Always Take the Down Elevator — Jim Cymbala

In the study of theology and the study of Bible theology, there's layers of truth, or you can look at it as circles of truth. There's foundational truths, and then there's other truths that are intersecting.

There are fundamental truths. And then there are some portions of the Bible not all Christians agree on. The book of Revelation, the proper interpretation of that, prophetic questions, not all Christians over 2 ,000 years have agreed.

If you look at it as circles, there's big circles, and then there's smaller circles that intersect. You know, there's God is, and he sent his son, and Jesus is the very foundation of this word. The Old Testament looks forward to his coming.

The New Testament covers his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and then the epistles look back on him. Paul and Peter and other John writing look back on Jesus. Then there's the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

These are foundational. These are right at the bottom. And then there's intersecting circles to that big main circle, let's say, the importance of giving. There's intersecting circles like the importance of service.

They're all truths in the Bible, and they're intersecting, and they all relate together. But there are some foundational things that are so overwhelmingly true that if you miss them, you're gonna be building, but you're gonna be missing some of the bricks on the bottom, and you will suffer for it.

Humility as a Foundational Truth

And I wanna talk about one of those deep, deep foundational truths of how we relate to God, how we can grow in God, how to receive from God. To me, it is the very bottom of foundational importance for our lives as we put our faith in Christ.

It can be seen anywhere in the Bible. You can see it in Genesis. You can see it all the way to Revelation. In the biographies of people in the Bible, you'll see it. You'll see it act out in one way for the positive.

You'll act out one way in the negative. And the name of this message is always take the down elevator. Always take the down elevator. I picked this story because it came to my heart this week. It's about a king named Jehoshaphat.

Now, Jehoshaphat is one of the positive great kings in Jerusalem in the history of Judah, the southern kingdom of Judah. They had some bad kings. They had some really good kings. His father was a great king, Asa.

Jehoshaphat was a great king. He had weaknesses in his personality, but who of us don't? He had some character flaws. He kept making alliances with people who were ungodly. He did so many good things, but then he kept just making treaties and trying to go to war with people who hated God, like he had a blind spot.

But don't we all? Don't we all? But this great king had done a lot of good things, got rid of the idolatry that was creeping into the country. He was a real example of his great, great, great, great grandfather, David, and then out of nowhere, the bottom falls out.

And when the bottom falls out of your life, you find out where you're at. Anybody looks good on a sunny day, but when the thunder comes and the lightning flashes, then you find out what's going on. So here's what happened to him.

Jehoshaphat’s Prayer in the Face of Crisis

Let's look. After this, the Moabites and the Ammonites, with some of the Meunites, a lot of ites in those days, as you can tell, came to make war on Jehoshaphat. Some men came and told Jehoshaphat, a vast army is coming against you from Edom.

That's the south. From the other side of the sea, it is already in Hazazon, Tamar, that is, and Gedi. Alarmed, Jehoshaphat resolved to inquire of the Lord, like what to do, and he proclaimed a fast for all Judah.

The people of Judah came together to seek help from the Lord. Indeed, they came from every town in Judah to seek him. Then Jehoshaphat stood up in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem at the temple of the Lord in the front of the new courtyard, and he said, and now here's his prayer.

O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you. O our God, did you not drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people, Israel, and give it forever to the descendants of Abraham, your friend?

They have lived in it and have built in it a sanctuary for your name, saying, if calamity comes upon us, whether the sword of judgment, we messed up, or plague, or famine, we will stand in your presence before this temple that bears your name, and we'll cry out to you in our distress, and you will hear us and save us.

But now, hear our men from Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, whose territory you would not allow Israel to invade when they came up from Egypt. So they turned away from them and did not destroy them. See how they are now repaying us by coming to drive us out of the possession you gave us as an inheritance.

O our God, will you not judge them? For we have no power. We have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do. We not only don't have the power, we don't know what to do.

But our eyes are upon you. And all the men of Judah, with their wives and children and little ones, stood there before the Lord. What an absolute helpless picture. Jehoshaphat's the king, they gathered the family, the children, they're overwhelmingly outnumbered, don't know what to do, don't have the power to face this army, don't know what stirred up these people to go and do it.

