He GOD will exalt you in due time.

The command is clear: humble yourself. That does not mean that it is your work to conquer and cast out the pride of your nature, and to form within yourself the lowliness of the holy Jesus. No, this is God's work, the very essence of that exaltation wherein He lifts you up into the real likeness of the beloved Son.

What the command does mean is this: take every opportunity of humbling yourself before God and man.

In faith that grace is already working in you, in assurance that more grace for victory is coming, in the light that conscience each time flashes upon the pride of your heart and its workings, regardless of all there may be of failure and falling--stand persistently as under the unchanging command: humble yourself. Accept with gratitude everything that God allows from within or without, from friend or enemy, in nature or in grace, to remind you of your need of humbling, and to help you to it.

Reckon humility to be indeed the mother-virtue, your very first duty before God, and the one perpetual safeguard of the soul. Set your heart upon it as the source of all blessing. The promise is divine and sure: he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. See that you do the one thing God asks: humble yourself. God will see that He does the one thing He has promised. He will give more grace. He will exalt you in due time.

All God's dealings with man are characterized by two stages. There is the time of preparation that trains and disciplines men for a higher stage. It is a time of command and promise, with the mingled experience of effort and impotence, of failure and partial success, with the holy expectancy of something better which these waken.

Then comes the time of fulfillment, when faith inherits the promise and enjoys what it had so often struggled for in vain. This law holds good in every part of the Christian life, and in the pursuit of every separate virtue. That is because it is grounded in the very nature of things. In all that concerns our redemption, God must take the initiative. When that has been done, man's turn comes.

In the effort after obedience and attainment, man must learn to know his impotence, in self-despair to die to himself, and so be fitted voluntarily and intelligently to receive from God the end, the completion of that of which he had accepted the beginning in ignorance. So God who had been the beginning before man rightly knew Him or fully understood what His purpose was, is longed for and welcomed as the end, as the All in All.

It is this way, too, in the pursuit of humility. To every Christian the command comes from the throne of God Himself: humble yourself. The earnest attempt to listen and obey will be rewarded--yes, rewarded--with the painful discovery of two things. The first is what depth of pride there was that one never knew, that is, what unwillingness to count oneself and to be counted by others as nothing, to submit absolutely to God. The other, what utter impotence there is in all our efforts and in all our prayers for God's help, to destroy the hideous monster.

Blessed is the man who now learns to put his hope in God and, in spite of all the power of pride within him, to persevere in acts of humiliation before God and men. We know the law of human nature: acts produce habits, habits breed dispositions, dispositions form the will, and the rightly-formed will is character. It is not otherwise in the work of grace. As acts, persistently repeated, beget habits and dispositions, and these strengthen the will, He who works both to will and to do comes with His mighty power and Spirit.

The humbling of the proud heart with which the penitent saint cast himself so often before God, is rewarded with the "more grace" of the humble heart in which the Spirit of Jesus has conquered and brought the new nature to its maturity. He the meek and lowly One, now dwells there for ever.

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will exalt you. Wherein does the exaltation consist? The highest glory of the creature is in being only a vessel, to receive and enjoy and show forth the glory of God. It can do this only as it is willing to be nothing in itself that God may be all. Water always fills first the lowest places. The lower, the emptier a man lies before God, the speedier and the fuller will be the inflow of the divine glory.

The exaltation God promises is not, it cannot be any external thing apart from Himself. All that He has to give or can give is only more of Himself, Himself to take more complete possession. The exaltation is not like an earthly prize, something arbitrary in no necessary connection with the conduct to be rewarded. No, but it is in its very nature the effect and result of the humbling of ourselves. It is nothing but the gift of such a divine indwelling humility, such a conformity to and possession of the humility of the Lamb of God, as fits us for receiving fully the indwelling of God.

He that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Of the truth of these words Jesus Himself is the proof. Of the certainty of their fulfillment to us He is the pledge. Let us take His yoke upon us and learn of Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart. If we are but willing to stoop to Him, as He has stooped to us, He will yet stoop to each one of us again, and we shall find ourselves not unequally yoked with Him.

As we enter deeper into the fellowship of His humiliation, and either humble ourselves or bear the humbling of men, we can count upon it that the Spirit of His exaltation, "the Spirit of God and of glory" will rest upon us. The presence and the power of the glorified Christ will come to them that are of a humble spirit. When God can again have His rightful place in us, He will lift us up.

Make His glory your care in humbling yourself. He will make your glory His care in perfecting your humility, and breathing into you as your abiding life, the very Spirit of His Son. As the all-pervading life of God possesses you, there will be nothing so natural and nothing so sweet as to be nothing, with not a thought or wish for self because all is occupied with Him who filleth all. "Most gladly will I glory in my weakness, that the strength of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Cor. 12:9).

Have we not here the reason that our consecration and our faith have availed so little in the pursuit of holiness? It was by self and its strength that the work was done under the name of faith. It was for self and its happiness that God was called in. It was unconsciously but still truly, in self and its holiness that the soul rejoiced. We never knew that humility, absolute, abiding, Christlike humility and self-effacement, pervading and marking our whole life with God and man, was the most essential element of the life of the holiness we sought for.

It is only in the possession of God that I lose myself. As it is in the height and breadth and glory of the sunshine that the littleness of the speck playing in its beams is seen, even so humility is the taking our place in God's presence to be nothing but a speck dwelling in the sunlight of His love.

"How great is God! How small am I!
Lost, swallowed up in Love's immensity!
God only there, not I."

May God teach us to believe that to be humble, to be nothing in His presence, is the highest attainment and the fullest blessing of the Christian life. He speaks to us: "I dwell in the high and holy place, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit" (Isa. 57:15). Be this our portion!