| A Place of Hope |
| A Place of Hope |
At New Vision Fellowship we are exploring what it means to be Good Neighbors. The core of this exploration is to become more and more like Christ, allowing the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, so that we reflect Jesus in our everyday lives through our actions, through our choices, through the way we use our resources and time, and through the way we treat others. In order to reflect Jesus fairly to the world, we must practice the same kind of humility as Christ; a self-sacrificial humility. We often consider the opposite of humility as pride, but Jesus didn’t come to earth and live among us in humility to save us from pride. Jesus came in humility to save us from judgment. In this case, it is not pride that is the opposite of humility; rather it is judgment that is the opposite of humility.
It is when we are sitting on the seat of judgment that we are the least like Christ. It is when we give up the idea that we somehow sit above others or through our actions and words consider ourselves better than, that we are becoming closer to the person Jesus was and is. Sometimes our knee-jerk reaction to the suggestion that we think of ourselves as better than others, or simply put that we are judgmental, is defensiveness and a lot of examples of ways we are not judging. However, a part of the way we process and make decisions about things every day is through judgment. Within the first 5-10 seconds of meeting someone we have already made a judgment about that person. How far this judgment is carried and how much impact it has on our choices and actions is where we need to focus.
