More on Humility
God wants me to be third, never first. God comes first, my neighbor second, and I am third!
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
Abraham teaches us the right way of conversing with God: "And Abraham fell on his face, and God talked with him." When we plead with Him, our faces should be in the dust.
Richard Cecil Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.
Prayer must be humble: God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Here St. James tells us that God does not listen to the prayers of the proud, but resists them; while, on the other hand, he is always ready to hear the prayers of the humble.
Teach me. Lord, my true condition;
Bring me childlike to Thy knee;
Stripped of every low ambition,
Willing to be led by Thee.
It is always the secure who are humble.
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