Largely unmentioned as a sign of the times: self-idolatry.

It is all around you.

Narcissism.

Stay as far away as you can.

Check your inner soul.

Are you truly humble? Or do you think you are smarter than just about all others, better in the world, better in God’s Eyes?

When it is said that self-idolatry is everywhere, we only have to look at how many parade themselves on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, television, and radio, or in the comments on Reddit or Quora, on Substack or Medium: in emails. We’re bogged in blogs and often vicious opinions.

Everyone has a microphone.

Everyone is everywhere, or is trying to be.

Everywhere there is discord—when in actuality people want to be united.

“We are all brothers,” says the Pope in a statement this week.

Also this week, a Gallup Survey: eight in ten endorse compromise; 83 percent reject political violence.

You’d never know it.

Let the majority rule.

Flee from vitriol.

We can tell the humble how?

They listen more than they talk. They admit mistakes—quickly and plainly. They don’t need credit or recognition. They aren’t easily offended. They don’t belittle or mock. They treat everyone with dignity. They give people the benefit of the doubt. They don’t exaggerate. They pray or reflect before reacting. (Humility pauses. Pride rushes.) They serve quietly. They speak gently. (Not weakly, gently.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The entirety of the relevant passage:

2 Timothy 3:1-7: “But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Amen.

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