Hello friends, brothers and sisters! The Lord gave me a dream last night—or a portion of a dream—just before I had to wake up and start to spend my early morning with Him. You know, I don’t get dreams all that often and when I do, I don’t always know what they mean. So I said, “Lord, if you’re gonna give me a dream, I need to know what it means or else it’s useless. Please explain it to me.” What I clearly remember taking away from my dream was the word “EpiPen®.” I was like, “That’s weird. What’s that about?” And I thought, “Do we need that?” We have four boys (brothers, ages ten to sixteen) that are not ours, but we spend a lot of time with them, we’ve known them for over five years, we take them to church, my wife likes to cook for them, we’ve been watching them grow up and everything else good and bad. I asked myself, “Do they need one of those? Do we need to get one of those?”
As I began to meditate on it, ask the Lord what it meant and try to get into the Word (He’s been teaching me about Philippians 2: 3-8, which is about humility and esteeming others as more significant than yourself. And I knew since the first day about two weeks ago that it was something I definitely needed. I know myself well enough to realize that I had to have this instilled in me. I knew this was something I didn’t have in me as a regular part of my spirit, my Christian walk, and I knew that I needed to concentrate on it for a while—perhaps months, if necessary—until it becomes a part of me, part of me.) So I started reading that passage again and, as I did, the Lord brought to my mind once more that there’s a verse in there that talks about “do nothing out of selfish ambition.” Then I also noticed He brought my eyes to another portion of Scripture in the opposing column, but on the same page, which used the phrase “selfish ambition” too. I hadn’t noticed that any other time during the weeks that I’ve been reading this. Of course, I haven’t been reading this other text, but He brought my attention to it.
So, I thought, there’s something about this and I need to know exactly what it means. I mean, I have an idea, but I need to KNOW. Accordingly, I looked it up (selfish ambition) and the Greek word is “kenodoxia.” In the KJV it is translated as “vainglory,” which is really apt because it means glory that is vain. In other words, it’s empty, it’s pride in something you think you have that is actually nothing, there’s nothing to it, there’s no substance, you just think it’s there. And alongside the command from the Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul to us, “do nothing out of selfish ambition,” it further says “do nothing out of conceit” which is part of pride too, right? So, our heavenly Father is saying to “do nothing out of pride,” with selfish motives, don’t think more highly of yourself than you should, “consider others as more significant than yourself” and “look not only to your own interests but to the interests of others.”
He’s telling me all these things and I’m still thinking, “What about this EpiPen® thing? What does that mean?” I looked it up (even though I had heard the name before, my knowledge was quite vague) and an EpiPen® is a medical device, an auto-injector full of epinephrine. It is used when your body goes into what is called (another medical word; I’m learning all this new terminology today!) “anaphylaxis,” or an extreme allergic reaction. When I got into the shower later, the Lord Jesus revealed to me by way of me asking myself the question “Well, isn’t that what pride is?” It is puffed up. In fact, when you get an allergic reaction you often get SWELLING; your face puffs up or your tongue gets puffed up or something like that. It can be hard to breathe because of a reaction in your airways, and the air can’t get through. I thought, “What a perfect analogy this is!” So, pride is like having an extreme allergy because you’re getting puffed up and swollen; you’re thinking more highly of yourself than you should. In fact, there are other places in the Bible where it talks about knowledge (for the sake of knowledge) is just puffing yourself up (1 Corinthians 8:1). It’s just pride. It’s just vanity. If you’re gonna get the knowledge but not live it—James says, “Don’t just hear the word, do it;” and “Don’t just be a hearer, but be a doer of the Word”—it does no good. So, we can’t do anything that’s vain or empty or like vapor, or like a cloud or a mist. We have to have substance in our lives. God is saying, “Don’t do anything out of selfish ambition. Don’t do anything out of conceit.”
So, I’m still wondering “Where does the EpiPen® thing come into this?” You know, I understand now that pride is like swelling but an EpiPen® is something you use in an emergency situation to make sure the chemicals in the body are flushed in reaction to an allergic reaction, to calm it, to help it get rid of those substances within us and restores the body back to where it needs to be. So, when I was in the shower, Jesus was telling me that auto-injector is what humility is. As I explained before, He’s been teaching me about humility; TRUE humility, LASTING humility. Like He says in the Word of God, “I am meek and lowly of heart,” He is God of the universe, He’s omnipotent (all-powerful), He’s omniscient (all-knowing), He’s omnipresent (everywhere at one time). How can you say He’s humble? That’s because He uses His power in a way that doesn’t abuse His authority. He doesn’t Lord it over people. He uses it rightly in all situations. But in this He’s talking about how He emptied Himself as a man, not counting Himself equal with God, but being subservient to God as a man, and to live out His life on Earth according to God’s purposes so that we could have salvation from our sins, and eternal life. So, what we need to do is to use a spiritual EpiPen®– which is HUMILITY—to get rid of our pride so that we can admit (confess) our sin and be reconciled to the Creator of our souls! Oh, like David exclaimed, this is too wonderful for me! That’s why I had to initially record it in a hurried and somewhat crude fashion– (in the dark, in my car, in the driveway, in my phone’s voice recorder) very hurriedly and spontaneously. But I long ago learned to write what the Spirit tells me on paper, type it into my phone’s notepad or record the audio because, if I don’t do it right way, I will lose it. His revelations are too precious to let them slip away!
This is where I stopped, or so I thought. Just a few minutes later after I left our neighborhood and got onto the main road and began to ponder all of this, He added on to what He let me grasp before. He said the EpiPen® and the epinephrine it contains were not to be injected into the buttocks like most effective shots, nor into a vein as an IV is, nor subcutaneously (just under the skin), but they need to be injected into the outer and upper thigh area. And this is because the muscle there allows the medicine to have a quicker absorption rate. And isn’t that what we want to do? If we have some kind of allergic reaction spiritually, or spiritual pride, we want to QUELL (a word I have never used in my life, but it’s the word the Lord put in my mind as He was helping me to fully understand all of this and its implications) it as soon as we can. Please pay attention to this, it’s important. So, we want to use humility as we would the EpiPen® and we want to put it into the best place. Because knowledge puffs up, where does knowledge come from? Out of the mind, it doesn’t come from the heart. So, what we need to do is to have humility OF THE HEART so that it can quell (make to subside, to suppress, to subdue, to put an end to rebellion–sometimes by use of force) and relieve the swelling that occurs in the mind! Just as we use the injector and infuse the epinephrine into the outer and upper thigh area and into the main muscle (so it will have the quickest absorption rate and highest effectiveness), we don’t need to use humility in our minds. We need to use it in our hearts! That way, it will be spiritually sucked in a lot quicker!
God bless you.
Christ View Versus World View 