He makes one of the great prayers, and here they all are standing, and while they're praying, the armies are moving toward them to destroy them. And what those armies did not know was that they were cooked.

They were gonna be defeated, as the next verses tell us. Because what had happened is the greatest thing that can ever happen to someone who believes in God. They humbled themselves. And when you and I humble ourselves before God, it's all over.

When he said, we have no power, and we don't know what to do, it was all over. Because anytime God hears somebody say, from their heart, I cannot do this, I don't know what to do, this thing is too big for me, the moment you say that and mean it, all the power of heaven starts working on your behalf.

Can we say amen to that? Now, this book, as I mentioned, is full of histories of other kings. Some were like Jehoshaphat and humbled themselves. We'll get to definitions in a moment. And some were not like Jehoshaphat.

They were full, not of the devil, something worse than being full of the devil. They were full of themselves. Because you can cast out the devil, but when you're full of yourself and I'm full of myself, that's a whole other kind of problem.

God Lifts the Humble and Opposes the Proud

This is the basic principle in the Bible. Whenever we go down, God will lift us up. Whenever we go up in pride, God swears himself that he will bring us down. Did you hear what I just said? There's a principle in the Bible from beginning to end.

Whatever goes up will come down. But reversing the law of gravity, whatever goes down in true humility, God says, I will fight for you. This is repugnant to the world. Humility is repugnant to the media, to politicians, to athletes, to Broadway.

Humility is ridiculous. We live in a society, and it goes back to the Roman Empire, had no use for the term humility. In fact, at certain times, there was no word for humility. And the philosophers mocked anyone who would be humble.

Weakness of that kind was looked down upon like, what are you, a loser? And God reverses the whole thing and says, no, losers are winners. And the winners are the losers. The people who strut around and are sure of themselves and say, I can handle this, they're the ones that God says, I swear to you, I will bring you down.

It's, I'll just pick one verse from a psalm. Look at it, Psalm 18, I believe. Verse 27, here's a law, here's the law, here's an absolute law. Like things fall at 32 feet per second, like water boils at a certain temperature, here's another law from God.

God says, I save the humble, but I bring low those whose eyes are haughty. In all places, at all times, eventually, God says, everyone who is humble, I will save them and deliver them. But anyone who's haughty in their eyes, looks down at other people, doesn't feel their need of God, God swears, that person I will bring down.

The theologians aren't sure why God has this tremendous aversion to this sin more than any other sin in the Bible. It never says in the Bible that God resists the immoral, that he resists the homosexual.

It never says God resists the thief, never says that. Are those sins? Will God judge those sins? Yes, but it says this, God resists the proud. That word there in the Greek means, he sets himself as an army general with full battle array, with all battalions behind him.

God sets himself against, what is this person that he's so against? The proud, the proud. We don't handle that like that in church. No, pride is not something we deal with. If someone shoots up, snorts some cocaine, if somebody gets involved with someone else sexually, we say, you know what, that's wrong, we gotta deal with that.

But the sin of pride, that can be in the pulpit. It can be in the minister. It can be in the church, proud of your church. Not proud of Jesus, proud of your church. Proud of your denomination, proud, proud, proud.

Proud of your singing ability. The very thing that God can gift somebody with can destroy them, because the gift makes them forget who gave them a gift, and they think like they have that gift on their own.

Pride, Lucifer, and the Fall

Now, some of the theologians have said that the reason God feels this way is this is what ruined his universe. Before the earth was created, he made these beautiful angels, that one time they were not, then they were.

Angels are not eternal. And the most beautiful of the angels was named Lucifer. And the Bible hints at some mysterious moment when Lucifer's heart was lifted up in pride. He didn't want to give God all the glory.

He wanted to keep some for himself, because of the beauty that God gave him. I mean, if you have everything from God, how would you want to fight against God? If God gave you everything you have, how could you strut around when you got it from someone else?

Like pride is a kind of spiritual, moral insanity. People who are proud are like off, bonkers. They're crazy. We get crazy, all of us, because we're all proud. We all have to deal with this. We have everything from God, but we act like it's ours, and we strut, and we look down at other people, because they can't do something we think like we can.

