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Foreign Sower Nation. It is Sunday, January 18th, in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm John David Walt, and this is your wake up call. Rise and shine. You want to hear, you want to hear that song?

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Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory.

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Come on.

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Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory Children of the Lord.

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I know you may not have been ready for singing just yet today, so it's going to be a good day. We might start doing that a little bit more here. As we cross the middle point of January, we just got good things ahead of us. The Lord is. He's awake. He's been waiting on us. He's had his coffee already. He's like, are they ever going to show up this morning?

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I'm ready, so.

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Let'S do this. It's. It's the Lord's day today. Not. Not as though they aren't all the Lord's days, but let's dive in. Prayer of consecration today. Wake up, sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. And we are praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. I often think when I close that prayer, I feel like it's like I'm walking into the cathedral of today. And the shape of that cathedral, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the triune God like arms wrapped around this whole day and holding me and holding you and holding us together and holding the world together. And we're walking into his presence and we're not going to walk out. Not that we weren't in his presence before, but we just became conscious of his presence. And this is a moving tabernacle throughout this whole day. We're walking in the Lord with the Lord and he's living in us and moving through us. That's what it means to be awake. That's what it means to live an awakened life. You know, backing up, even that opening, wake up, grow up, light up. And you know, in light of all that we can, lighten up. Jesus has got this. He's got us. No matter what we're struggling with, what we're dealing with, he's got it. He's got us. So here we go. Today's entry. Humble yourself or be humiliated later. Your choice. And our text all day long, Proverbs chapter 18. Focus, focus. Text today, verse 12. Hear now the word of the Lord before downfall. The heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor. The word of the Lord. Now consider this. Two things that don't go together, wisdom and pride. Two things that do go together, humility and honor. Back in chapter 16 we passed right over this little gem. Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. That's 1618, the most common version. Pride goes before a fall. The crazy thing about pride is the way it remains hidden from us, yet visible to everyone around. You know what I'm talking about. It's fascinating when you think about it. Pride leads to humiliation, which is involuntary humility. There's only one remedy, voluntary humility. James gives us a good take on pride and humility from chapter three. Hear this. Who is wise and understanding among you, let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. How about that? Humility comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. But okay, this is coming up on verse 17. This is my new word for the new year. I love it when it starts with a but. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, then peace, loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. That's James all. That's James 3:13 to 17. And then there's another verse right on the tail end, end of that that says peacemakers who sow in peace will reap a harvest of righteousness. Look at that sewing language just dropping right out of heaven. In the final analysis, there are only two choices, humility or humiliation. Wisdom chooses while there's still time. The prayer Abba. Father, thank you for showing us the inexhaustible depths of your own humility in your son Jesus. Keep our eyes fixed on him that we might become like him. Save us from humiliation. Let our pride be crucified now with him on the cross. In its place, let humility rise, praying in Jesus name. Amen. The journey. Are you a proud person? Are you a humble person? You know the crazy thing about both pride and humility? They're hidden from us. So this maybe not be a fair question anyhow. Keep going. Try scaling yourself right scale of 1 to 10 and see where you land Pride on the left end of the scale and humility on the right end. Oh, gosh, this. This feels like a mess. I think the 1 to 10, I don't know, just put humility on the left end and pride on the right end. And. And frankly, this could be another one of those sort of fear and faith continuums that it's a zero sum game, like, how fearful are you? Are you at a six? Some fear? Well then you're at a four on faith. Are you at a eight on pride? Well then you're at a two on humility. Anyway, just play with that. Now here's the kicker question I want you to ask a good friend. If you're in a band, ask your bandmate, ask them all to scale you on those continuums and see how it compares. Be gentle. What might voluntary humility look like in a very practical way today? Those feel like good questions. Voluntary humility. Humble yourself or be humiliated later. Because pride precedes a fall. We see it all the time. I mean, you know, Jesus is like, well, pride hides what's done in secret. He says it'll come out. And it's just so amazing how it does, which makes me just tremble like, man, Lord, I just want to humble myself before you. I want you to examine me, search me out. I don't want that way of hiding, really, of living two lives, one that is in the appearance and the other is behind the scenes. Maybe when people are watching on the one hand and when people aren't watching on the other. This is, this is a. This is, this is a huge issue. Pride and humility. You know, it made me think about the mind of Christ. Philippians 2 is one of the massivest, biggest paradigms, if you, if you will, of, of. I don't want to say of my life. I hope it is, but it's of my teaching at least. But it's have the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus. You see, humility is a mindset. It. But way before it's a behavior. And then he says, who? Being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing. Okay? He. He was the ultimate something in somebody, and he made himself nothing and nobody. He did not consider that something to be proud of. He considered it the deepest source of his identity in his security. And you know what? If you got that, you don't got to put on any airs. You don't have to put on any show. You don't have to project an image. If you have an identity. And God has given you one loft. We're still trying to discover it. Many of us, we're ever discovering it, all of us. But God has given you an identity as a son or a daughter. And when you have that identity and when you can live into it, you don't need to. You don't project an image. But if you have an insecure identity, you're projecting an image. And that's the, that's the source of pride. And I like to just keep this out of moral categories and keep it in the categories of brokenness and wholeness. Right? Deep wholeness comes from a restored identity, but deep brokenness comes from a. From a broken identity. And we're covering it over with image. We're projecting something that we want to be true or that we're overcompensating for. And that's what pride looks like. We're on the journey, guys. But get this. He, after he con, made himself nothing, he takes on the nature of a slave, a servant being made in human likeness, it says, and found in the appearance of a man. He's God. Found in the appearance of a man. He's a man. And then after all of this, right after he made himself nothing, after he just took that great descent, it says, after all that, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.