Broken and Refined

I am blessed beyond measure to have a wonderful ladies Bible study here in Swaziland. When I joined them we began by studying the Israelite’s wilderness journey. God was taking me on my own journey as he began to bring to the surface my own pride issue. An issue that had been pointed out to me before, but something that I don’t think I would have recognized or admitted to if I was still living in the States.

Along the journey I was learning why I was walking through many trials. Deuteronomy 8: 2 says: “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.” The Lord used that time to break me in many ways as I was required to humble myself before Him on a regular basis. As I walked through this refining time of my journey God used many areas of my life to point me to Him.

In a conversation with a short term team member I was made aware of something CS Lewis said:

It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices (pride) can smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life… It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly… For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

The way it was put by the team member was that pride was the worst kind of sin because we do not always recognize it. This hit me like a ton of bricks. This man had no idea what I was going through or what God was doing in my life. It was exactly what I needed to hear as the Lord gently reminded me, “this is for your good.”