There is a strange doorway into God’s favor that the world almost never uses: the doorway of humility. James tells us that when we willingly go low before the Lord—owning our sin, admitting our need, surrendering our pride—God Himself responds by lifting us up. The way up in His kingdom is always down, and today is an invitation to step off the pedestal and onto our knees, where true honor begins.

The Upside-Down Path to Greatness

Everything around you screams, “Promote yourself. Prove yourself. Protect yourself.” But the Lord calls you into a different story: lay down your demand to be seen, and let Him be the One who sees and exalts you. “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you” (James 4:10). That promise is not a spiritual slogan; it is a covenant reality. When you willingly take the lowest place before Him, you are never forgotten, never overlooked, never abandoned. The One whose opinion matters most has pledged to personally lift you.

Jesus walked this path before you. Scripture says, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name above all names” (Philippians 2:8–9). The cross came before the crown. If the sinless Son chose the road of humility, how could we expect a different route? To follow Christ is to trust that when we stoop in obedience, the Father will decide the time and the way to raise us.

The Posture That Opens Heaven’s Door

Humility is not self‑hatred or pretending you have no gifts. It is seeing yourself truthfully before a holy God: utterly dependent, deeply loved, and completely owned by Him. It is the heart of the tax collector who “would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’” (Luke 18:13). Jesus said that man, not the proud Pharisee, “went home justified” (see Luke 18:14). Heaven opens not to the one who lists his spiritual résumé, but to the one who brings empty hands.

God is drawn to that low place. He declares, “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly in spirit—to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isaiah 57:15). Do you want fresh fire, fresh joy, fresh tenderness in your walk with Him? Start with confession instead of excuses. Trade defensiveness for repentance. As we agree with God about our sin and smallness, we experience His nearness, His cleansing, and His reviving power in ways the proud never taste.

Living Low in a World That Climbs

The pressure to climb is constant: climb in status, in influence, in comfort. But Scripture calls you to a different reflex: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, so that in due time He may exalt you” (1 Peter 5:6). Notice where you are called to bow—under His mighty hand. Humility is not letting people trample you; it is letting God rule you. It means obeying when it costs you, forgiving when it hurts, serving when no one notices, trusting His timing when you feel hidden or passed over.

This is where it gets real: at home, humility looks like apologizing first. At church, it looks like serving gladly in hidden ways. At work, it looks like giving others credit and refusing to build your platform through subtle self‑promotion. John the Baptist captured this heart when he said of Jesus, “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). That’s the daily decision: less of me, more of Him. As you choose that path today, you can rest in this unshakable promise: the God who asks you to bow low is already planning how—and when—to lift you high.

Lord, thank You for drawing near to the humble. Today, teach me to go low before You in every choice I make, and give me courage to obey You so that my life exalts Christ alone. Amen.

Too many of us object, perhaps unconsciously, to the rather evident fact that the maintenance of the devotional mood is indispensable to success in the Christian life. And what is the devotional mood? It is nothing else than constant awareness of God's enfolding presence, the holding of inward conversations with Christ and private worship of God in spirit and in truth! To establish our hearts in the devotional mood we must abide in Christ, walk in the Spirit, pray without ceasing and meditate in the Word of God day and night. Of course this implies separation from the world and obedience to the will of God, as we are able to understand it. No matter how we may argue, true holiness and spiritual power are not qualities that can be once received and thereafter forgotten, as one might wind a clock or take a vitamin pill. Every advance in the spiritual life must be made against the determined resistance of the world, the flesh and the devil!

Be not therefore anxious for the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself - Matthew 6:34

An apparently impossible advice. That word "careful," in a great many places in the New Testament, does not mean what it has come to mean to-day; but it means what it should still mean, " lull of care." And "care" meant, not prudent provision, forethought, the occupation of a man’s common sense with his duty and his work and his circumstances, but it meant the thing which of all others unfits a man most for such prudent provision, and that is, the nervous irritation of a gnawing anxiety which, as the word in the original means, tears the heart apart and makes a man quite incapable of doing the wise thing, or seeing the wise thing to do, in the circumstances. "Careful" here means neither more nor less than " anxious."

But even with that explanation, is it not like an unreachable ideal that Paul puts forward? "Be anxious about nothing." How can a man who has to face the possibilities that we all have to face, and who knows himself to be as weak to deal with them as we all are - how can he help being anxious? There is no more complete waste of breath than those sage and reverend advices which people give us, not to do the things nor to feel the emotions which our position make absolutely inevitable and almost involuntary. Here, for instance, is a man surrounded by all manner of calamity and misfortune; and some well-meaning, but foolish, friend comes to him, and, without giving him a single reason for the advice, says, " Cheer up, my friend! " Why should he cheer up? What is there in his circumstances to induce him to fall into any other mood? Or some unquestionable peril is staring him full in the face, coming nearer and nearer to him, and some well-meaning, loose-tongued friend, says to him, " Do not be afraid! " But he ought to be afraid. That is about all that worldly wisdom and morality have to say to us when we are in trouble and anxiety. " Shut your eyes very hard, and make believe very much, and you will not fear." An impossible exhortation! Just as well bid a ship in the Bay of Biscay not to rise and fall upon the wave, but to keep an even keel - just as well tell the willows in the river-bed that they are not to bend when the wind blows - as come to me, and say to me, " Be careful about nothing," unless you have a great deal more than that to say. I must be, and I ought to be, anxious about a great many things. Instead of anxiety being folly, it will be wisdom; and the folly will consist in not opening our eyes to facts, and in not feeling emotions that are appropriate to the facts which force themselves against our eyeballs. Threadbare maxims, stale, musty old commonplaces of unavailing consolation and impotent encouragement say to us, " Do not be anxious." We try to stiffen our nerves and muscles in order to bear the blow; or some of us, more basely still, get into a habit of feather-headed levity, making no forecasts, nor seeing even what is plainest before our eyes. But all that is of no use when once the hot pincers of real trouble, impending or arrived, lay hold of our hearts. Then, of all idle expenditures of breath in the world, there is none to the wrung heart more idle and more painful than the one that says. Be anxious about nothing.