Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul

by Hannah Anderson

When we’ve spent our lives and emotion and time and money pursuing what we believe will make us happy only to never reach it, we quickly learn where—better still, who—is the source of our ultimate joy. When we are denied the very things our hearts long for, we learn to long for the one thing that will never be denied us, God Himself.

Humble people understand that their work is no guarantee of success; but the humble also understand that the possibility of failure is no reason not to work.

If we limit ourselves to working only when the signs are promising, if we only plant when everything is perfect, we limit our ability to see God at His best. When we limit ourselves to working when the time is right, we reveal that we are still clinging to the notion that success is dependent on our choices and our ability to control outcomes. We are still relying on our ability to make all the right decisions. We are still counting on our calculations and plans to foresee all possible eventualities.

The grace to rest in the future that He has planned for us. The grace to work. The grace to wait. The grace to dream.

We do not feel the weight of good gifts, for good gifts point back to the Giver; no, we feel the weight of trying to replace the Giver with His gifts. We feel the weight of the pride that convinced us to rely on earthly goods to relieve a spiritual need in the first place. And we find ourselves in a constant cycle of maintaining these earthly goods, of packing and moving them and sending them off to Goodwill so we can have space to buy more. We find ourselves caught work, work, working to afford them, our hands “full of toil and a striving after the wind.”4

But it is from these very thorns that Jesus proves His power. It is from these very thorns that He shows how humility overcomes the brokenness. It is from these very thorns that He produces sweet, abundant fruit. And so, in His humility, He opens not His mouth. “When he was reviled,” Peter writes, “he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”8 This is how humility overcomes the world: Humility trusts God. In the midst of injustice, humility believes that God is just. In the midst of grief, humility believes that God is comfort. In the midst of brokenness, humility believes that God is health and life.

And when we remember who God is, when we are humbled before Him, we will be free to mourn the brokenness—both from within and without.

Humility teaches us that God is actively redeeming the world. And because He is, we can experience the relief of confessing our brokenness—whether it is intentional sin, our natural limitations, or simply the weight of living under the curse. Humility teaches us to find rest in confession. Rest from the need to hide, the need to be perfect. We rest by saying, both to God and others, “I am not enough. I need help.”

And yet, even as we mourn the brokenness both within and without, we do not mourn without hope. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a day when “the light of Israel will become a fire and his Holy One a flame, and it will burn and devour his thorns and briers.”

The humble person doesn’t deny the pain of this world, or her complicity in it, but she does hope. She continues to forage for the sweetness that God has promised. She gleans where she has not planted. Along the fence rows and roadsides. Not in carefully cultivated thickets, but in the wildness of the waysides. Our hands may be scratched and bleeding, we may stink of sweat, our feet sinking in the mud, but there, just within our grasp, is a cluster of hope—a reminder of who God is and how He never fails His children.

All our life, humility is working to this end: Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit. I give up. I surrender. I trust.

But resurrection does not happen apart from humility. Resurrection does not happen apart from surrendering to the Father’s will. In this sense, God the Father did not raise Jesus up simply because He was His Son; God raised Jesus up because this is how God responds to humility. He exalts those who humble themselves. This is the governing dynamic in God’s upside-down kingdom: You go down in order to go up. You go low in order to go high. You humble yourself in order to be exalted.

Jesus’ work to restore humility did not end with His own resurrection. Even today, even now, His work of resurrection continues. Even now, He is cultivating His garden. Even now, the second Adam, the true Son of Man, is tending His Eden. And as we submit to His skillful hand, our own hearts and lives—though perhaps for a time locked and dead—will break forth in green.

In many ways, the act of sleep is itself a spiritual act, an act of humility. To sleep, we must stop our work. To sleep, we must lay our bodies down. To sleep, we must trust another to care for us.

Through practicing this trust every night, He is teaching us how to trust Him when He finally calls us to Himself. Through our practicing this rest every night, He is teaching us how to rest in Him for all eternity.

“So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God,” the writer of Hebrews promises us, “for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.”17 But this rest only comes by humility. This rest only comes by acknowledging our weakness. This rest only comes by submitting ourselves to Him.

For when you do, when you finally come to Him—you who labor and are heavy laden—you can be confident that He will welcome you. You can be confident that “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.”18 You can be confident...