Sarcasm may be the mark of the weak, but humility is the mark of those who are intimate with Christ.
One can't follow the meek and lowly Lamb of God and not demonstrate meekness and lowliness of heart. The deeper in Christ we go, the more we understand that nothing is more blessed than to be nothing so that God may be all.
When I was a teenager, my sarcasm and wittiness were on full display, often masquerading as humor and intelligence. In reality, they were destructive.
My mother warned me that my upcoming marriage would be destroyed if I didn't curb it toward my fiance. I did so but failed to change my inner thought-life toward myself. A few years later, God showed me a vision of my self. In a dream-state while fully awake, He showed me a cistern deep inside my heart. The Holy Spirit (in overalls and carrying a powerful flashlight), helped me prepare to lean over the cistern. When He said "Ready?" I pushed with my hands and peeped over the cistern, while He beamed the light down.
What I saw was equal to God putting Jacob's hips forever out of joint: I saw my self. He called it "Voraciously Destructive" as I glimpsed it lash out and eat a bit of my inside, from inside. My response was simple: "Kill it!" I said.
I once shared this vision with a group of single women I led in Bible Study. Their response was to bristle and look down on me, saying "Well, I don't have anything like THAT in me." I shared it with my grandmother, who had just walked in the door to visit. She was shaken and said she needed to go immediately home to examine her own heart. Whose response was humble? The one whose intimacy with Christ is unquestionable.
Disapproval and superiority, thinly veiled as humor and sarcasm, is rampant in today's discourse. And I see it in the church and even in leaders who have been given venues through which to speak. This is not acceptable. Nor it is a new problem.
(See 1 Peter 4:8, Ephesians 4:2; 4:32, 4:25-29, Proverbs 15:1, Colossians 4:6, etc.)
"Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves." —Philippians 2:3
Andrew Murray says this:
"I stand amazed at the thought of how little humility is sought after as the distinguishing feature of the discipleship of Jesus...humility is not esteemed the cardinal virtue, the only root from which the graces can grow, the one indispensable condition of true fellowship with Jesus."
Note that humility is the one indispensable condition of true fellowship with Jesus. Not correct doctrine, or choosing a side or person to follow, nor attendance, nor sacrifice, or knowledge acquired. It is simple humility: the place of absolute dependency on God.
Jesus said it best: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Humility is the grace from which all other graces grow.
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