judgment and of a God who is a consuming fire. Burning heat and a God in the midst of it is a strange kind of apparition. It has got to upset things as we understand them, and if you have seen that, you never turn back to see things as you have seen them before. Our God will only send those who will first encounter Him in the revelation of His burning glory. If we do not glimpse Him in His glory, we cannot serve Him rightly. We will have some other motive, some flaky thing, some personal ambition that has to do with our religious success thereby corrupting and spoiling everything. There is only one true motive for pure, godly service and that is to have but one jealousy, passion and motive, namely, the glory of God. But if you do not glimpse the glory, then how shall it be your motive? This is so much a pattern for us. It is not just a historical account of what happened to Moses. By it we should know what could happen to us. We stand relative to Israel today in the same proximity as Moses did then.

There is a drama about to break of a global kind, and somehow the issue of Israel’s deliverance is the focus of God and a church chosen not only for that release but for the confrontation with the powers of darkness represented by Pharaoh. There is a difference between a man who murders an Egyptian, leaves him in the sand and flees in panic when he is discovered, as against a man who is sent in the authority of God to confront Pharaoh himself. Until he is confronted in the apostolic authority of God as one sent, there is no release for anyone anywhere, let alone an entire nation whose return to God and to the Land of their election constitutes the return of the King and the establishment of His Davidic and Theocratic rule.

Where are we as the church today? We are either at the front side or the backside. The backside is for failures who know it and who know that it is not a bad thing. If you don’t know you are a failure it is because you have not undertaken anything noble enough to have revealed it. Your life is too safe and too timid. You have been satisfied with mere pew occupancy; you have not taken great risks for God so that you could fail. I believe that failure is a pre-requisite. It is necessary; it is humiliation, and because of it Moses found himself in a place that few discover, let alone occupy for forty years, shepherding the flock of God. Moses thought himself disqualified, and that very knowledge, that very thing was his qualification. Moses said, “Who am I that I should go,” and God never once argued with him. His reply was rather, “You are not going because you are qualified; you are going because I have chosen you, and I will be with you. That is the basis of your power and authority and your success at being their deliverer. It is not because you were a prince in Egypt or some giddy charismatic star and you had it all laid out and you knew this and that and the other. It is because you have been emptied of those presumptions and are yet willing to continue faithfully in the trying place to shepherd the flock of God. I have appointed you. Because you are appointed, your preparation is extensive.”

There will come a day when God will reveal Himself in glory and what kind of God is He? The Glory of God is a consuming fire to be seen in one place only, namely, the backside of the mountain in the wilderness place in a burning thorn bush and in no other. I love a God who exhibits His glory in that place. I love a God who chooses the lowly bush, the everyday, mundane, ordinary thing, and the knock-about grit of life with God’s people.

I love, and believe God loves such a people who see things as they really are and as He Himself sees them. He loves a people who look right into the depths of things, though it burns and though it aches and though it hurts. God is there in that affliction, and His glory is there also. Glory must not be necessarily seen or associated with something lustrous. God is meek and lowly and in the midst of the truth of our situation if we have the stomach to look at it. Until we will, we are not apostolic. We are still charismatic; we are still daydreamers; we are still escapist; we still want some flamboyant personality as our pastor or visiting teacher, etc. We still want the excitement and the diversion. We have not learned to find God in the place where we least expect Him and where He most profoundly is burningly. Have you turned aside to see or have you passed by to get a divorce or to find another congregation? Isn’t that what we do? We do not want to deal with the rude root things of our life.

