I bet, if you dropped a 50k note in a big bucket every time you heard the word “you” in a sermon, you would become a billionaire under an hour.

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Yet, as we learn from Nebuchadnezzar, God is willing to bring about utter humiliation if his glory seems to compete with ours.

Or ask Herod (I mean, we will all be eaten by worms underground someday), but the story of a King eaten by worms before he “breathes his last” in Acts 12 is supposed to send a warning — God will not accommodate our self-consumption with true worship.

Herod we are told, was eaten by worms while he was still alive. There he was, he didn’t have to wait, going six feet deep, God wanted him to learn, you welcome lofty ideas of yourself, I become your opponent. God was even willing to command insects for the sake of killing pride.

Yet this “self” is the water everybody swims in these days; it’s so insidious and subtle that sometimes we put ourselves forward while hoodwinking everyone that it’s ‘not about us.’ We exalt ourselves in the most ‘Christian’ way possible. Volunteering information (read prayer request) that centres us, speaking more than we listen. Thinking highly of ourselves is the default posture that easily entangles us.

Before the Tower of Babel went up, the bricks of making ‘humans famous’ had already been laid (Gen 11:4). But nobody had been designed to do life on their own terms.

Yet humble men seem to have abounded still, perhaps as examples awaiting the true servant King – Jesus; Moses is described as the meekest (Num 12:3). At some point illustrating this by questioning his own credibility after the Lord of hosts commissioned him (Ex 4:10). Joseph too tells Potiphar he couldn’t interpret the dream, but ‘the Lord would’ (Gen 41:16). These men saw the potential of narcissim to wear religious clothes.

Then there was a Babylonian king indicted for pride and sent on a vegetarian diet in the wilderness (Daniel 4:25). Then, John the Baptist, whom Jesus called ‘the greatest born among women’ (Matt 11:11), yet he preferred to ‘decrease so Jesus may increase’ (John 3:30). Aware that creatures cannot occupy the same spot as the creator.

Then we had the Apostles who got physically hoisted on the shoulders of man-centred men, yet they exclaimed, “We are only men”(Acts 14:15). Hesitating to breathe in what they weren’t designed for.

One of my favourites is when Jesus’ brothers ask him to “show himself to the world” (John 7:4), duh, you are the Messiah, why delay the inevitable? But the inspired text says, he refused, for his hour had not yet come. (7:6) God’s redemptive purposes at odds with human timelines!

Jesus, though God, “did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped.” (Phil 2:6) and in a world where the earthly prominent put their best foot forward; speaking up in rooms, going for glass ceilings, showing themselves to the world, Jesus leaves eternity for earth, picking up towels and basins to wash feet, as he exchanges eternal streets for dusty Middle East roadsides.

So that the radical call of believers based on Christ’s work, to embrace the daunting invitation of self-forgetfulness, remains. So that we can say with Paul, “I no longer live!” Gal 2:20 (and maybe with Robert McCheyne) “For every look at self, take 10 looks at Christ.”

Where in life have you lately experienced a “death to self”? Who knows? Maybe that’s the last place you last truly lived, for Christ?

Tell us.