Proverbs - Don't Honor Yourself

Proverbs 12:9

   

 He that is despised, and hath a servant, is better

 than he that honoureth himself, and lacketh bread.

                                Sometimes we want to give off a good impression regardless of the state of our being.  The Lord Jesus never concerned himself with other people’s opinion of Him.  He focused on pleasing the Father and was so confident in who he was that even if they called Him Beelzebub, the prince of devils, He was not shaken nor needed to defend Himself.

Our true worth is not defined by the evaluation of others.  We may want to appear one way in the eyes of other people to give us a sense of importance or worth.  This leads us to be hypocrites and really we are actually speaking lies with our lives.

The true evaluation of our character is what we really have in our character NOT what we want others to think we have.  We may use social media to present ourselves in a purposefully slanted way to somehow gloss over those things that God has spoken to us to surrender or turn from. We may honor ourselves and try to appear as something we are not only to discover when we are alone that we are lacking the very things we wanted others to think we had.

We are not to decide what to say or what to do based on whether other people will be impressed or be bothered by what we do.  We are to live in a way that pleases God EVEN if others despise us for it.

When we speak up for what is right we may find ourselves despised but, in fact, we are rich in righteousness and our stability and sense of order will be just as if we had servants at our beckoning.  Righteousness will establish us and give us enduring riches. We must focus on doing the will of God rather than exalting ourselves in the eyes of others.

Those who boast in all they are and all they have oftentimes have little enduring riches.  We must be careful not to boast or honor ourselves.  This is very much our pride wanting to exalt our gates and it is so much easier to let people down when they have an inflated view of us.  Let us exalt Christ and boast in our weaknesses that the power of Christ may rest upon us.