December 5 Petition Mission

“I am a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.…Give to Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil” (1 Ki 3:7, 9). This is the humility God loves to exalt. The Lord was pleased with Solomon’s request since “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (Jas 4:6).

Millard Fillmore, 13th President of the United States, was born in a log cabin and labored in his youth as a farmhand. Although self-taught in the law and admitted to the bar, he considered himself an unlettered man. In 1855, Oxford University offered him an honorary degree. In an act of humility rarely seen in world rulers, he responded, “I had not the advantage of a classical education and no man should, in my judgment, accept a degree he cannot read (the text was in Latin!).”

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if, taught by the Word, the record would say: “The speech pleased the Lord, that [we] had asked this thing” (see 1 Ki 3:10).