God is real, saints, and He is going to have a church that is real or it is not apostolic and cannot minister to His people Israel. As unregenerate as they are, as proud as they are and as worldly as they are, they have an instinctive sense of what is true and what is phony. The desert is a place in which there is no subterfuge, no disguise, nothing gilded, nothing false, nothing fancy, nothing put-on. That is what it is: dry, barren, grit, sand, heat and sun. It is a place that is unmistakably real, and God allowed Moses to tread in that for forty years before He met him in the blaze of His glory. When God saw that he turned aside to see, He said, “Now there is an apostolic candidate.” Moses did not turn aside to see because he was curious. He turned aside to see why it was that the bush burned but was not consumed. He wanted to know WHY! Here is a man who wanted ultimate answers for the predicament of human existence. He was not content to live with the Holocaust and learn that six million Jews went up in smoke through ovens. He wanted to know WHY! How could such a thing take place in modern times through the most enlightened nation, the cultural bastion of western civilization that produced Beethoven, Brahms, Fichte, Hegel, Neitzsche, Kant and hundreds of others that make us Americans look like ‘Johnny-come-latelies’ and whose civilization is only skin deep? How could a nation of that depth produce such horror? Have you asked WHY?

The church is the ground and pillar of truth or it is not the church. Is there anything phonier than a phony church? Is there anything that is more false than a church that is not true? Is there anything more uncomfortable, more painful to sit through than a church that is not real, a preaching that is not real? There is something about being false in the church that is so patently a contradiction in terms that if you have anything left of you that is integrity you cannot abide the feeling of it. You cannot stand to say, “Hello brother or sister,” and give a slap on the back and a bear hug and that kind of stuff when you know there is no truth, no reality, no life, no true relationship between each other and before God.

God forbid that you should not be occupied and taken up with the ultimate purposes of God as it pertains to Israel and the coming of the King and the restoration of His Kingdom. But it needs a people called of God and prepared of God in the wilderness place. Can we suffer the reproach of having no flourishing work or great numbers and programs? Can we be content with treading wearily in the everyday grit of the desert place under the blazing heat? If you can keep in that mundane place faithfully ‘shepherding’ the flock of God, the day is not far off that there will be a revelation of God that you might be sent by Him. When that call comes, will you say, “Here I am.”? You have got to love Moses. First he turns aside to see and then the Lord calls him twice. Anytime the Lord calls you twice you should know, “Uh-oh, this is going to cost me.” But even though Moses didn’t know it, he said, “Here I am.” Have you ever said that? Be honest. Have you ever with all the stops pulled out, without any reservation and any condition said, “Here I am”?

I said that, and you know where it brought me? Out of my beautiful Gothic seventeen-room house in Plainfield, New Jersey to a most remote location in northern Minnesota with winter temperatures down to forty below zero. I can remember some of the leading figures of the church at that time saying to me, “Katz, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got two and a half million Jews twenty miles away, and you are going to the boondocks?” Try to explain that when there is no explanation, but only an obedience to be rendered. If you say, “Here I am” to God, then put on your safety belt. Your comfort, your conveniences, your lifestyle, your plans of how you are going to serve God might themselves be radically altered. You might find that there is no service at all but just a stumbling about in an obscure place, totally unseen and unknown, while God is shaping the character of the man or woman. There will come a day to be sent of God, not to confront the peripheral Egyptian, but the Pharaoh himself. How are you doing in that category? Are you going to take cities for God with a shout? I think that the enemy looks at congregations that have such flamboyant ambitions as this, and says, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?” The issue is not your popularity with men but rather how much you are feared by the Powers of the air? Is there something in you that was both in Jesus and in Paul that is the unmistakable stamp of the authenticity of God?

You are not going to find that place as a casual pew-sitter. It is found and obtained in the wilderness place. God called to Moses and said, “Take off your shoes for the ground on which you stand is holy ground.” Holy ground is not some geographical dirt somewhere in Sinai. It is wherever God transacts with men and women in an utter and ultimate way, without qualification and without hindrance. Where the Lord is Lord totally and actually, and you can be sent without any promise of returning or succeeding. You go because He has sent you. That is holy ground. My Jewish kinsmen will languish unto death under this Egyptian world system until such a people come to it from God. Will you turn aside to see? Can you hear such a call as this? Are you willing to encounter the God of the burning bush and be sent by Him?

Prayer:

Father, who is sufficient for these things? Who am I that I should go unto Pharaoh? I pray, my God, that you prepare me in this desert of my experience so that I will turn aside to see the God who is a consuming fire and be sent by Him.

