Humility = Loved?

Hope everyone had a very happy Easter! I've been thinking about this post for a long time. It started several weeks ago when I was listening to a local Christian radio station that was doing an interview with Peter Furler, who used to be the lead singer for The Newsboys (Captain Crunch, anyone?).

 

Anyway, the interviewer had been talking with Peter for a while before saying, "It's amazing. You seem like such a humble guy." And I don't want to botch this part, but Peter said something along the lines of, "I think that's because I know I am loved. When you know that you are loved by God you don't have live your life trying to impress everyone."

And that's where I got stuck. I'd never really made a connection before between pride and our desire to impress, between humility and feeling loved. In fact I thought quite the opposite - that you felt pride because you could impress. While that might be true on the surface, I think Peter hit a truer cord with his analysis - we feel pride because we feel like we have to impress, and we feel it even more so when we do actually impress because we feel that false sense of security in ourselves.

What if we dropped that superficial sense of self-worth that we assign ourselves from things that won't last? What if we instead find our worth in the knowledge that God, the creator of the whole universe and beyond, actually loves us? How freeing that would be, and how much less annoying we would all be to be around =) .