But we didn't originate it, it came from God. And some people think that when God picks up that scent of pride, it reminds them of what Lucifer did. Let a rebellion in heaven itself was cast out of heaven.

Jesus said, I saw Lucifer, I saw Satan cast out of heaven. Became Satan, or the devil, and now we have all this mess. But how did it start? What was the first sin? Don't think Adam and Eve. The first sin was pride.

And the world, that is the world. That's why the Bible says, if anybody loves God, they can't love the world. Anyone who loves the world cannot love God, because one of the traits of the world is the pride of life.

You are somebody. I am somebody. Let's go to definition. So what is humility? Humility is understanding in God's reality who we really are. Weak, needing help, unsure how long we'll live, very immortal, prone to error.

Our righteousness is like filthy rags. The word there means the menstrual rags of a woman. That's not our sins. That's our righteousness. So imagine in God's sight, our righteousness is like those filthy rags, and people walk around like they're somebody.

I won't get any amens, but Lord, give me strength here to keep going here. When you preach on humility, you don't have people running the building. But is this not true? How do you know you'll wake up tomorrow?

Look at me, tell me what guarantee you have. I said, look at me and tell me what guarantee that you'll wake up tomorrow. Oh, you got all kinds of plans. We got all kinds of plans. We're gonna do this, we're gonna do that.

You don't even know that the next breath is in God's hands. Am I right or wrong? When we lost four people on 9 -11, more than any church in the city, none of them woke up in the morning and said, this is the last day I'm gonna live.

Nobody thought that. You're just gone. Your life is a vapor. Think of the madness of pride when looked down upon from heaven. Here are little ants that don't know how long they live strutting about, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that.

And the angels must be like, they're nuts. Folks are crazy. So humility is just seeing yourself in your proper perspective before God. That's all it is. It's not talking bad about yourself because some people are pride and they just always down themselves and they verbally do it all the time because they want you to argue with them and say, no, you're good, no, you're nice.

That's false humility, right? People who just, so it's not moping around, it's not being negative. It's being totally healthy and just real about life. I need him every day. When he humbled himself, what was the king saying?

He was saying, we have no power against these enemies. Verdad, true. It's true, we don't have power. We can't fight them. They got two million, we got 500 ,000. These are not good numbers. We don't know what to do.

We don't know a strategy. And when God sees anybody face that and tell the truth, he said, now I will work on your behalf because I will get the glory now. The moment we say, no, I can do this. My mama didn't raise no fool.

I can do this. I got a college degree. We're telling God we have a college degree. He knows everything. We got a college degree. Just think, just think about that. So to be humble is not to be negative.

It's just to realize in God's sight who we are. To be proud is to live in a kind of dream world that we have something that God didn't give us. The Bible says that even about spiritual things or about physical things, are you pretty?

Are you handsome? That's a gift from God. Are you strong? Do you have a good body? Can you sing? All we can do in life is receive from God. Every good and perfect gift comes down from God. And why God wants us to be humble is he wants us to give us more gifts.

But only the humble can reach out because the humble alone have empty hands and the humble alone are feeling their need and that's who God gives to. Everyone who's content with themselves and feel they're superior or adequate in themselves, God resists that and says, you have that much?

You won't reach? And look to me? Then fine, you're on your own. I know that from my own life. My worst days have been when I've been strutting around thinking I could do something. What in the world can I do?

What in the world can you do? Pastor Symbol, don't say that. You're a good man. Listen, let's talk real talk, okay? Do we all need God every moment of every day? Lift up both your hands if you know that.

We need God. Forget to do anything, just to breathe. How about to eat? How about to sleep? If he takes sleep away from you, you'll be up for the next week. Everything we have is a gift from God. You would think we would just be walking around praising him all the time, but no.

We walk around like this is ours. All a human can be is a receiving vessel. God created us so that we have nothing in ourselves we only receive each day. Gifting, breath, food, grace. Why humility is so important to God, let me wrap this up.

Humility in Worship and Gratitude

Humility is so important to God and to us is because it glorifies God, it blesses us, and it always shows kindness to others. A humble person is gonna be the person who worships. See, we can encourage people to give, and that's right, it's in the Psalms.

Lift your hands, all you people. Bless the Lord. David, the psalmist, and others are telling the people, come on, praise him. But the people who truly worship God are the humble because they realize everything I have comes from him.

