You save the humble, but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them low. – 2 Samuel 22:28

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 31, 2013): 2 Samuel 22

I cheer for the underdog. If there are two sports teams playing that I do not have an emotional attachment to, then I will cheer for the one least likely to win. I am not really sure that I understood that until a few years ago. An acquaintance of mine came up with a simple question, why do you cheer for that team – I mean, they never win. And then he turned the thought around – why do you not cheer for my team, and then he started to list the championships and near championships that were lurking in his favorite team’s history. And about half way through the recitation I realized how little I cared about those things. I wanted to cheer for the teams that Las Vegas said had no chance to win. (Having said that, I will be cheering for the Toronto Blue Jays this year, it has been a long time for them and I will support them even though it seems that they might be becoming one of the five or six teams expected to win this year – of course, there is also that existence of that pesky emotional attachment.) But I enjoy so much more listening to teams who can say “we just focussed on each other and played together until we won the championship” rather than listening to teams who just believed that they were the best. There is something about humility that I find deeply beautiful.

David writes a song of praise to the God that has rescued him and in it he begins to list all of the things that God honors. But the reader quickly realizes that he is not talking about himself. He is very few of these things. Maybe the ones that have gathered around him might be pure and blameless, but not David. David has seemed to stumble at every point. But the tenor of the Psalm is that unless God moved, David would not have survived – God had saved David, and David was well aware of it. What David seemed to possess in abundance in this moment was humility. David was becoming other focused, a trait that is at the heart of humility – and David realizes that that was why God had saved him.

C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity makes this observation. “If you were to meet a truly humble person we would never come away from meeting them thinking they were humble. They would not be always telling us they were humble. They would not always be telling us they were a nobody. The thing we would remember from meeting a truly gospel-humble person is how much they seemed to be totally interested in us. Because the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.”

David’s reality – and ours – is that when our thoughts and concern begin to be consistently about the people that are around us – it is then that we are allowing God to move in our lives – and then that he can come to save us.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 18

Note:  Last Week's message "Run with Pride" - the final message from the series "Danny Boy" rom VantagePoint Community Church  is now available on the VantagePoint website. You can find it here.