Humbling Ourselves

Go and humble yourself; press your plea with your neighbor! —Proverbs 6:3

Thinking of your own temptations, what are you facing in your own life at this moment? Could it be that you need to humble yourself? It is not a question of having it done for you. You must humble yourself. So we need to look at ourselves. Are you a strong-willed person? Do you have a reputation for proving your masculinity, your authority? Letting that image be tarnished requires humility. Or perhaps you can be a little difficult to get along with.

Conversely, the opposite may be true. You may say, “I’m not a strong-willed person; I’m a weak-willed person.” Does that make you exempt? That is just another form of pride, and you too need to humble yourself. Maybe the hardest thing you ever did was to accept responsibility and assert your input. It will take humility to do it.

None of us are humble by nature. There is no such thing. Even Jesus was not: He humbled Himself. There is a crucial difference, however, between our Lord and us in this connection. We are told that Jesus humbled Himself. In contrast, any humility that seems to flow from us is due to one thing: we have been humbled. Our humility, therefore, if you can call it that, tends to be passive: we are humbled involuntarily.

God sometimes allows something that brings us to our knees. It may be when our foolishness catches up with us and we are humiliated. We may not recognize it at the time, yet what is happening to us may be nothing but God judging us. It is painful to admit to that, and yet, if it is God so working, we have the example of David to show us humility. When David saw that God was going to judge him, he just said, “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great” (2 Sam. 24:14).

Excerpted from Meekness and Majesty (Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 1992, 2000).