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Dear God of Words,
Thanks for writing to me on Grace and Mercy. It helped the "Nicodemus" in me a whole lot. This time though, it's just me. No smart questions for you, just plain, weak ones.
I want to talk about humility, God. I work real hard to conjure up some humility and it lasts a solid five minutes before I'm feeling very proud of just how humble I'm feeling. Right now, humility feels like my life's biggest struggle and considering all the other monsters in my deep, dark closet, that's saying something! A proper thorn in the flesh, I say!
Every time my pride rears its ugly head, I honestly try to force humility - I remind myself of just how weak and foolish I am, I relive my past and all of its haunting mistakes to try and muster up some humility. But it just doesn't last! And God, I'm just tired of this back and forth...
Of late, I find myself wondering if my problem is less with the act and more with the word. Have I just got it all wrong?
Love,
Nik
Dear Nik,
It's nice to hear from "just you", kid. Verily I say, I'd like to hear from this version of Nik a lot more! She keeps it real, doesn't she?
You're onto something when you ask me, "Is my problem the word itself?" I don't mean to spy or anything but I overhear your thoughts all the time. And you spend a lot of time wondering why I've removed your sins "as far as the east is from the west" but you still have to keep thoughts of your sins close to try and achieve humility. Or why when I have made you "white as snow" you need to still hold on to your scarlet sin so you feel bad enough to be humble. There is definitely some merit to that train of thought. Although I wish you'd have just asked me instead of trying to figure it out on your own.
Now that you have, here are a few of My thoughts:
There are a couple of people in My Word that I paid great compliments to. One I called My "dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy" and the other I called "a man after my own heart." There are few things these two had in common but there is one that I valued greatly - humility.
Jesus was the most humble to have walked the earth. Do you think that His humility came from His nothingness? You seem to think that the only way to be humble is to feel more weak, sinful or foolish. I'll admit that that does bring a measure of humility but you yourself confessed it is short-lived.
(Sure, by all means remember who you were before I saved you and do remember it is I who sustains you. You want to remember those and that ought to humble you. But let's be honest, Nik, it's not these thoughts of what I have done that make you experience humility; it's the thoughts of what you have done and the embarrassment that they produce, isn't it?)
Coming back to Jesus, My Word says of one of His greatest acts of humility (John 13: 3 & 4), "He knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist."
Kid, notice how His humility to lower himself to the feet of others did not come from the knowledge of His low position? It was quite the opposite, wasn't it? He was so convinced of His standing with Me and who He was and where He was headed and so He knelt down and washed feet.
Take David as another example. His first assignment after being anointed to be king over Israel was to sooth the nerves of a man tormented by an evil spirit and to put himself at the mercy of his many mood swings. Now that task gets much harder when you know that your rightful place was to share that very man's honour.
What is it but the sheer security of his standing with Me, that can cause a man to be at home at another man's feet for any length of time?
The reality is, Nik, that your pride is often the fruit of insecurity in this very thing. You are often unconvinced of what I've done for you and so you're constantly trying to one-up the other person and to make yourself look and feel bigger. Humility is not to be a result of your lack of standing with Me but the assurance of it.
Perhaps the day you're fully convinced in your heart that you've been raised, "seated in heavenly places in Christ", that your life is from Me and that it is to Me that you're headed, humility will come to you, naturally.
The day that you see who Jesus, by His death, has made you, you will no longer need to force humility by remembering the ugliness of the very past that He died to set you free from.
Love,
The God of Words