Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul

by Hannah Anderson

During the day, my mind raced from one responsibility to the next, mentally calculating all the things I needed to accomplish before bed. It also kept track of how many calories I’d consumed, what chores I’d left undone, and my failures to be an appropriately invested mother, readily available friend, and consistently devoted wife. And all of it made me so very tired.

“That’s because you’re an A-plus kind of girl, Hannah,” he interrupted. “Me? I’m content with a B-plus. Just go to sleep.” Was it that? Was I simply a perfectionist? I didn’t feel like a perfectionist—my house certainly didn’t scream “perfectionist.” It screamed a lot of other things, but it didn’t scream perfect. When I thought about the piles of clothes sitting next to the washer, I’d feel guilty. But when I began working through the piles, sorting them into darks and whites, heavy and light, I’d feel guilty over owning so much stuff. And then I’d feel guilty about feeling guilty. No, I wasn’t a perfectionist. I was simply losing my mind.

I see peers in ministry, freely giving of their time and energy but privately wondering whether their efforts amount to anything.

I see all of us: blessed beyond measure, but exhausted, anxious, and uncertain nonetheless.

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. I shouldn’t have to worry about small things because I should be able to handle small things. I should be able to return emails on time. I should be able to sleep at night. But if I can’t handle little things, what can I handle? 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. 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.”

if we’re not careful, telling someone to “Seek God” without explaining how and what that looks like can actually compound her stress.

So what does it mean to trust Jesus for rest? How does seeking His kingdom free us from anxiety and stress? He frees us from our burdens in the most unexpected way: He frees us by calling us to rely less on ourselves and more on Him. He frees us by calling us to humility.

Poet Marge Piercy describes the ox tethered to the plow as those of us “who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward.”3 So why would Jesus call people who were already burdened to shoulder another burden? Why would He believe plowing is a good image for rest?

When you read the context of Jesus’ words, you’ll realize that Jesus isn’t calling us to shoulder an extra burden; He is calling us to exchange a heavy burden for a lighter one. He is calling us to take His yoke because it is easier and lighter than the one we are presently carrying:

Some of us are hitched to the plow of men and women who happily abuse our spiritual sensitivity for their own benefit. These kinds of masters are not gentle and humble as Jesus is; they specialize in strict judgments and man-made rules that they themselves do not follow. 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. In contrast, Jesus promises to be a kinder, gentler master. He promises that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. In John 3, He tells Nicodemus (a religious leader himself) that He did not come into the world to condemn the world but to save it.7 And in his letter to the early churches in Galatia, the apostle Paul reiterates that “for freedom Christ has set us free … do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”8 Unlike many of the religious leaders who sought power and personal glory, Jesus comes to bring us freedom and rest.

But this rest is contingent on something. We must come to Him. We must take His yoke. We must learn of Him. And here is the rub. Here is the real source of our anxiety and stress. Here is the root of our unhappiness: The rest that Jesus offers only comes when we humble ourselves and submit to Him.

This is why Jesus uses the image of a yoke; the yoke is a symbol of authority. 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. Ironically, the heavy burden the people were struggling under, the thing that kept them from the rest, wasn’t simply the weight of other people’s expectations. It was their belief that they had to meet those expectations by their own ability, leading to confidence that they could carry the bu...

If anything, 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 that “success” is within our grasp also invades our churches. If only you are committed enough, if only you are passionate enough, you are told, you can “do great things for God.” At first, this message is inspiring. It taps into your God-given desire to work and do good. And so you push and press to “make your life count” only to see celebrity speakers and megachurch pastors take center stage at sold-out conferences while you slog away at a small brick church that sits at a bend in the road. 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.

You may have thrown off the yoke of religious form, you may be working for the greater good, but 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.

Do you feel underappreciated and easily slip into self-pity?

Do you find yourself irritated by people or struggling to forgive them when they fail? Do friends and family rarely meet your expectations?

Do you work hard but never feel like ...

When we insist that our voice and our work is essential and must be honored, we set ourselves in God’s place. When we believe that with enough effort, enough organization, or enough commitment, we can fix things that are broken, we set ourselves in God’s place. And when we do, we reap stress, restlessness, and anxiety. Instead of submitting to His yoke, we break it and run wild, trampling the very ground we are meant to cultivate.

When Jesus calls us to take His yoke, when He invites us to find rest through submission, He is not satisfying some warped need for power or His own sense of pride. He is calling us to safety. The safety that comes from belonging to Him. The safety that comes from being tamed.

It is understandable that we fear the yoke. We fear the loss of control. We fear surrender. But we must also understand that without the protection of a good master, we are not safe. From the manipulation of other masters. From the expectations of society. From ourselves.

One of the clearest examples of the extent of our pride is how quickly it infiltrates even our attempts to “be humble.” When you encounter a person who—for whatever reason—is “trying” to be humble, you can spot it almost immediately. You may not be able to articulate why, but you know that the person is not actually humble. In fact, false modesty is so prevalent in our culture that we even have a term for it: the humble brag.

Some of us debase ourselves or use self-deprecating language as a way to invite reassurance and praise.4 After a personal success, we may deflect well-wishes and congratulations, which simply forces those around us to repeat them. 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.

But humility is not a commodity. It is not something you can achieve. It is not something you earn or accomplish. 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. All your attempts to “be humble”—to say the right words or deflect praise or carry yourself in a lowly way—will seem unnatural and put on.

