Humility - The Two Extremes

Perhaps it will be easier to see what humility is not. As with most things, one can go off the road in either direction, and the extremes on either side of humility are easier to see. To the one side, we have conceit in all its snobbishness. We know for sure God doesn’t want us to go around considering ourselves lords of humanity. In fact, more than one text above speaks of false pride as well. Proverbs 16:18 says famously, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling.” Phil. 2:3 has it right there in the verse: “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit.” The ellipse left in the middle of the 1 Peter 5:5, 6 passage left out “for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” And several different texts promise the proud that if they don’t humble themselves, God will do it for them. So in one direction, humility is not arrogance, false pride, and conceit.

In the other direction, things get a little murkier. There is such a thing as false humility, too. It’s hinted at in Col. 2:18, 23. Verse 18 talks of “delighting in self-abasement.” Verse 23 admits that such things as self-abasement and “severe treatment of the body” have “the appearance of wisdom.” But they are only “self-made religion,” and “of no value against fleshly indulgence.” In Martin Luther’s time, and in some places still today, it’s considered pleasing to God (or the gods) to beat oneself, lie on nails, cut the flesh, and so on. We’re more enlightened than that, right? Yet there are some beloved children of God among us that appear to believe that God is pleased when they deny their bodies by being so unbendingly strict about dietary laws and restrictions that they look thin and unhealthy to everyone but themselves. Jesus, by contrast, was forever being called a drunkard and a glutton. We know He was never guilty of license or fleshly indulgence. Yet His lifestyle looked that way to some. Note His comments in Luke 7:33-35.

There is another region of what humility is not: the martyr. It’s easy to mock and make jokes about the “doormat” or “Mr. Milktoast” who mopes through his life letting everyone walk all over him and never stands up for himself. But this is a real, painful issue for far too many Christians. They’ve been taught that Paul told the Corinthians to always consider others more important, to look out only for others’ interests and never stand up for their own.

The ugliest version of this is the abused wife who believes, and may even be told by her pastor, that if she can only hang in there and be a good enough, loving enough wife, things will change. The unexpected thing is, learning to respect ourselves can actually be the key to others’ learning to respect themselves, as well as us. A question to ask an abuse victim: Who is the abuser hurting worse, you or himself? If the victim can see that the abuser is damaging his own soul as much as he is damaging those he abuses, she may be able to see that the most loving, self-denying thing she can do is to stop enabling him to continue that pattern another minute. Her standing up for herself, leaving the situation, may be the only chance the abuser, who is still a beloved child of God and for whom Jesus died, will ever have to see the truth and get the help he needs to change. But is this humility? Where, in the middle of all this confusion, is the genuine article that God wants each of us to have?