Royal Insignia, compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, contains many inspiring quotations on varied aspects of humility which, as the title suggests, is the badge of every true believer in Christ. The following excerpts are on the subject of nothingness, a subject none too popular in today’s culture but indispensible, nevertheless, to those of us who strive to follow in our Master’s footsteps.
Thus though worn, and tried, and tempted,
Glorious calling, saint, is thine;
Let the Lord but find thee emptied,
Living branch in Christ, the Vine!
Vessels of the world’s despising,
Vessels weak, and poor, and base,
Bearing wealth God’s heart is prizing,
Glory from Christ’s blessed face.
Oh to be but emptier, lowlier,
Mean, unnoticed, and unknown,
And to God a vessel holier,
Filled with Christ and Christ alone!
Naught of earth to cloud the glory,
Naught of self the light to dim,
Telling forth His wondrous story,
Emptied, to be filled with Him.
–Paul Gerhardt, Royal Insignia, p. 108
We are nothing unless we abide in God; we can do nothing apart from Christ. We know and admit this as a doctrine, but to realize it as a fact, painful and humbling experience is often needed. But in this lowest humiliation is our true and highest exaltation. God takes all things from us that we may turn again to Him as our sure Portion; He makes us feel our weakness, our poverty, our ignorance, in order that we may return to Him.—Adolph Saphir in The Hidden Life, quoted in Royal Insignia, p. 112
Beware of too sublime a sense
Of your own worth and consequence.
The man who dreams himself so great,
And his importance of such weight,
That all around in all that’s done
Must move and act for him alone,
Will learn in school of tribulation
The folly of his expectation.
—William Cowper. Royal Insignia, p. 114
Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.
Royal Insignia is a collection of 98 two-page readings on the subject of humility and is compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey. One of these readings is entitled “The low door of the cross,” and contains a poem written by Annie Johnson Flint who was barred from entering her chosen career as a concert pianist by crippling arthritis.
“Oh, straight and narrow is the door,
The little door of loss,
By which we enter in to Christ,
The low door of the Cross:
But when we put away our pride,
And in contrition come,
We find it is the only way
That leads to God and Home.
“Oh, strait and lowly are the doors
By which Christ comes to us;
We bar the entrance gates of joy,
And when He finds them thus,
By strange, small doors of woe and want,
Of trial and of pain,
He enters in to share our lives
To our eternal gain.
“The narrow doors He brings us to,
The little doors and low,
What large rooms they will open on,
If we will only go:
The strange, small doors of work and want,
Strait doors of grief and pain,
What riches they will lead us to!
What everlasting gain!” Royal Insignia, p. 78
In the next reading, “The Door of Destitution,” there is a quotation along the same lines by Oswald Chambers, taken from his book, He Shall Glorify Me:
“We learn to welcome the patience of Jesus only when we get to the point of human destitution. It is not that God will not do anything for us until we get there, but that He cannot. God can do nothing for me if I am sufficient for myself. When we come to the place of destitution spiritually we find the Lord waiting, and saying, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.’ There are hundreds at the place of destitution and they don’t know what they want. If I have been obeying the command of Jesus to ‘go and make disciples’ I know what they want; they want Him. We are so interested in our own spiritual riches that souls are white unto harvest all around us and we don’t reap one for Him.
Some men enter the Kingdom of Heaven through crushing, tragic, overwhelming conviction of sin, but they are not the greatest number; the greatest number enter the Kingdom along this line of spiritual destitution—no power to lay hold of God, no power to do what I ought to do, utterly poverty-stricken.” Royal Insignia, p. 69.
“Is it wrong, the wish to be great?” asks young Willie of his father in George MacDonald’s poem “Willie’s Question. ” The following two stanzas are taken from the end of the poem and summarize the father’s response:
“The Man Who was Lord of fate,
Born in an ox’s stall,
Was great because He was much too great
To care about greatness at all. . . .
The following quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry the Eighth, contains a truth that is reiterated time after time in Scripture:
“His overthrow heaped happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little!”
Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their online Christian Bookstore.
“He that is down needs fear no fall;
He that is low no pride;
He that is humble, ever shall
Have God to be his guide.”