Amen.

The Context of Humility in the Cosmic Purposes of God

In his book entitled Humility, Andrew Murray calls humility “the only root from which the graces can grow.” In other words, there is no growth in grace and no receiving of anything from God without this ultimate and essential requirement. The scripture that supports this is: “He gives grace to the humble, but resists the proud.” The proud have no disposition, recognition or need of receiving that grace. And God looks for this fundamental condition of humility, which is also the very essence of what God is in Himself: “I am meek, and lowly; learn of Me.”

There is a special promise made for the meek that is not given to any other, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Indeed, the Lord’s own death on the Cross as well as His whole earthly life is a statement of that meekness and humility. Just His coming in the form of man is a humiliation for God. He was confined in a body, limited to a finite form, and fixed in very narrow place within Israel, from Galilee to Jerusalem, for His thirty-three years. His whole life had to be expressed and developed within the confines of one small geographic piece of His own creation. In only three-and-a-half years, and by His own example, He had to express and set forth a mode of being that would be given to mankind as a basis for all the days that are left for the human race.

Murray continues, “It is the one indispensable condition of true fellowship with Jesus.” I would add the only basis for true fellowship with anyone. Pride, arrogance, and haughtiness of spirit prevent fellowship. If humility is at the heart of the matter, then how do you get it? Anyone who has tried to seek to imitate humility knows that he is on the road to dismal failure. It is the phoniest of attempts to try and be humble. Humility is what God is. So the only way to have it then is to find some kind of basis by which we appropriate what God Himself is. Every time we find ourselves in a circumstance that’s painful or humiliating, and receive it from God’s hand as coming from Him, we have an opportunity to learn of Him. This is true obedience, and, with every such obedience rendered to God, something of the very character and personality of God is transmitted into the believer.

Humility is hard to define because it is something wrought in the man through a history of union with the God, who Himself is meek. Acquiring humility will never be our experience unless we covet and desire this attribute. And it should be as distinctive of us as it is of God. If it is only one of many things in which we might have an interest, it will not be obtained. But if it’s the very basis of the receiving of any grace from God, and the basis for relationship with Him and with believers, then it ought to be the foremost object of our consideration.

One can always tell religions that are false because what they celebrate and what they themselves express are completely the antithesis of the meekness of God. Violence is a statement of human arrogance that presumes it has the right to take the life of another. The world’s definition of meekness is a kind of self-deferring humility that is contrived and phony. In fact, if we’re satisfied with that, and people are impressed with that, we’ll never have the real thing. If you’re going to come to the meekness of God, you’ve got to come to the recognition first of your humanity, especially when you are stung and your self-interest is challenged and threatened. Whatever comes up from you will show the truth of the nature that has not yet been met by the Cross. So, just like anything else, if we’re satisfied with a false substitute for the authentic, God is not going to force the true upon us. We have to first come to the humbling and humiliating recognition of the truth of our condition. Then comes the repentance over that and the shock of the disclosure of what is the truth of our condition. Then comes the washing and the contrition in order that we can find a place of union with God in truth.

God will not bestow grace except on the ground of truth. When we come on that ground, and the recognition of the horror of what has been revealed about the truth of our condition, then we’re in a place to receive a God who will meet us with His grace. We have come in truth. Then, by such meetings and such union, the time comes when the meekness of the Lamb, which you cannot imitate or emulate, becomes part and parcel of what we in fact are. And so, when our self-interest and self-love are threatened or touched, we don’t react in arrogant self-defensiveness.

Paul rejoiced for those Hebrews saints who took their strippings with joy, knowing in themselves that they had a far greater recompense in heaven. It didn’t matter what was stripped from them in this life; they knew their reward in the life to come. They knew it was not an accident that could be attributed to men, but that God Himself had allowed it as the very testing of the truth of where they were with Him. If you are too much in your possessions, you’re going to be resentful, angry, irritated, and vexed if they were to be rudely taken from you. But if those things are given of God to begin with, then you receive the ‘stripping’ with joy, because you know that God Himself has brought that provocation and testing. And in receiving it with joy, you’re giving to those who have stripped you such a testimony that they’ll not be able to turn from it. They expect you to be resentful; they expect you to curse and to be angry. But to see you taking that stripping with magnanimity and grace is the very testimony of God Himself.