Oh God, I praise you. Proud people can't worship. They can lift their hands, they can sing songs, but they can't worship in spirit and in truth because they don't have a spirit of gratitude because they're full of themselves.

When you're empty and you realize everything, listen, brothers and sisters, I don't know about your life, let me speak for myself. If it wasn't for God, I would never even be here today. I could've died in a crash in Argentina when my car, the car I was in sitting in the back seat was flying off into the air with two trucks coming on two-lane road, one trying to pass the other, and now the trucks were, I don't know how many yards in front of us, coming at 70 miles an hour, and the driver just went off and we went flying into the night into a banquina, a ditch, but we went off because of the drop.

We were just flying in the road. The only thing that preserved me was God. What was I gonna do when I'm in a car going 60 miles an hour into nowhere? Who's gonna protect me but God? Why are you here today?

All the stuff that you've been through in life, all the diseases you could've caught, all the things that happened to others that didn't happen to you, come on, do we have a lot to thank God for today?

All of us, behind me, in front of me, everything we have comes from God. Everything we have, name anything you have, are you smart? God gave you that intelligence. Can you go to work every day? He gave you the strength.

Do you have somebody who's helped you through life when you were weak? God gave you that help. Name anything in your life, it came from God. We should be so humble. We should be just walking, praising Him all day long.

What, in a mood, I don't feel like praising God today? You don't feel like praising God. You only have a day because God gave it to you. Amen. One more time, let's just thank Him. We thank you, God. The more humble a church gets, the sweeter and deeper the praise.

The more humble a preacher is, the more God can use them because then God knows He'll get all the glory. If a preacher's full of himself, he can make himself the focus and instead of pointing to God, come on, you see that on TV.

It's all about the preacher. He's playing to the camera. That red light goes on and he turns into an actor. Am I wrong or right here? Come on. I've seen that, my wife and I've seen that since we were kids.

Is that the way to represent Jesus Christ? Now, I haven't even talked about our sins. All our sins are gone. Did you know there's not one record, anything you ever did wrong in your whole life? As far as the East is from the West, God has wiped it away.

And on top of that, He hasn't let others know some of the boneheaded things you and I have done. Oh, I didn't get an amen, but I got laughter. But that laughter was a little nervous, like thank you, Jesus, while I'm laughing.

Come on, how many can thank God for His mercy? There's somebody here in the building that before they got saved, among other things, they stole from stores. They did credit card stuff and they did stealing from stores.

So this person's picture was wanted and posted in some department stores. So when they came to church here and they found the Lord, they were almost a little leery of meeting me or Pastor Johnson, the NYPD, on top of that.

They were a little bit nervous because they thought because when you've sinned and you've messed up, you're very self-conscious of it, aren't you? Aren't we? Then, oh no, they've seen my picture in Macy's or wherever it was, right?

But to God, it's like you never even did it. Come on, who is a God like our God, full of mercy and compassion? Humility is so important because it secures all the praise and honor and glory, glory that God deserves.

Humility, Worship, and Receiving God’s Blessings

That's why you can't get proud people to praise God. You can work them up in a frenzy. You can run them around the building. You could teach them the new praise and worship song, but worship is not about the song.

I don't get that about people. There's this craze about praise and worship music as if the song, look, I thank God for a good song to praise God with, but the Father seeks those who will worship him in spirit and in truth, and that means sincerity and that means humility, and that means in, oh God, you're awesome.

You can praise God more on walking on Fulton Street tomorrow than you could in this church. All you have to do is be full of gratitude, but who, a proud person can't be full of gratitude because they think they don't have anybody to thank.

Proud people don't say thank you, not to God or anyone else. They figure they deserve everything in life, but also humility is the best thing for us. When God tells us to humble ourselves, he's not saying, now look, I don't want you enjoying life.

I want you humble. I want you down. I want you in sackcloth and ashes. No, God's not like that. He loves his children, so when he tells us to humble ourselves, what he's saying is, get into the position that I can give you all my blessings.

Do you get it? God's not trying to rain on your parade my parade. God is saying, all my graces flow down, and like Spurgeon said, the great British preacher, God keeps his best wine in the lowest part of the cellar.

