Humility: The Glory of the Creature

Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.
Worship the LORD with gladness;
   come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the LORD is God.
   It is he who made us, and we are his;
  we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.  (Psalm 100:1-3) 

Whoever finds his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  (Matthew 10:39) 

Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue.  And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil.

 When the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.  Hence it follows that nothing can be our redemption, but the restoration of the 'lost humility, the original and only true relation of the creature to its God. And so Jesus came to bring humility back to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us. . . .  His humility gave His death its value, and so became our redemption. . . .  His humility is our salvation. His salvation is our humility.

[Humility] is not a something which we bring to God, or He bestows; it is simply the sense of entire nothingness, which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all.

This humility is not a thing that will come of itself, but that it must be made the object of special desire and prayer and faith and practice.  (From Humility, Chapter 1, Andrew Murray)

 At the heart of praise and worship is this knowledge: the Lord is God alone.  A necessary attendant to this knowledge is the knowledge of my "creature-liness."  I am not my own.  I was made by God.  I belong to God.  I am "pastured" and sustained by God.  Praise and worship focused on God and not on performance - "How am I doing?", "How do I look?", "What do people think of me?" - teaches humility.  May God grant me the knowledge - the actual experiential, hands-on knowledge - that the Lord alone is God.


When Jesus talks about losing one's life, some parallels in surrounding literature are a centurion who betrays his army and country, or the daughter of a priest who becomes a whore.  The loss is to throw away what is precious to oneself; to render it completely useless.  In trying to make my own way, I render my life an empty betrayal; I throw away what is most precious in myself.  When I lay my life down as nothing before God, seeing it as refuse and dung in comparison to knowing him in Christ, I can begin to know what my life is for and what I have been made to do. Humility is losing my life so I can find my life.  May my life be nothing to me in the light of Christ my Lord.


Humility is simply the other side of faith.  When I "see how God truly is,"  humility is the "sense of entire nothingness" that comes.  It is not a matter of self-deprecation (which, in my experience, is a pride-based humility, as strange as that sounds) but a loss of self-consciousness and worry in the light of God's glory and goodness.  It is freedom.

This freedom was coaxed out of our hands by Satan.  The "high estate" of Adam and Eve was their humility. It is the true nobility of human beings.  In contrast, "self-exaltation is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell."  This is the great Fall of man: from humility to pride.  I am still facing the fall.  Like in free-fall, many no longer sense their downward plummet until they are caught by the wind of the Spirit which propels them upward into humility or hit the bottom of the fall of pride: misery and death.

When Paul says that everything that does not come from faith is sin, he is also saying that humility supports all other virtues.  Humility is the underside of faith, making virtue possible and rendering sin unappealing and ineffective.  When God is who he should be, then I can become who I should be.  Faith in God brings humility and humility supports faith.

Lord, let humility become the object of my desire and prayer and practice.  Let me give everything up for this pearl.  Work it into my life, Father.  I am yours.  Amen.


As you think about God or worship him or pray to him, do you ever become aware of a "sense of entire nothingness?"  Do you resist humility or embrace it?  Do you see it as painful necessity or your "true nobility?"