Am I remembering to humble myself before others so that I will be exalted, rather than humiliated?

8 “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited.  9 If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place.  10 But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests.  11 For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

INSIGHT:     Sometimes we see a celebrity and say, “Wow, they are so humble.”  They may very well be, but my experience is that it’s easy to look and act humble when everyone thinks you hung the moon.  It was easy for me to feign humility when I was living the “good life” and my clients were calling me the next “Zig Ziglar”.  Trying to remain humble when God strikes your circumstances, and your life looks to have fallen out of the sky, can be impossible without His grace. 

As we can see from this teaching, desiring honor and being honored is not a bad thing.  The bad thing is when we attempt to honor ourselves, rather than allowing God (Jn 12:26), or others (Rom 12:10), to honor us.  This is a major area that I have wanted to continually improve in.  Even writing this book the first time challenged my thinking in this area.  After all, when does talking about your experiences and your testimony, become you trying to honor yourself? 

Because of the Mark 5:19 call that God placed on my life, it gives many the place to accuse me of preaching myself and pointing people to me, rather than Christ.  But this could also be said about anyone who compiled great journals about God and Satan’s dealings with them, Charles Spurgeon, John Wesley, Madam Guyon, Lorenzo Dow, George Muller, Brother Yun, etc., all those who truly walked with God and had vibrant living spiritual experiences as a result.  For me, the answer is to look honestly at your heart’s motive when no one else is around but you and God.  I prayed so many times privately in those woods, “Lord, promote me, so I can promote you…honor me, so I can honor you” (Jn 13:31, 17:1). 

God knew I desired His glory, but He wisely knew I needed to be cut back after so much fruitfulness and honor from tens of thousands.  I couldn’t see it then, but there is no way, at that stage of my faith, I could have remained humble at the pace the ministry was growing.  So, the Lord allowed Satan to cut me back like Nebuchadnezzar’s stump, through the apostasy of my 2nd spouse, and my public failures of saying “If she doesn’t come back, you should not listen to another word I say” and my predictions of something happening on Feb 11 & 12, 2021.  When she never came back and nothing happened on those dates, I shut down the ministry.  Thousands shamed and ridiculed me.  Perhaps my flesh said a few times, “just remove that part of the story”.  But, to do so would be sinning against Jesus’ command, and trying to put myself in a “better place”, while He was putting me in the “lowest place”.  I didn’t erase that shameful part of the story, but instead accepted the “lowest place”. I was so confused about what happened, but I knew God had ordained that marriage and that He would one day vindicate me and put me back in a “better place”.  Forty-five days after I first decided to make that risky “if she doesn’t return” statement, on Aug 9, 2020, I found the astonishing precise timing match between every event in our marriage, and every event in Noah’s flood.  Then, God vindicated His giving me the Feb 11th and 12th dates, with her remarkable US visa approval, severing all ties to me. Then on Sept 23, 2021, I discovered the 370-day connection between my proposal to Lisa, and Noah coming out of the Ark.  Then on Oct 18, 2022, He led me to see His own painful experience with faithless Israel, in Jer 3:7, where God says, “I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me but she did not.

With each of these discoveries, it was like Jesus was saying to me, “Friend, move up to a better place.” Therefore, let us all humble ourselves before the Lord, when He sends humbling circumstances, because in due time He will lift us up again.  He never fails!