Got Humility?

Humility is slippery. I didn’t really know how slippery until I tried to be humble. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips out of your grasp. I have discovered that the best way to become humble is not to try to be humble at all, but to find the most humble person you know and just try to be like them, in every way.

You see, for most of my life as a Christian I have wanted to be humble. The people I most admire are humble and the people who lack humility are those toward whom I am most critical and intolerant. I’m sure this is because they remind me of my own lack, since the disdain of pride in others is really evidence of my own condition. C. S. Lewis wrote about the lack of humility in others, “There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it in ourselves the more we dislike it in others” (Mere Christianity).

Still, I love the way humility looks on others; it is what most impresses me about Jesus and, ironically, it is what most mystifies me about the Christian life. This article is a result of my own journey toward humility—learning to find it beautiful in others, then to embrace the quest and, finally, to let it affect and even define me.

The Bible’s commands to “humble yourself” (Exodus 10:3, Proverbs 6:3, Daniel 10:12, James 4:10) have haunted me, as I have instinctively taken a passive approach to the subject, holding out for some alternative to this direct and personal command. I’ve come to realize that it takes work and effort. Yet, mostly I’ve discovered that the path toward humility is trod over my own misconceptions about God and myself. It’s primarily a change of heart, a new way of thinking. In part, that is why I’m writing these thoughts down. It simply takes more than one hearing to undo what decades of life and experience have taught. Rest assured, you and I are not sufficient. Contrary to popular teaching, you are not the maker of your own destiny. And the “giant inside you,” if awakened, may lead to financial and worldly success, but it will also devour your spiritual life in the process. Lewis concluded, “Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

The Divine Paradigm

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his influential work The Antichrist, described this human malady and revealed the deepest darkness of the human heart when he declared that God was dead, and that we had deified “nothingness, the will to nothingness and pronounced it holy.” The phoenix that would arise from the ashes of the God we killed would be the “superman.” Nietzsche contended that human beings were all that was left from the rubble of God’s destruction and that the world was in our hands to build or to destroy. The only precursor to power is the human will because we are all that exist. Will is the ultimate expression of human sufficiency and pride since it contrives a world without rival to humans.

The Christian response to ­Nietzsche is two-fold. On the human level, we know the truth about our race: it is feeble and utterly destructive. Our confidence in ourselves is unfounded and our arrogance the bastion of our deepest corruption. In truth, there is nothing super about man.

As for God, he is of course not dead, not to say we didn’t kill him—we did. But he arose, say the Gospel writers, and that is good news, because his death meant the end of sin, if we would have it. Our hero was the only real life superman. For God himself became man to show us how life must be lived. We have made a mockery of a divine image and Jesus came, in part, to show us what a real human life was to look like. So, for the Christian, the life of Christ is the beginning and the end of our search for meaning and significance. This is where we look for how to live. His life is the divine paradigm not only for what we do but how we do it.

While this is one thing to say it is quite another to really live. There are three obstacles we must address. First, we do not fully perceive the life of Jesus. We tend to be selective in the portrait we paint of him. Some of us emphasize forgiveness but not judgment, love but not justice, truth without mercy, or tolerance lacking passion. We explain the life of Christ in terms we find palatable or fashionable, with little regard to the revolutionary nature of the incarnation.

Second, we know we can’t imitate his life fully so we don’t really try. We buckle under the pressure of our world and admire the life of Jesus from afar, relegating it to a bygone era of robes and sandals, uncomplicated by modernity.

Finally, we don’t realize that we should be like Jesus. We see Jesus as our Savior but not our Lord. We graciously thank him for the work of the cross, doing away with our sin, and the resurrection breaking the power of death over us. But we ignore his life and teaching. In the words of James Stewart, “Christianity does not mean complimenting Christ as genius, or artist, or teacher: it means bowing to Christ as commander.”

God knows that we learn best by illustration. Conceivably, God could have suffered and even died without our knowledge. He could have atoned for sin privately. But he lived and died for all to see, illustrating the perfect life, the life we are to imitate. Yet for those of us who are convinced that the life of Jesus is not simply incidental, there are considerable challenges still to overcome. There is no more difficult aspect of his great life to imitate than his humility. It means the utter rejection of our own pride (which is difficult enough) and then the embrace of the most profound expression of love possible. So, where do we begin?

Moving Forward

The first step to humility is to realize that we lack it. It is to recognize and admit, “I am proud.” Of course it’s not that simple. It’s like the old joke, “I won a medal for being humble, but I wore it so they took it away.” If we claim to be humble, then we are by necessity not. “If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed,” quipped Lewis. The problem with this cycle is that people will vehemently admit that they are prideful, not because they see the evil behind their attitude but because they know that if they do not admit it they will not be considered humble. This admission then is false. Simply because someone says, “I could be wrong,” but has never to anyone’s knowledge, including himself, been wrong, it is doubtful whether he truly means he could be wrong.

I’ve been in confessional situations where someone admits to struggling with pride. Everyone else confesses some personal sin that is embarrassing to mention and then someone shares their struggle with pride. Curiously, it is not actually a humble act. Not all such confessions are disingenuous but some are. It is as if they are saying, “Please pray for me, I am struggling with pride. You see, I’m convinced that I’m better than everyone. That’s my great struggle. In the face of such giftedness and accomplishment, I’m really having trouble believing that I am not superior to all of you.” Is that humble? It is possible to be proud of our pride. Pride craves the spotlight just like humility flourishes in secret. Pride must be starved. It cannot be given any daylight to announce itself. Humility expressed in contrition is its antidote. Confronting pride is a gruesome task. It is quite uncomfortable and will produce nothing less than a loathing for what is left of it in us.