It's when you go down that he can pour in. When you go up, he steps away, so he wants us to be blessed. Just think of the joy and the peace that some of us are lacking today, or the financial resources, or whatever.

It's not because God doesn't want to. It's because we're too, excuse me, too stinking proud to humble ourselves and say, God, I can't make it without you. God, I can't make it without you. God, I don't know what to do.

When God sees that, of course he's gonna help us. I've never humbled myself once in my life that God didn't break through and help me, but many times, we, instead of looking at God, we look at the means that God will use, like that time that man was worth, what was it, 700 million, and he was visiting our church, and we were in real financial need, not even finished with this building project, and he was gonna be there.

We're sitting right in the middle of that section, and someone told me, he's coming. The man's worth $700 million, almost a billionaire, and I just, in my mind, I said, we're in such need. I bet when the offering basket comes, he's just gonna take piles of money and just drop them in.

They're gonna need like a big pan to just take all that money. Oh, did God rebuke me severely? During the meeting, he said to me, right while I was standing here, who do you have your eyes on, him or me?

Yeah, exactly, that's what I went like, help me, Jesus, but we're all like that, aren't we? We look at the means rather than the supplier. We look at the job and the economy as if that's the one who's gonna help us.

God is gonna help us. So when he says, humble yourselves, he's not saying, I wanna rain on your parade. He's saying, get in the position where I can give you all that I have promised for you, because I resist the proud.

People who are full of themselves and don't feel their need of me, who live in some altered reality like they have something that they can manage with, this is the spirit of the world. This is why the Bible says, if anyone loves this world, the love of the Father's not in them, because what's in the world?

The pride of life, you strut. You don't walk humbly. Athletes strut. Movie actors and actresses strut. And if there is a humble one, then the media will turn against that athlete. They'll turn against that athlete.

What are you, a religious fanatic? If you bow and thank God for something or you honor God for something, ah, that guy's a fanatic. But if a guy says, yeah, I'm gonna do it even worse next time, then that's, oh, that's my man.

That is beautiful. I don't wanna be like that. How many wanna be more like Jesus? Now this is the amazing thing here, is that Jesus had no sins to be humbled by, but he was the most humble that ever lived.

Think of that. He had no sins to be ashamed of, but he said, take my yoke upon you, for I am meek and lowly, and you'll find rest. All the turmoil that we have in our lives, 98 of it comes from pride.

Who said that about me? What? I bought that new dress, and she has a nicer dress. Or whatever. But if we were dead to that and we were humble, whatever, I have my God, and he will supply, he will take care of me.

No, just think of all the tension that comes, sleeplessness that comes from pride. We think we have to accomplish it instead of giving it to God. This is why the New Testament says this. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will what?

Support. And then in 1 Peter, look. Young men, in the same way, be submissive to those who are older. All of you, all of you, everybody, starting with the pastor, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because God opposes the proud.

There's that law again. But he gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he might lift you up in due time. God's gonna lift you up. And when God wants to lift someone up, do you think anybody can hold him down?

And when God wants to bring someone down, do you think anybody can prop that person up? Lastly, humility makes us kind to other people. How many agree with me? It's nice when you run into kind people, right?

Humility Produces Kindness Instead of Judgment

And that's a good lesson for all of us. You win more people with kindness than you do yelling at them. Some people are terrible witnesses of Christ because they're so mean. Who would want to be like them, you know?

Receive Jesus and be like me. No, I pass on that for a while. Am I right? Here's the way it is with humble people. Humble people aren't anxious to judge anyone because they're so aware of their mistakes and God has shown mercy on them.

You know, you meet people, they're enthralled with their opinion. It's like expressing their opinion about everything is like the ultimate for them. Humble people aren't interested in that. They just want to say an encouraging word because they know how hard life is.

Life is hard. People don't need to be pulled down, they need to be lifted up. Oh, but Pastor Cimbala, what I see in that person, oh yeah, and what does God see in you? Well, look at me, what does God see in you?

Have you been so great? You don't have any days that you wish were erased? God hasn't forgiven you of things that you're ashamed of? Look at me and tell me that you've been perfect, then I'll receive it from you.

