As godly women who value God-given covenant relationship, we have to be willing to do the hard work in order to maintain those relationships when God exposes what’s in our hearts. We briefly touched on Cain in the Bible who killed his brother Able because of jealousy in the last blog post. Cain’ s problem was that he was not willing to do the work to get pass what God was exposing in his heart.
God used Cain’ s brother Able as sort of a mirror to expose what was in Cain’ s heart, and God does the same thing with us using covenant relationships to sharpen us making us better for his own glory. This was a good thing. A good relationship that would sharpen Cain and make him better, but he was not willing to do the work.
Cain wanted it easy. He just wanted the hard and uncomfortable situation to be over therefore he took things into his own hands continuing in the flesh making matters worse. Cain simply chose pride rather than humility. The Bible says with pride comes shame, but with the lowly there is wisdom (Proverbs 11:2).
In other words, pride says you have exposed me and shown that I am not perfect, I can no longer hide behind my cloak of perfection. I don’t like this. This has to end. I have to cover my shame, but when we seek to cover our shame by continuing in pride and flesh, we end up bringing more shame and ultimately judgement which is what happened in Cain’ s case.
He was judged to walk the earth several years as a wanderer and no one was supposed to kill him. The contrast of the above mentioned scripture is with the lowly there is wisdom. In other words, when we allow ourselves to realize we don’t have it all together to the point of humility, God is willing to give us wisdom to work through our imperfections whether it is jealousy or whatever the case may be with the lowly there is wisdom.
We see this picture being painted for Cain as an offer from God when God says to Cain if you do well Will you not be accepted (Genesis 4:6-7). In other words, if you humble yourself and come to me for help I will help you with what I’ve allowed to be exposed in your heart and you will be accepted. I want to accept your sacrifice Cain let me show you how I can accept it.
If you do not understand the story at this point, you may want to take a look at Genesis 4 to see the story of how Cain became Jealous of his brother.
The conversation between Cain and God there shows a strong characteristic of God which is how he resists the proud, but gives Grace to the humble. The truth is humility is needed and should always be our choice when God exposes sin in us. It shows our need to depend on Christ and what he did on the cross to complete his work of salvation and regeneration in us.
When God exposes sin in us, it is because he has already set aside the grace for us to work through it if we choose humility. This process of humility is so important in maintaining all good relationships whether brother, sister, mother, or father. It will also be needed in the closest covenant relationship that we will have which is the marriage relationship. We cannot just check out in our flesh as it pertains to pride, and murder our spouse’s character or spirit because of jealousy and pride. We have to do the mature thing and choose humility going to the Lord for his wisdom and both us and our spouses will be made better for it.
Look at your current covenant relationships with your sisters as such preparing you with the life skills needed for a healthy marriage one day.
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