If you want to know the truth, humble yourself. If you want double the blessings, humble yourself. If you want goodness, humble yourself. Truth comes only through the door (and windows) of humility.

A huge percentage of your problems and arguments can be traced to pride.

Every day, there is good and bad. We can't avoid the "teeter-totter."

Humility magnifies the good and brings back proper balance.

When we have pride, the Prince of Pride has a legal "right" to our spiritual terrain in proportion to that pride, and this blurs the truth because he is also the Prince of Deception. We lose track of the road God set for us.

Humility scatters the enemy and clears the soul's windshield. "I am He Who suddenly illuminates and lifts up a humble soul, so that it can take and receive in short time the true reason of the wisdom of God more perfectly than another who studies ten years in the schools and lacks humility," the Lord spoke in the great spiritual classic by Thomas a Kempis.

As Scripture tells us: there are those who are ever-learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. In their pride (focusing on worldly minutiae), they have obscured the way of blessings.

"I teach without sound of words, without diversity of opinions, without desire for honor, and without strife and arguments," Christ told Kempis -- whose writings even saints admired. "I am He Who teaches all the people to despise earthly things, to flee honors, to bear patiently all evil words, to put their trust wholly in Me, to desire nothing without Me, and above all to fervently love Me. I am He Who teaches a man wisdom and gives more understanding to humble persons than can be given by man's teaching."

Dead to the world is dead to the glamour of evil.

You know how it goes: There is positive and negative in each day. A day can seem like everything is right and then take a sudden turn down. All that felt good crumbles.

We transcend that (at least, it fazes us less) when we are humble in God's Light.

When we are humble, we are in God's favor.

And when we're in His favor, it can lead to a dramatic reversal of fortune. In the Bible, we see how Esther went from a nobody -- an orphan -- to being the Queen of Persia. She was humbled and cleared her soul for her fullest destiny.

So can you. (Do you pray about your right destiny?)

Any bad fortune be reversed into (big-time) victory. Double the blessings. Triple them.

"He who serves Me freely and with good will receives grace for grace," said the Lord (in Imitation of Christ). "However, he who glorifies himself, or who will fully rejoice in anything except Me, will not be established in perfect joy or enlarged in soul, but will be hindered and straightened in many ways from true freedom of spirit. You therefore should ascribe no goodness to yourself, or think that any person has any goodness of himself. But you should always yield the goodness to Me, without whom man has nothing."

How many of us know this in our hearts -- but can't shake the world around us? How many of us can't resist honoring and favoring the man who has accumulated material gain -- the one with the house that is three times the size of yours, whose car cost four times as much? How many of us can't help parading out -- as a measure of stature, even in prayer groups -- our worldly or "natural" stature?

"I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world," said Jesus (John 17). "I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the Evil One. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”

In Heaven, the small are big.

"Nature rejoices greatly in many friends and kinsfolk, and is much puffed by a noble place of birth and kindred," said Kempis. "Nature has great joy with distinguished men, she flatters rich men, and is happy with those she thinks, like itself, in highly worldly position. But grace makes a man love his enemies; she has no pride in worldly friends, does not regard the nobility of kindred or her paternal home, unless virtue dwells there. Grace favors poor more than rich; she sympathizes more with an innocent man than with a powerful man; she always rejoices in truth rather than falsehood, and strengthens good men more and more to profit and grow in virtue and goodness, and daily to seek higher gifts of grace so that they may, through good virtuous works, be made like to the Son of God."

Double your grace through humility and double the speed toward God and your "right destiny."

[resources: The Imitation of Christ]

["I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world," said Jesus (John 17). "I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the Evil One. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”]

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