What painful verses these are! ‘When thou wast little.’ Perhaps it's true in some measure of us. When we were saved, the Spirit regenerated our hearts, and we felt our need, and we ran to Christ, and believed in him and repented of sin. We were given eternal life, and made sons and daughters with the wonderful status of children of God: that was done at a time of humility. We were so grateful, we were so humble, we were so dutiful, we were so eager to attend all the meetings, we were so eager to do the right things. Do we still have it? Humble before the Lord and in the sight of others? Often we put some time behind us in the Christian life and now we slip this, and we slip that, and we are not so humble, and we don't feel so much our shortcomings as we did at first. It is true in the ministry. How many of us as ministers: we are appointed in a time of humility. Is that humility still there five years later, ten years later, thirty years later? It is a terrible thing to lose humility. Of course it might be a sign of a phony convert, of an unregenerate person, but even for a true believer it can happen. We have to examine our hearts always humility. ‘When thou wast little in thine own sight.’ May the Lord keep us all little in our own sight, so we fight against pride. Never let pride get hold of you. How do we get rid of pride? How do we attack it? Well, we examine ourselves, we watch ourselves. We pray that we should be delivered from pride. We hate pride. We say, this is what it will do to me. This is how it will bring me down, and make me ineffective and odious in the sight of God. It is the great killer of all things good. And we avoid self-justification.