Humility

…meekness and lowliness of heart are the chief marks by which they who follow the Lamb of God are to be known.

Humility: The Journey Toward Holiness, Andrew Murray

Pride was the source of the fall. 

Jesus opened His Sermon on the Mount with the following three Beatitudes: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek – all signs of humility.  As we have seen, the order of the Beatitudes, and, in fact, the entire Sermon, is important.  These three characteristics are the foundations for the Christian life, and characteristics the opposite of pride.

Yet, how often are we taught this?

When I look back upon my own Christian experience, or at the church of Christ as a whole, I am amazed at how little humility is seen as the distinguishing feature of discipleship.  In our preaching and in our living…how easy is it to see that humility is not esteemed the cardinal virtue, the root from which grace can grow and the one indispensable condition of true fellowship with Jesus.

This has been my experience, and this reality has been blown wide open via my work on the Sermon on the Mount. 

Andrew Murray (1828 – 1917) was born in South Africa, educated in Scotland and Holland, and then returned to South Africa as a pastor and missionary.  This book was recommended to me by a couple of people, one of whom I trust completely when I ask for recommendations on topics of the Christian life and theology.  It is through this book and my prayers that I intend to begin to rectify my shortcoming in understanding, embracing, and living this most fundamental distinguishing characteristic for the Christian.

Humility, the place of entire dependence upon God, is from the very nature of things the first duty and the highest virtue of His creatures.

The truth of this can be grasped even in the moment of creation and every moment since.  It is God that upholds all things by His Word; at every moment, God maintains all things:

The life God bestows is not imparted once for all but each moment by the unceasing operation of His mighty power.

In the face of this reality, how can we be anything but humble?  And we have not yet even come to the humility displayed by Christ in His death and resurrection.

[Humility] is simply the sense of entire nothingness that comes when we see how truly God is everything.

Which comes back to pride: the absence of humility and the source of the fall.  It is the root of every sin and every evil.  Both for the fallen angels and fallen man, it was pride that brought them (and us) down.  Cited from The Spirit of Prayer:

“All this to make it known through the region of eternity that pride can degrade the highest angels into devils, and humility can raise fallen flesh and blood to the thrones of angels. … The truth is this: Pride must die in you or nothing of heaven can live in you. …Humility must sow the seed or there can be no reaping in heaven.”

In other words, nothing can save us but the restoration of this lost humility.  This is where Jesus started His Sermon, and this is the foundation of the Christian characteristics and life that Jesus described, not only in that Sermon but throughout His teaching.

Humility should not be seen as another virtue, not even as the most important virtue.  Humility is the soil necessary for any virtue to develop and grow.  It is to be the chief mark of our uprightness. 

It is the first and chief mark of the relationship of the creature to God, of the Son to the Father – it is the secret of blessedness, the desire to be nothing, that allows God to be all in all.

Which comes back to the curiosity – in my experience and in Murray’s – that this idea of humility, meekness, and lowliness, is not emphasized as the distinguishing feature of the disciple and of the Christian life.  It must be emphasized as the object of a special desire, a focus of prayer and faith.

Nothing is so natural to man as his pride, and nothing so dangerous.  It is only a determined persevering, by waiting on God, that will reveal how very lacking we are in humility – and the same is necessary to increase our humility.  It is prideful to think otherwise, that through our strength and will we can grow humble.

We must study the character of Christ until our souls are filled with the love and admiration of His lowliness. 

Jesus lived and taught this humble life.  At its root, this is the model for Christ-like living.  The divine became man so that man could become divine.

We must believe that when we are broken under a sense of pride and our inability to cast it out, Jesus Christ himself will come to impart this grace as a part of His wonderful life within us.

Conclusion

God has so constituted us as reasonable beings that the greater the insight into the true nature or the absolute need of a command, the quicker and more complete will be our obedience to it.

As Christians we are to live differently.  Do we do this by obeying hundreds of commands?  No.  we do this via a change of heart, a change regarding the root from which we grow.  By this change, call it being born again or born from above, we will obey the commands.

What is the true nature or the absolute need of the hundreds of commands and laws God has given in the books of the Law?  Jesus boiled it down: love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself. 

And what is the foundational requirement for this kind of love?  Humility.