Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil. (Proverbs 3:7 NIV)
I have been wise in my eyes for a while now but I’m not sure how to manage my thinking that I’m greater. How does one bring themselves to realise their need for God?
It is a fine line that we cross easily and frequently. This is not something you learn and it will permanently be so but rather something you submit to as often as you realise that you have crossed the line. We are all called to be humble before our God.
The short answer is in the quoted text: “fear the Lord and shun evil.” Let me try to give a long answer.
There is nothing wrong with going all out and doing your best but that often puts you in a position where you see yourself superior to others who don’t. The thing is not to stop doing your best but to understand that in God’s eyes you have a long way to go to deal with the challenges in your own life. This means learning to live in the reality of God’s majesty and being humble. In other words you should take pride in doing well but doing well today does not mean we are superior to others who are struggling. All of us have fallen short of the glory of God.
We can never feel superior to God but we can feel superior to other people.
And this is then our temptation: to cross the line and feel superior to other people. We should instead understand that in God’s eyes we all have our own road to travel. We are not in competition with others. We are only to do better, or, when we have failed, to trust God’s love and receive his forgiveness and continue on our journey.
We should therefore not mind other people’s business and judge their success or failures in terms of the conditions of our own path. In fact we are asked to not judge one another but to love one another.
The truth is that in God’s eyes everyone is on their own paths and they need to rise up (or succumb to) the different challenges in their lives. The rich person has no place to judge a poor person because he only gave RM1 to the church. But neither can the poor person judge the rich man for buying an expensive motorbike. Each have their own challenges. Each have their own journey. You draw strength and encouragement or you are humbled and reprimanded according to the choices you make on your own journey because each path has its own challenges and resources.
But how do you make good choices? How do you know that the choices you make are choices you can take pride in? Because this is a journey between you and God, you have to learn from God what is good. There is no alternative to learning the wisdom of God and that is best found in the Scriptures.