Imitation

The life of humility and the life of worship are the same. Humility is not only the necessary posture toward God in worship, but it is itself the most profound act of worship. Imitation is the greatest compliment we can pay God. The re-enactment of the life of Jesus, in every detail, is the living song of respect and veneration to the servant King. That means not only reliving the external life of sacrifice and self-denial but also the hidden, perhaps more unique, inner life of abasement and preference for others. What is most incredible about the sacrifice of the cross is not that a man would willingly give his life for a cause, or even for a person, but that Jesus, in the fullness of deity, knew that his life was to be a ransom for those who despised him. It is the motive that has not and will not be matched in all of human history.

Humility was the inward character of Christ, expressed in outward acts of sacrifice and self-denial. Human beings have never had a problem imitating sacrifice. The challenge, of course, is to keep from exalting ourselves in the experience. False humility longs to be seen. Once we recognize the wonder and glory of the humility of Jesus, we can label it a virtue, a characteristic to be achieved and added to one’s repertoire, and it then becomes yet another potential source of pride for us—which not only undermines the process of attaining it but also destroys what little humility we might have. This is what makes humility so elusive.

Like spiritual greatness, it cannot be attained by a direct campaign. As soon as I try to be humble, I am not. “I would not advise any of you to try to be humble,” Charles Spurgeon preached. “As to acting humbly, when a man forces himself to it, that is poor stuff. When a man talks a great deal about his humility, when he is very humble to everybody, he is generally a canting hypocrite” (Sermons, number 2328). If I try to be great in the Kingdom, if that is my goal, then I will fail, because Jesus redefined greatness in his irrational labor of love for us. Greatness, like humility, is a byproduct of sacrificial love and cannot be gained through direct attempt.

The Inner Life

Jesus taught that life comes from death. “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). Like a seed that dies and then comes to life underground, so the human heart must be rightly aligned to God out of sight. Then, and only then, can we begin to grow out of our private lives into a public expression of an inward reality of humility toward God and others.

As children, every Easter morning my sister and I would rush out of our rooms to inspect our Easter baskets. They would usually consist of various candies, sprinkled on a bed of green plastic grass. Although we couldn’t always see them, we were certain to find some jelly beans strewn throughout the basket, some marshmallow “peeps,” and of course the centerpiece—the chocolate bunny. One Easter I was betrayed by a shocking revelation. My towering, male Easter bunny (my sister’s was female), was hollow! What, upon first glance, promised me days of frozen chocolate gnawing was really just the fraudulent shell of a bunny. Biting into the ear and then looking down into the hollow body was a bona fide childhood tragedy. When I go to the store today around Easter time I find that those bunnies are rarely solid anymore. It has become understood that unless indicated on the package the bunny, whatever size it appears to be, is hollow.

Years later a friend of mine reminded me of that experience and likened it to the disappointment he has had in the unveiling of the contemporary Christian. I fear he is right, that it’s the exception today to find a Christian who is sincere, solid on the inside. So much of what we esteem in the church is an external, physical spirituality. We have made it more important to be able to excel at praying out loud than praying in private (against the strict injunction of Jesus in Matthew 6). We are hardest on external sins such as sexual immortality that bring shame, and we neglect the deeper internal sins such as greed and pride that destroy us from the inside out. We have acquiesced to a kind of moral and spiritual capitalism that invests in what will bring the greatest immediate returns. Like the Pharisees who undoubtedly began with a sincere desire to know and follow God, we have preferred the wide, fast road of self-esteem instead of the narrow, slow road of self-denial that comes from humility.

It always amazes me at how quickly a person who comes to Christ in our InterVarsity culture is transformed externally. Within a year, a new believer will know all the relevant and frequently quoted Bible verses of a fellowship (although they may not know where they are). They will have learned to avoid all the unpardonable sins of a group. They will have learned the appropriate jargon, and within a matter of months no one can tell how long they have been a Christian. I do not mean to minimize the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in the life of a new believer, but I do mean to question the standard of Christian maturity. Shouldn’t those who have walked with Jesus the longest most reflect his likeness? Shouldn’t it take longer than a year to look like everyone else?

New believers will invest in whatever we esteem to be essential to the Christian life. Unfortunately, what I see is that we stress the necessity of a transformation in the external life, which is measurable and obvious, and not the internal life, which is far more critical. “The Lord does not see as mortals see. They look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Or, as the ancient writer Tertullian put it, “Do the ears of God wait for sound?”

Humility will continue to elude me if I do not begin to invest in my inner life deliberately. Too much energy is expended to maintain the exterior, which only produces a false sense of spiritual success. If that means my external life suffers, so be it. But then again, the journey inward will not likely have negative consequences for the outward life. Jesus taught that good trees bear good fruit. They do not have to strain to produce the natural fruit of their identity. When investment is made for the building of the inner person, the result is a righteous life, and a genuine one at that. Spurgeon argued that “humility must be in the heart, and then it will come out spontaneously as the outflow of life in the very act that a man performs.”

Humility is slippery. It eludes us because we cannot embrace it as long as we simultaneously embrace our pride. We must rid ourselves of any vestige of our own righteousness and desire only God. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote, “Christian humility consists in laying aside the imaginary idea of our own righteousness, and trusting entirely to the mercies of God, apprehended by faith in Christ.” In the throws of neediness is where greatness is found. To whatever degree we proclaim our sufficiency we also proclaim Christ’s insufficiency. The pursuit of this virtue must never eclipse the pursuit of God. The secret to embracing humility is to embrace the life of Jesus, as it really is, to follow him, to carry a cross and not to wear a crown. That is for later.

Brian Sanders is the InterVarsity area director for Florida. He’s married to Monica and has four kids, Jael, Noah, Eve and Luke. Brian lives in the heart of Tampa in a house that is made up of seven adults (ages 23-90) and five kids (ages 1-7).