I was trying to gather excerpts from this devotional, but it is all good.
"And you shall remember that the LORD your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not."
"To know self is part of knowing the Lord. If we do not know the self, we cannot adequately know the Lord. And when we adequately know the Lord, we know ourself-that we are untrustworthy and that there is nothing good in us. So experientially, the more we get to know the Lord, the more we know ourself in God's light. (Psa.36:9~"In your light we see light.")
The Lord humbled the children of Israel and tested them. Their being humbled came about through many testings and failures. It was not that the Lord needed to learn more about them, or get to know them; but they needed to get to know themselves. It was the same with Peter in the Gospels. Obviously, he was a person full of self-confidence, because he had so many opinions. So the Lord allowed him to fail the most.
We may express our opinion, living it out toward our husband or wife, or toward the brothers and sisters. We are so strong. We feel that we are so right. We are convinced that the other person is wrong and we are right. But then in some area of our personal life, we sin. We live in the flesh. We fail. But we may not connect our opinion with our failure. Yet this failure is intended to cause us to open ourself to the Lord and to tell Him, "Lord, I do not know anything. I cannot do anything. I just open to you, Lord, to cast down not only the sin, but all of my opinion." Through dealing with failures in this way, we are brought more and more to the place of having no confidence in ourself but in the Lord Himself."
Like John the Baptist, we can say,"He must increase; I must decrease."
It is human nature to want the opposite.
But with His increase and our decrease there is peace.
Besides, He can handle the increase. We cannot.~A
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