Andrew Murray continues,

“…Pride can degrade the highest angels into devils, and humility can raise fallen flesh and blood to the thrones of angels. Thus, this is the great end of God: raising a new creation out of a fallen kingdom of angels.”

In one statement, you have the whole cosmic purpose of God through the church — to replace fallen angels who have fallen through their pride and arrogance. God is going to replace them with those of His church who exhibit the character and humility of God, and who can therefore rule and reign with Him from that governmental place. Those angels, who were first given that governmental place, have lost it through their pride. God will return, through humility, what was lost to Him through pride, through the sons of men that are being formed at His hand in their character and life.

There is an intimation of this in Romans 11:25 of a fullness of Gentiles “coming in.” In my opinion, this fullness is the number from all nations that will replace the number of fallen angels who have lost their place of preeminence because of their pride and arrogance. Their leader, Lucifer, exalted himself by his own beauty. He was intoxicated and taken up with himself in pride, and they who followed him had the same disposition. But those who will replace him have exactly the opposite; they have the humility of God. And that is the whole cosmic saga; that is what this whole history of redemption is about since its commencement.

The fullness of the Gentiles are those who exhibit this essential quality of God, not as a cosmetic overlay, but as the essential truth of their being. They have submitted to the work of God in the humiliating circumstances that bring them down. They accept lowliness, they accept rejection, they accept stripping, and they accept even the loss of their own lives if it should be required. Thus, they are exemplifying the very nature of God.

In its deepest and truest form, God’s salvation is bringing humility to men. It is a divine attribute; you can’t form it from the earth. You can form other things—intelligence, skill, diligence—but humility is distinctively what God is in Himself. And except that God comes down with it and makes it available for man, there is no prospect of obtaining it. Salvation is God bringing humility to men, not just a salvation from hell and death.

When God has got that in a people who can replace those that have fallen from pride, the age will have been completed, and then “Israel shall be delivered” (Romans 11:25-26). He waits for this in the church in order to deliver Israel. So, He humbled Himself, taking upon Himself the form of man, and as a servant and as a Jew, He bore that humiliation, and humbled Himself unto death. That very same humbling of Himself unto death opens up the grace of life—resurrection life—through the willingness to come to that final place of humility.

To “die to self,” or to come out from the power of self, cannot be done by any act of resistance we can make. This death to self, which is the last hindrance to humility, is not something that we can perform. Self cannot die through self, by self, because if self could do it, then we would be boasting in what we have accomplished in the death to self by our own self. It is a death that only God can bring. So the one true way of dying to self is the way of patience, meekness, humility and resignation to God. It is to have the humbling awareness that I cannot do this in myself. I may desire humility and to be like the Lord in lamb-likeness, but I know that the more I try in a self-conscious way to obtain it, the more frustratingly it will allude me. I have got to recognize that only God can perform this, and that He will perform it in His own time—not when we might want it.

A total resignation to God is required, and that is the most humbling thing to which man can submit himself. A total submission to God, to have this formed in us in the time and mode that He Himself will elect, is resignation. Any impatience that desires it before that time, or seeks to circumvent God to obtain it by ourselves, is to effect and put on a show of it. It is not a true submission or resignation to God. Resignation is that complete yielding and trusting, and that is the key to obtain the humility of God.

I can sum this up another way. It is being willing to suffer the humiliation of not having humility you feel could be yours. But you would rather live with the humiliation of the truth of your condition, knowing that the remedy is not going to come by any hands-on that you can apply. You’re concerned for the lack of humility, not because you want to be relieved of the reproach, but you want to see God glorified by the truth and the reality of what He is wanting to perfect in that person or fellowship. The resignation is that you will have to wait for it. It’s waiting on the Lord; it’s trusting in the Lord; it’s being resigned unto the Lord. The issue of God’s glory needs to be greater than the issue of personal relief.

