How’s this for a reoccurring theme for the Christian. Let’s say you begin to realize that your having a problem with, oh let’s just say, humility. So you pray and you begin to look for opportunities to “think of others as better than yourself” (Philippians 2:3) and while this goes well for a couple of hours (hopefully in your case longer) something bad starts to happen. You start out freely encouraging and speaking kind words and somewhere along the line, without even thinking about it, you start to wonder why you aren’t being encouraged and then you start looking for the encouragement and then when the encouragement doesn’t come you throw up your hands in disgust feeling worse than you did before you began.
Recently I began to realize something about myself that I wasn’t satisfied with and when I began to think about how to deal with it from a biblical perspective I started to think about the failed attempts in the past. I was trying to think of what went wrong then in the hopes that it doesn’t go wrong again. I remembered an illustration I’d read recently that described the speech that the airline attendant gives before take-off. The whole seat cushion as a floatation device and where the exits are located discourse. Then she explains how the oxygen masks will drop in the event of a decrease in cabin pressure. The illustration asked, if you have a child, whose mask should be put on first and why? The answer is that you should put yours on first because you’ll be useless to your child if you pass out. The illustration closed with the point that if we don’t go to God first then we’ll be useless to others.
It’s a simple illustration but it explains my failure. When something bad started to happen in my example above is when I stopped getting my oxygen. I stopped going to the Lord. I stopped praying for real humility to be experienced. I stopped praying for strength and satisfaction in Him. I tried to help others when I was about ready to pass out myself and in then end I become weak and frail and in the end frustrated.
What’s worse than being frustrated is feeling that I’ve failed the very one who I intended to glorify. In order to glorify Him I must be satisfied in Him and to be satisfied in Him I need to seek Him daily. That’s the way to break the pattern. Seems so simple doesn’t it?
