Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul

by Hannah Anderson

was also tired of knowing that I had absolutely no right to feel the way I did.

The truth was that I had no large looming problems, only small ones that felt large. I had no major life crises, only minor ones that felt major. I had no monumental difficulties, only trivial ones that felt unbelievably monumental. I was stressed and unhappy with a very normal life.

Failure at small things reminds us of how helpless we are in this great, wide world. When little things spiral out of control, they remind us that even they were never within our control in the first place. And this is terrifying.

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.

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

So instead of being motivated by goodness and beauty, we are driven forward by fear, threat of punishment, and manipulation. We feel the pressure to maintain picture-perfect lives and never step out of line lest we incur judgment. And we end up caught in a cycle of always evaluating our performance, always looking over our shoulder, always afraid and defensive.

Here is the root of our unhappiness: The rest that Jesus offers only comes when we humble ourselves and submit to Him.

By calling us to take His yoke, Jesus is calling us to submit to Him as our true master. But this can only happen when we “learn of Him”—when we are humbled as He is humble.

It was nothing other than pride and self-reliance.

And yet, my lack of peace was undeniable.

those of us who are busy “working for Jesus” may be the first to miss that we are struggling with pride because it can hide behind our good intentions.

We can also miss it because we exist in contexts that excuse and, at times, actually encourage such self-reliance.

The belief in her own competence drove Slaughter’s daily choices.

And suddenly trying to change the world—and seeing it stay very much the same—feels like nothing other than the weight of the world resting on your shoulders.

If you’re feeling burdened and heavy laden, you must question whether you’re as humbly submitted to Him as you believe yourself to be.

it’s entirely possible that you are still plowing under your own direction and strength. Instead of embracing Jesus as your Messiah, it’s entirely possible that you’ve become your own messiah.

We must come to Him to be tamed.

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.

And sometimes we will even wallow in our “unworthiness” as a means of signaling our spiritual superiority; unlike other people, we are aware of our helplessness.

We tend to think of pride as something we can conquer and of humility as something we can attain.

Being humble is something you either are or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, no amount of trying can make up for it.

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.

we often mistake our emotional unsettledness as simply taking advantage of our difficult circumstances. As a result, we justify our short tempers and agitation because we’re “under stress.” We convince ourselves that our worry is normal because we have so much responsibility. And we end up treating the symptoms instead of the root cause.

none of them resolve the root issue. None of them eradicate the pride that is feasting on our souls.

suddenly we begin to understand what’s at stake in our fight against pride. What’s at stake is our own sense of identity.

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.

So before we can even begin to answer His call to come to Him, Jesus comes to us. Because we could never sufficiently humble ourselves, Jesus humbles Himself. And by doing so, He became both the model and the means of our own humility. Through His life, death, and resurrection, Jesus shows us our true identity as people dependent on God for life. And through His life, death, and resurrection, He imparts this humble life to us once again.

We can no longer simply be content to attempt to imitate Him; we must become part of Him in order to reflect Him.

we must learn about our roots. And we learn this by encountering Jesus Himself.

Through His humanity, we learn what ours is supposed to be. Through His deity, He enables us to be what we are supposed to be.

I defined humility as a correct sense of self, as understanding where you come from and where you belong in this world.

To riff off G. K. Chesterton, perhaps the reason your life seems smaller is because you’ve simply grown too big in it.14

We feel smaller, not because we are smaller than other people, but because we had been thinking of ourselves “more highly than [we] ought.”

She and her husband consume the lie and it becomes part of them. And suddenly they become competitors instead of collaborators, their work an endless exercise in striving to prove their worth.

rumor of a tree that flourishes beside streams of water and produces good fruit;20 a rumor of a healthy branch, a scion, which will generate from the tree of David;21 a rumor of a tender plant that has the potential to flourish in dry ground.22

Jesus Christ is the one true Branch, the lost variety. Jesus Christ is the one who alone fears the Lord and who bears good fruit. Jesus Christ is the one who restores both our humility and our humanity. And in His glorious resting place—under the shade of His branches—we find rest.

Something about Jesus’ very existence—about the way He moved through the world as a human being—radically altered humanity.

This is the mystery and the hope of the incarnation: We are restored as much by the life of Christ as by His death and resurrection.

But then we strive for the ideal apart from Him. We insert ourselves in the narrative as if we were Jesus. We talk about being “Jesus’ hands and feet” and then proceed to act independently of Him.

We ask, “What would Jesus do?” but really mean, “What would Jesus do if He were me?”

We can be entirely well-intentioned, but if we attempt to pursue even humility apart from Him, we will simply act out of our own pride once again.

We are not called to embody Jesus ourselves; He has already been incarnated and is still even now! No, we are not called to be Jesus; we are called to fall at His feet and worship Him.

Instead of controlling each other, we can cultivate each other.

The goal is—as Lewis put it—to get “rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.”30

But this is no quick fix. What we’re after is sustainable growth.

But instead of making them like God, the fruit revealed how unlike God they were.

while culture sells us the lie that our bodies could be flawless, we buy it because of our pride.