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By AnonymHannah Anderson
And now you can see the relationship between pride and stress. Pride convinces us that we are stronger and more capable than we actually are. Pride convinces us that we must do and be more than we are able. And when we try, we find ourselves feeling "thin, sort of stretched . . . like butter that has been scraped over too much bread." (The Fellowship of the Ring) We begin to fall apart physically, emotionally, and spiritually for the simple reason that we are not existing as we were meant to exist.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
As long as we refuse to accept that our pride is the source of our unrest, we will continue to wither on the vine. "Humility, that low, sweet root / From which all heavenly virtues shoot." —Thomas Moore
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Before we can be grafted into Him, we must be stripped of our self-sufficiency and ego.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
But this is also why Jesus calls us to come to HIm. By coming to Jesus, we remember who we are and who we are not. By coming to Him, we come face to face with God and with ourselves. "It is only in our encounter with a personal God," writes philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, "that we become fully aware of our condition as creatures, and fling from us the last particle of self-glory.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
By leaving the yoke of their Master, they have become prey for the wild, unpredictable world around them . . . We must come to Him to be tamed.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Discernment gives you the ability to both appreciate the subtle beauty of a Renoir and spot a fake.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Here is the offense: "Apart from me, you can do nothing." Apart from Jesus, our leaves will turn yellow and fall off . Apart from Jesus, the fruit we bear will be watery and acidic, unfit for anything. Apart from Jesus, we will wither up and die . . . The problem is our obsession with ourselves.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Humility is knowing where we came from and who our people are. Humility is understanding that without God we are nothing . . . Or as . . . Andrew Murray writes in his classic book Humility, "Humility is simply acknowledging the truth of [our] position as creature and yielding to God His place.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Instead of finding identity in our roles—in being fathers and mothers, teachers and writers and pastors—we must find identity in being image bearers of God.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Through His humanity, we learn what ours is supposed to be. Through His deity, He enables us to be what we are supposed to be.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
We are not called to embody Jesus ourselves; He has already been incarnated and is still even now! No, we are not called to be Jesus; we are called to fall at His feet and worship Him. We are called to affirm that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." [John 1:14] And it is through this worship, through recognizing His rightful place, that we are finally humbled. When we are consumed with God's glory, we forget to worry about our own. When our eyes are fixed on Him as the source of all goodness and truth and beauty, we accept that we are not. When we are enamored by His worth and majesty, we can stop being so enamored with ourselves. And fascinatingly, when we seek God's glory, we'll be able to appreciate it in the people around us. Instead of seeing them as threats to our own glory, we will see them as beautiful reflections of His.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
When Jesus calls us to take His yoke, when He invites us to find rest through submission, He is not satisfying some warped need for power or His own sense of pride. He is calling us to safety. The safety that comes from belonging to Him. The safety that comes from being tamed.
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By AnonymHannah Anderson
Your life has intrinsic value, not simply because of who you are as an individual, but because of who He is as your God.
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