So who are you and I to judge anyone? That's our stinking pride. That's our pride that makes us look down and say, Jesus said, who set you as the judge over someone else? I thought God is the judge and he's worthy of judging, he knows all things.

But you and I are not competent to be a judge. You want to judge yourself? Look in the mirror. You want to judge somebody? Take a good look. Like that song that says, Heaven on My Mind. I got no time for he said, she said, they said.

Because it's enough just to check myself out. How many have found that if you just check yourself out, you got a lot of work to do? Could you lift your hand? Right? A humble person, see, a humble person who sees themselves in God's reality, not in fantasy.

They don't have much to say about anybody. Because they go, wait a minute, after he's done all this for me and forgiven me of so much. You know, it's like that funny parable that Jesus gave. He said, some of you, you're trying to pick a speck out of your sister's eye, take your glasses off.

The only trouble is, you got a two by four in your own eye. It's kind of hard with a two by four to be going in there and saying, sister, your eye is really messed up. And you got a two by four. Isn't that the way it is with proud people?

And we've all done it. One thing we're all in unity about this is that we've all lived in pride. Oh, pride. And sometimes God will put you down right in your highest, proudest moment, right? How many ever had?

A Personal Lesson in Pride

I was the captain of the basketball team at Erasmus Hall. And it all happened for me quickly. And there were cheerleaders and girls who just wanted to go out with the basketball players. And I went by a different name there.

They called me Jim Cimbala then. I lost my name for about a good six years. It wasn't Cimbala, it was Cimbala. There was this one cheerleader. You know, every time I scored, she would go. I know you don't believe that, but it's true.

It's true. Well, anyway, so I went to her one time and I said, pretty little Jewish girl lived right off of Foppish Avenue, Cortellia Road. I went, after the game tonight, you wanna go out to have like some pizza or something?

And she went, me? I went, yeah, we'll go out. It was an easy game. I knew we were gonna win. I knew I'd be in a good mood. So we went out. Come on, I'm being open here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't look at me like you never had a moment like this. So don't, don't, don't. Don't be liars on top of being proud. That's not a good comment. So anyway, we went, I just went by it the other night. I spoke somewhere on Friday night in Brooklyn and came down Foppish Avenue with a deacon, deaconess in the church.

Went right by Beverly Road, Foppish Avenue, right there. There was a pizzeria tie-in place. So there she is and there I am and we're sitting and we're eating and I was so full of myself. Oh, like it even stunk to me and I was the one being proud.

So the waiter came and we just had some pizza or something and I had a bottle of Coke or soda with two straws in it and she was there looking at me and we're talking and whatever I was doing anyway and no, I knew she liked me and I thought, wow, basketball player.

So as she's talking, I was talking to her. I wanted to like fasten my eyes on her so that I would just keep looking at her and I went to drink the Coke, forgetting that there were two straws in it. And as I went to sip it, both the straws went directly up my nose.

Directly up my nose. And I knew, I knew that the straws were up my nose and she looked at me strangely like, why are those straws up your nose? But the bottle was still there and unfortunately when I took it away, the straws stayed just hanging right out with Coca-Cola dripping from the bottom.

She never looked at me the same after that. Like, whatever goes up. Don't you have a story like that somewhere in your life? Anybody here have a story like that somewhere in your life? In different ways, God can just show you that you're a mess.

Taking the Down Elevator Through Servanthood

The Bible now gives a command and let's do it the best we can today. It says, humble yourself under the mighty hand of God. Now, to be humble and try to humble yourself is hard because we're so proud, you can't trust your pride to get humble.

Am I right? You have to say to God, God, give me a meek spirit. Help me to see myself the way I really am because it'll give honor and glory to you. It'll bring me to a place of blessing and receiving.

I don't want to miss God's blessings because of my pride, but he does resist the proud. And thirdly, I want to be a blessing to other people and humility makes you a servant, doesn't make you a judge.

Most people want to be judges. Very few people want to be servants, but humble people want to be servants because they don't think they're worth that much to do anything else. I thought that was profound.

I didn't get one amen. Humble people love to be servants because they don't think they can do anything else. See, you're struggling with this. The greatest Christian in this church is the most humble Christian, the one who God is gonna exalt highest in heaven.