Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul

by Hannah Anderson

I wonder if I wasn’t worrying about these little things themselves so much as what these little things revealed about larger things—about what they revealed about my larger helplessness.

Failure at small things reminds us of how helpless we are in this great, wide world.

When we believe that we are responsible for our own existence, when we trust our ability to care for ourselves, we will have nothing but stress because we are unequal to the task. You know this. Deep inside, you know your limits even as you fight against them. You know your helplessness even as you press forward by sheer determination. But at some point, the world becomes too much, and the largeness of life threatens to overwhelm you. And when it does, you must stop. And you must do what Jesus told His friends and followers to do on that flowered hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Your heavenly Father knows what you need. He knows your heart is troubled. He also knows, better than you do, that all these things are beyond you. And so, this is what you must do, all that you must do: You must seek Him. And let Him take care of the rest.

He frees us by calling us to rely less on ourselves and more on Him. He frees us by calling us to humility.

Pride convinces us that we are stronger and more capable than we actually are. Pride convinces us that we must do and be more than we are able. And when we try, we find ourselves feeling “thin, sort of stretched … like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”11 We begin to fall apart physically, emotionally, and spiritually for the simple reason that we are not existing as we were meant to exist.

When we disregard our natural human limitations, we set ourselves in God’s place.

“If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud.” —C. S. Lewis

Most of us would probably agree that we “should” be more humble. We see it as a noble virtue. We may even be convinced that humility is essential to experiencing rest. Without it, we will continue to be agitated, anxious, and frustrated because our pride will lead us to live beyond natural limitations. But until we understand the extent to which pride infects our everyday choices, we will never be at peace.

So when Jesus calls us to learn of His own humility, He’s not calling us to adopt humble posturing or master a new skill. He intends to fundamentally change us. He intends to strip us of the pride that keeps us from experiencing rest. He intends to get to the root of the problem so that humility becomes natural to us.

Apart from Jesus, we will wither up and die.

The problem, at this point, isn’t that we can’t see the symptoms or even that we don’t know what’s causing our lack of peace. The problem is our unwillingness to accept the solution. The problem is our obsession with ourselves. With our need to fix things, our need to make ourselves better, our need to be approved by God and others, our need to “count for something.”

Humility is accurately understanding ourselves and our place in the world. Humility is knowing where we came from and who our people are. Humility is understanding that without God we are nothing. Without His care, without His provision, without His love, we would still be dust. Or as nineteenth-century pastor Andrew Murray writes in his classic book Humility, “Humility is simply acknowledging the truth of [our] position as creature and yielding to God His place.”

If we are to find rest from our stress, if we are to have any hope of escaping our pride, we must be grafted onto the one who is humility Himself. We can no longer simply be content to attempt to imitate Him; we must become part of Him in order to reflect Him.

And when we are, when we exist as God has intended us to exist, we will find rest.

Without God’s breath in us, we are nothing but a pile of dirt.

And so often ego is at the root of our present unrest, as well.

“He became what we are so that he might make us what he is.” —

If pride told them that they could be like God, their physical bodies told them in no uncertain terms that they absolutely could not.

And like the man and woman in the garden, instead of rejecting the pride that tells us we could be like God, we reject our bodies that tell us we cannot.

Humility is not feeling a certain way about yourself, not feeling small or low or embarrassed or even humiliated. Theologically speaking, humility is a proper understanding of who God is and who we are as a result.

Humility teaches us that we don’t have to obey our emotions because the only version of reality that matters is God’s.

To accuse oneself of falling short of infallibility is to arrogate to oneself the godhead.

Humility reminds us that the lack of confidence does not determine whether God has gifted us and called us.

Because “God is greater than your heart,” He can handle the depth of your emotions. He is not afraid of them, and as you bring them back to Him, you shouldn’t be afraid of them either. In this sense, humility does not shut down your inner life; humility redeems it.

But the Scripture roots wisdom in something else entirely; the Scripture roots wisdom in submitting to God. In this sense, a fool is not unwise because she does not have enough facts; she is unwise because she doesn’t submit to the source of wisdom Himself.

But what modernism fails to account for is the possibility that our minds might be limited and our reason corrupted by sin. What modernism fails to account for is a God whose “ways are past finding out.”

Ultimately our need to be “right” and to defend our “right”eousness is a form of self-reliance and pride.

Humility teaches us to wait for God for answers.

So, too, humility teaches us to wait. To wait for the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. To wait for those we love to come to understanding. To wait for answers that, in God’s own wisdom, may never come. But humility also teaches us that we don’t need to know everything as long as we know the one who does know.

left unchecked, pride blinds us to God’s good gifts. Because pride convinces us that we are more significant than we really are, it also convinces us that we deserve a certain experience of the world; and when something disrupts that, our pride reveals itself by complaining.

But as unfounded as our stress may be, we still feel it. In that moment, our complaint feels entirely valid. And it feels valid because we actually believe ourselves worthy of a different experience.

If your thankfulness is rooted in comparison, it will evaporate in an instant. No, gratitude born from humility is not a gratitude rooted in having more than someone else. It is a gratitude rooted in having anything at all.

But it is precisely the fact that our resources do not belong to us—that they have been given to us by our good, kind Master—that frees us to take risks. When everything is gift and when we learn to trust the Giver of those gifts, we learn a kind of humility that makes us fearless and productive. And instead of either hoarding or rejecting our resources, we cultivate them.

More than anything, I wanted her to be a woman of humble obedience. A woman who would answer God’s call with courage instead of fear. A woman who would make the most of the life she had been given.

1. I will not overlook my privilege. I will take stock of the resources that God has given me including time, talent, education, and wealth. 2. I will not feel guilty about what God has put in my hands or attempt to earn it. I accept it as a gift and rejoice in it. 3. I will allow God to lead me in cultivating these gifts for His glory and the good of those around me.

You, too, have resources at your disposal. They may not be many or public, but you have them. And no matter how small, no matter how few, God intends for you to use them. He intends for you to become a humble, resourceful person, first by receiving His gifts with gratitude and then by cultivating them for the good of those around you.

Just as you must accept your resources as good gifts from Him, you must accept that you cannot cultivate them apart from Him. The very process is meant to teach you dependence.

Our dismissal of desire may be built less on our holy hesitations … ignoring our desires may serve as the convenient way we remain ignorant and resist change.

Pride, on the other hand, demands to know God’s will before it will act. It balks and halts and refuses to move until success is guaranteed. In other words, sometimes the failure to plan is a form of arrogance that expects knowledge beyond our human capacity to know. When we refuse to plan before we “know,” we are asking for the same level of knowledge about our future as God has.

What if grace is true?

Part of the way riches deceive us is that we end up caught caring for the very things that we thought would care for us.