Monday, November 21, 2011

Humility

It’s so hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way or so the saying goes. Humility is a strange thing. It is prized by God. The Bible says we are to humble ourselves. But I question whether we understand what humility is. By “we”, I really mean me.

Someone once said that humility isn’t about us. In other words, humility doesn’t mean you have to go around telling people what a worm you are, but it is seeing the greatness of others. If you’ve accomplished something in life or if you have some special ability, you don’ t have to go through life playing it down like it is unimportant. That would be dishonest. The humble person simply doesn’t spend a great deal of time talking about that stuff. If he has won an award, he may talk about it if it comes up, but what really distinguishes the humble person is that he is quick to talk about the accomplishments of others. When someone is better than he is at something, he says something about it.

In our relationship with God, what that means is that we talk about the greatness of God. Of course, compared to God, we really do look like worms. We don’t have to play down our abilities, we simply need to highlight the greatness of God and we’ll see ourselves as plenty low. Even in talking to others, we may talk about the things we’ve tried and by themselves, they may seem great things to try, but once we talk about what God did, even the greatest of our attempts seem like nothing.

So I think a person can talk about his accomplishments and still be humble, but not if that’s all he talks about. If he view his accomplishments without the proper context of what others are doing, he is a braggart, and not humble.