—John Bunyan. Royal Insignia, p. 66
“In all the copious language of the Greeks,” says John Wesley, “there was not one word for humility till it was made by the great Apostle Paul. The whole Roman language, even with all the improvements of the Augustan age, does not afford so much as a name for humility.”—Royal Insignia, p. 69/em>
The above quote was taken from a reading entitled “The Venom of Pride.” In the same reading we have the following comment by Spurgeon on this “venom.” “There never was a saint yet that grew proud of his fine feathers, but what the Lord plucked them out by and by. There never yet was an angel that had pride in his heart, but he lost his wings and fell in Gehenna, as Satan and those fallen angels did. And there never shall be a saint who indulges self-conceit and pride and self-confidence, but the Lord will spoil his glories and trample his honors in the mire.”
—Royal Insignia, p. 69
“During the eight years that I labored in the Church as a lay catechist,” he Writes in 1735, “I never attempted expressly to interpret the Scriptures—that is to say, to positively declare that an apostle or a prophet meant to say such and such a thing when the matter was not so clear that every one, whether a Christian or not, would understand it in the same sense.
“Although,” says he, in a letter written in 1729, “I am and Wish to remain a member of the Evangelical Church, I do not limit Christ and His truth to any sect. Whosoever believes that he is saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus, by living faith, that is to say whosoever seeks and finds in Him Wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, he is my brother, and I regard it as a useless and even injurious task to examine into his opinions on other matters, and to sit in judgment on his exegesis. In this sense they are right who say that it does not much trouble me that some are heterodox, but only in this sense.”
MALCOLM Muggeridge was a searcher after truth for many years. In the course of this search, he traveled to Russia in order to explore the possibilities of Communism, only to be bitterly disappointed and disillusioned. Finally, he found in Christ the End of his search and exhorts us thus: “Let us as Christians rejoice that we see around us on every hand the decay of the institutions and instruments of power; intimations of empires falling to pieces, money in total disarray, dictators and parliamentarians alike nonplussed by the confusion and conflicts which encompass them.
Are we often tempted to think, in the depth of our hearts, that perhaps, after all, God is not quite enough. So many self-sufficient people seem successful while those who trust in the Lord often appear to be just that little bit behind the times. Is God really and truly sufficient for every situation and for every need? Our Lord died an apparent failure, discredited by the leaders of established religion, rejected by society, and forsaken by His friends. The man who ordered Him to the cross was the successful statesman whose hand the ambitious hack politician kissed. It took the Resurrection to demonstrate how gloriously Christ had triumphed and how tragically the governor had failed. —A. W. Tozer. p. 30
Since Pentecost, God’s instruments have become nothing through Calvary. They have learned that willpower or any other human force can never make a man small enough to be able at all times to let God have all the glory. It is a precious moment when a weary soul asks earnestly and in faith, “Lord, let me be nothing; let me die with Thee.”
—E. F. Harvey. P. 42
Too many are waiting for God to move upon them, when they ought to be prevailing upon Him. We may all sing, “God is still on the Throne,” but I wonder who is sitting upon yours? He stood in honor of His faithful martyr, Stephen, and, no doubt, would stand more often if we gave Him occasion to do so. It is not a matter of whether or not we have numbers— but do we have God? Someone has said, “If God be for us, what difference does it make who is against us?” Anyone plus God is a sufficiency. Some of history’s greatest conflicts have been decided by a minority of men in the hands of Divinity. —George Bowen.
Taken from, “Royal Insignia,” published by, Harvey Christian Publishers Inc.
But it is with the human mind when God enables it to grasp some truth as it is with children or with savages when some one gives to them a compass or a watch. They are absorbed in it; they put it to all sorts of uses. They never rest till they have spoiled it. The human mind when in possession of some new truth is not content till it has turned it into an error. Every tendency, every school, every Church in this way parodies itself. In this way the pietiests exaggerated or rather falsified and denaturalised piety itself, just as the orthodox had exaggerated orthodoxy, and as we shall see the disciples of Zinzendorf transform into puerility that Christian simplicity which had been their most precious treasure.
The asceticism of Spener soon became in most of his disciples, a spirit of minute and pharisaic legalism. Starting from the plausible principle that there are no indifferent works, they came to magnify the importance of the most insignificant actions, to regulate everything, and to make the Christian life consist in the performance of certain acts of devotion, and in the renunciation of certain so-called worldly pleasures. The little devotional meetings, which Spener wished to be “little Churches within the Church,” came to regard themselves as the only Church, outside which there was no salvation. Hence a most intolerant spiritual pride which compensated the little for their lack of worldly position, and which in the great, became an aliment to their exclusiveness.
We shall see these aberrations of pietism manifesting themselves in deadly opposition to Zinzendorf and his work. At the moment of his birth, however, the revival was still in its pristine purity.
From, “Count Zinzendorf” by Felix Bovet, available from Harvey Christian Publishers Inc.
