By Jason Smith

“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you.” (James 4:10)

My
family recently returned from a trip to Fresno, California, to see relatives. It
can be a roughly 12-hour drive from
there to Salem. However, as you can imagine, the journey is a bit delayed when
you have a one-year-old (Weston) and a three-year-old (Logan) accompanying you.
They actually both took a couple naps going both directions, which made things
go a little smoother. But, alas, even I was asking, “Are we there yet?” by the
15^th hour on the road.

After
pulling into our driveway at zero dark thirty, the first thing Whitney and I
noted when stepping into our house was how chilly it felt. We soon realized
that our furnace was not working, and, perhaps, had not been working for close
to a week. My first thought was: I can do
this. I’ve fixed things like this before. I hoped this would be a quick fix,
but unfortunately, I had to call it quits when I could not figure it out after
an hour of fruitless effort. I had to go to work the next morning, so I decided
to try my hand at fixing it that evening as soon as I got home. When nothing I
tried seemed to be panning out, I turned to YouTube, the fount of DIY (Do-It-Yourself)
wisdom.

Sadly,
I kept bumping into one disappointment after another. Just when I thought I’d
solved the problem, something else turned out to be the “real” issue. The more
things I tried and failed, the more I read up on what can cause furnace
malfunctions. By the end of the weekend, I felt like I knew every nook and
cranny of my furnace, something I’d hardly looked at in the two and a half
years we’ve lived in our home. The worst part is, despite the plethora of
knowledge I had acquired on home furnaces, I still had not fixed it, and our
home was beginning to feel more like an igloo.

I
decided now was probably a good time to reach out for help. I called up two
family members who are more mechanically inclined, one of which was my father-in-law.
Rob, who my sons call “Pappy,” gladly agreed to stop by. Before he arrived, my three-year-old,
Logan, came into the garage to watch me struggle for a few minutes more.

“Dad,”
he said, in his sweetly matter-of-fact tone, “I think you should just stop and
let Pappy fix it.”

Out of the mouths of babes. Ah,
yes, it was plain to even my young son that I did not have the mechanical
skillset requisite to finish the job. It is a humbling thing to ask for help
and admit you do not know as much as you thought you knew.

I
cannot help observing that a similar thing can happen in our approach to
knowing God. How many different views on God are out there? How many different opinions
on Jesus Christ are floating around in our culture alone? There is an in-built
tendency for all of us to think we have things figured out, as if we intuitively
know what God approves of and what our purpose in life is.

But
we are mere humans. We cannot fathom the depths of God’s mind. It is a marvel
that He has mercifully revealed anything to us.

The
Apostle Paul exulted in God’s greatness:

“Oh,
the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are
His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the
Lord, or who has been His counselor?’ ‘Or who has given a gift to Him that He
might be repaid?’ For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To
Him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:33-36)

The
only right posture in approaching a holy God of this magnitude is humble submission.

“But
He gives more grace. Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace
to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he
will flee from you. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse
your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched
and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to
gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you” (James 4:6-10).

God
is eager to shower us with grace and cancel our guilt. The question we all
should be asking is: Do I see my need for
grace? “Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your
evaluation of yourselves” (Romans 12:3a, NLT). That is why God, after surveying
all the wonders of the heavens, says, “All these things My hand has made, and
so all these things came to be… But this is the one to whom I will look: he who
is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).

Is
that how you approach God’s holy and perfect Word? Do you tremble at what it
means that God has spoken to you? When you turn to a passage in the Bible, do
you understand that you are about to encounter the Creator of the universe? Have
you seen how desperately you need to hear from Him? And have you recognized
just how shallow your wisdom is apart from Him?

Take the gospel for example. No mere human could have devised a plan where God’s holy and beloved Son ends up staked to a cross in order to accomplish our redemption. That is why “Christ crucified” is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (v. 21).

As it turns out, we do not have everything figured out. And we don’t know as much as we think we know. Certainly, we should turn to “God-breathed” Scripture for the divine wisdom we all need (2 Timothy 3:16). But let’s resolve to approach the Bible with the posture of humility, acknowledging the infinite gap existing between our relatively puny minds and the mind of our all-knowing God. And let’s thank Him for loving us enough to speak to us.