Ephesians 4:2 “With tender humility and quiet patience, always demonstrate gentleness and generous love toward one another, especially toward those who may try your patience.” Today's episode reminds us that God wants us to demonstrate gentleness and love towards others, even those who really annoy us. It also gives some ideas of how we can accomplish this. It talks about the importance of humility. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Humility & Quiet Patience
Ephesians 4:2 “With tender humility and quiet patience, always demonstrate gentleness and generous love toward one another, especially toward those who may try your patience.”
This is a profound reminder of the challenging path we are called to walk. We are summoned to be gentle and generous towards others, a task that is far from easy. People can be difficult, and they can test our patience. St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, was well aware of this. Hence, he emphasized, “Especially those who may try your patience.” St. Paul's intention was to underscore that our love should not be limited to those who are easy to love or reciprocate. We are called to love everyone and treat everyone with gentleness, a challenge that requires our utmost dedication.
If we take a minute to think about those who try our patience, I am sure we will all have several people who come to mind. Now, let’s take a minute to think about how we interact with those who try our patience. When we are annoyed, we tend to be short with people. It is not easy to demonstrate gentleness when we feel people are annoying us. I think the key to being gentle and loving with people who try our patience is what it mentions in the beginning of this verse.
We need tender humility and quiet patience if we want to demonstrate love and gentleness to one another. Why humility? Humility allows us to get past ourselves, think of others more, and avoid offending too easily. Humility is not easy. It is something that we need to pursue actively. What does humility even mean? When you look in the dictionary, humility means a modest or low view of one's own importance. However, I like what Rick Warren said about humility. “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” I think we need to be careful when we read the dictionary definition is we may read it and think that humility means we are supposed to have a low view of ourselves. I don’t think God would want us to have a low view of ourselves especially since we are made in His likeness and image. But what the definition is actually saying is that we have a modest or low view of our importance.
This is why I resonate with Rick Warren's perspective on humility. It's not about thinking less of yourself but about thinking of yourself less. This challenges the misconception that humility means having a low opinion of oneself. Instead, it suggests that true humility is about shifting our focus away from ourselves and toward others. It conveys that genuine humility involves selflessness, empathy, and an orientation towards serving and caring for others. It inspires us to transcend self-centeredness and egocentric thinking and cultivate a mindset of humility that prioritizes the well-being of others. It's a powerful transformation that can reshape our hearts and lives.
C. S. Lewis also talks about humility. According to Lewis, the first step in pursuing humility is recognizing and admitting how proud and conceited you are. A solid second step would be to confess this to God and ask God for help. The third would be to cultivate the practice of praying for other people. Don’t pray for others like you’re reading over a laundry list to God, but offer deep, imaginative, caring, and concerned prayers like you are holding someone else’s life, their existence, their well-being in your hand and holding that person up to God. Pray for others like you pray for yourself or your children and see what God does in your heart.
That last line is powerful. “See what God does in your heart.” I think we would all be amazed at what God will do in our hearts when we start trying to be more humble, when we try to put the needs of others before our comfort. I am not saying to never think about your needs but often we put the needs of others behind our wants and desires. For instance, someone asks us if we can help them with something important on Thursday night, but that is when our team plays an important game. They need us, and we don’t need to see the game; we could watch the replay, but we want to see it.
We often talk about the importance of self-care, and rightly so. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we can’t take care of others. However, we can’t be solely focused on ourselves and ignore the needs of others either. I believe God created us to look out for one another. He wants us to care for the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, and so on because He tells us so in the scriptures. When we shift our focus away from ourselves and towards those in need, we can grow in humility.
The verse says, “With tender humility and quiet patience, always demonstrate gentleness and generous love toward one another, especially toward those who may try your patience.” If you are struggling with this, as I think we all are, it's okay. God doesn’t expect us to be perfect or to get it all right. However, now that we know what we are called to do, we also can’t keep going on like we were without changing anything. Once the Holy Spirit points out that something needs to change, we must set about to change it. Once we are aware, we can no longer claim ignorance.
If you want to change the way you interact with those around you, especially those who get under your skin, you must work on cultivating patience and greater humility. Once you do that, it will be easier to love and be gentle with those around you. If we follow C. S. Lewis’s advice and have a conversation with God about our current level of self-centeredness and then ask Him to show us how to be more humble and more patient, I think we will be surprised at the ways He will show up for us. God is so good!
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those who are listening to this episode right now. Lord, we love you tons! We ask that you help us grow in humility in a gentle way. We ask you to help us grow in quiet patience as well. We thank you for showing us how you want us to live and then helping us live that way. We thank you more than words can express for sending each one of us the Holy Spirit as our guide. Help us to invite the Holy Spirit into our situations more and help us to rely on His power more. We ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’s holy name. Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. If you have experienced loss in some way and are grieving right now, I invite you to join mentoring this month as we cover the topic of “Grief.” I look forward to meeting you here again tomorrow. Remember, Jesus loves you just the way you are, and so do I! May the grace and favor of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you. Have a blessed day!
Today’s Word from the Lord was received in February 2024 by a member of my Catholic Charismatic Prayer Group. If you have any questions about the prayer group, these words, or how to join us for a meeting, please email CatholicCharismaticPrayerGroup@gmail.com. Today’s Word from the Lord is, “Arise, my people. Do not be afraid to arise from wherever you are, in whatever circumstance you're in. I am with you. As the Father has raised me, so I raise you.”