William Law, another respected author, writes:

“This is the truth and perfection of dying to self. For if I ask you what the Lamb of God means, must you not tell me that it is and means the perfection of patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God? Must you not therefore say that a desire and faith in these virtues is an application to Christ, is a giving up of yourself to Him and the perfection of faith in Him? And then, because of this inclination of your heart to sink down into this patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God, you are truly giving up all that you are and all that you have from fallen Adam. It is leaving all you have to follow Christ. It is your highest act of faith in Him.”

This is the leaving of all. This is the giving up of any last confidence in yourself (that you can of yourself and by yourself obtain the character of God), and rather trust Him for it in His own time and way. It is that final surrender by which, indeed, the true thing comes. It is your highest act of faith in Him because you are trusting Him to do it.

No man can have the humility of God unless He bestows it. And when we humble ourselves to call on the name of the Lord, that process of obtaining begins. God alone has the power to bring His own person, His own attribute and character into the life of a believer. William Law continues,

“When the Lamb of God has brought forth a real birth of His own meekness, humility, and full resignation to God in our souls, then it is the birthday of the Spirit of love in our souls.”

When we talk about the life of God or the abundant life of God, it is not only a source of energy and enablement, but also the source of a distinctive quality of life – namely, the Lord’s humility. We have His humility in proportion as we have His life, and we have His life in proportion as we have put our own natural life into death. We cannot bring ourselves to that death of self outside of the recognition that that death can only be worked by God. It is meekness to recognize that we are powerless, and that something has to be wrought in us from God by His life.

Jesus humbled Himself unto death, even the death of the Cross, which is to say, the most humiliating form of death. Under Roman torture, the victim died of asphyxiation because he was stretched out in such a way that the fluids of his body finally drowned him. That is why they broke the legs, to hasten the death because as long as a man could stretch himself on his feet, he could continue to suck air. But the moment that he could not stretch, then the fluids would rise up and he died an agonizing death of suffocation or drowning. He bore the humiliation of being stripped naked before people who were watching the process. In fact, the crucifixion of Jesus was the most remarkable demonstration of the only authentic God who is God. In that death, His very distinctive was portrayed.

“Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. You don’t have to strive, if you’ll learn of Me—not learn about Me with your mental faculties—but learn of Me by appropriating the means that I will give you to obtain what I am in Myself every time you’ll accept with resignation the conditions that are calculated against your pride. You will learn of Me as I give you the conditions by which you will see My grace.” [Paraphrased!]

This is the way of God; this is the faith; this is why people cannot make up their minds for Christ; this is why they are in the valley of decision and never come through. They intuit that this is a way that is against the flesh and pride, and they will not have any part of it. Our mission task is to call people to a very strange salvation—from the very thing that the world wants them to enjoy and to develop, namely, their pride, their self-sufficiency, self-exaltation, of commending themselves before men by virtues that they have in themselves. God wants all that to be brought to death. The only thing worth having is God Himself. He alone is righteous; He alone is love, truth, mercy, patience, and humility. He calls us to the way of the Cross, which is the way of humbling, and the church is the very provision for our maturation in the way. In the fellowship of believers, you are going to find yourself in collision with others. There will be the inevitable conflicts where you have to humble yourself to go to one another and find reconciliation before you bring your gift to the altar.

Who wants this kind of a salvation? Only those who desire God above all else. Their reward will be a place of eternal distinction in the governmental overview of His kingdom. They will replace those fallen angels who opted for pride, and He will have in the place of government those that are lowly and meek like Himself. They will exhibit the authentic reality of God because only then can the government of God go forth. The government of God is not bureaucracy, but the administration of God’s mercy, kindness and goodness to the earth. It is the bringing of the spirit of humility by which such government is performed. So, it is good to know what we are being saved for and what salvation itself means: that Christ might be formed in us, through His life, because this humility is the distinctive character of that life.

From a transcribed message.

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Reprinted with permission from Art Katz Ministries

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