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.

we can often see the effects of pride and how it contributes to our overall lack of peace. We may agree that the infestation is so profound that it corrupts even our attempts at humility. But like them, 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.

When we feel overwhelmed, we establish stricter boundaries and coach ourselves to say no more often. When we are tired, we trust a vacation or carving out “me-time” to alleviate our stress. When we find ourselves falling behind in our work, we commit to better scheduling and longer days. When we feel like we can never do enough, we tell ourselves to just “embrace the mess.” And while any of these could be potentially helpful—having poultry eat insects off plants did offer some benefit—none of them resolve the root issue. None of them eradicate the pride that is feasting on our souls.

If we establish strict boundaries without accepting our lack of control, we’ll simply be harried and unhappy in a smaller space. If we go on vacations without cultivating humility, we’ll return to our stress once the bags are unpacked. If we schedule every available minute without acknowledging our own temporariness, we’ll become a slave to the calendar. And if we try to “embrace th...

As long as we refuse to accept that our pride is the source of our unrest, we will conti...

Here is the offense: “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Apart from Jesus, our leaves will turn yellow and fall off. Apart from Jesus, the fruit we bear will be watery and acidic, unfit for anything. Apart from Jesus, we will wither up and die.

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, then, is not simply a disposition or set of phrases. 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.”

But this is also why it’s so difficult to come to Jesus for rest. Before we can be grafted onto Him, we must be stripped of our decomposing roots, our self-sufficiency and ego. We must give up the pretense that we can root ourselves. We must reject the pride that believes in humility as a concept but refuses to actually be humbled before God. The trouble, of course, is that it is our very pride that keeps us from being healed of our … pride. 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.

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

Fascinatingly, while humans were made to rule over the earth, we were also made from the earth. And perhaps even more significantly, we only came alive by God’s Spirit. Without God’s breath in us, we are nothing but a pile of dirt.

This earthy imagery repeats itself throughout the Scripture. In Psalm 103, David sings that God shows compassion on us, in part, because “He remembers that we are dust.”6 The prophet Jeremiah likens humans to a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel, being shaped and formed by the sovereign hands of the Potter.7 In the parable of the sower, Jesus compares the human heart to different types of soil that either receive or reject God’s word. And in his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds them that we are simply “jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”

We see friends achieving success, maybe even in ministry, and rather than rejoicing with them, we somehow feel smaller. So we privately tally our spiritual “successes,” reassuring ourselves that we’re just as necessary as they are. Or perhaps one morning you’re scrolling through your social media feed, when you see her—the woman you secretly compare yourself with—and she’s just posted pictures of her latest family trip (to a place you could never afford). There she sits, effortlessly beautiful even with vacation hair, her arms wrapped around her spunky, albeit well-behaved, children, her adoring husband standing next to her, smiling. And suddenly the rest of the day is ruined for you.

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

At its root, pride confuses our identity with God’s and makes us think of ourselves as larger than we really are. But when we begin to think of ourselves this way, we expect other people to think of us like this too. Without realizing it, we begin to expect more glory and more honor because we actually believe ourselves to be better than they are. So when normal everyday occurrences—like scrolling through Facebook—remind us that we aren’t, our ego takes a hit. As pastor and theologian Tim Keller explains in his book The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, “the ego is fragile. That is because anything that is overinflated is in imminent danger of being deflated—like an overinflated balloon.”

As C. S. Lewis writes, “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.”

The temptation, of course, is to bypass Jesus altogether. The temptation is to read these verses as a model for our behavior and then attempt to live them out in our own strength.

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

When we are consumed with God’s glory, we forget to worry about our own. When our eyes are fixed on Him as the source of all goodness and truth and beauty, we accept that we are not. When we are enamored by His worth and majesty, we can stop being so enamored with ourselves. And fascinatingly, when we seek God’s glory, we’ll be able to appreciate it in the people around us. Instead of seeing them as threats to our own glory, we will see them as beautiful reflections of His.

In his essay “The Maniac,” Chesterton asks, “But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure.”

It is important to understand the connection between pride and our sinful actions. The danger for many of us is that we evaluate the state of our hearts based on whether we are intentionally sinning. The problem, of course, is that pride literally blinds us to the state of our own hearts; we will feel entirely justified in our choices. When this happens, we can convince ourselves that we are humble people, despite sin in our lives. Because of this, we must be quick to receive the reproof of trusted friends; they often see things that we simply cannot.

Around here, you live close to the land because the land is what you’ve been given, and you take care of what you’ve been given. You raise your own vegetables because your granddaddy did, and seeds are cheaper than produce shipped from Mexico. You hunt because you like venison, and the deer have been eating your hostas again. And you buy local honey because your barber sells it, and it’s the best honey you ever tasted.

The issue, of course, is not whether we recognize our bodies as physical, but whether we recognize this physical nature as good. Do we humbly embrace and honor our bodies, or do we see them as a source of shame, embarrassment, and guilt? “Many people,” notes biblical scholar Dr. Gregg Allison, “abhor their body, and many Christians … consider their body to be, at best, a hindrance to spiritual maturity and, at worst, inherently evil or the ultimate source of sin.”2

Within the church, the messages can be just as mixed. Women are simultaneously celebrated for being “smoking hot wives” at the same time they are told that their bodies are a source of temptation, a ticking time bomb that, for love of their brothers, they must defuse. Men experience shame over their bodies, as well; they may believe themselves too short, too thin, too heavy, to have too much body hair, to have not enough facial hair, or to lack muscle tone. Men also receive confusing messages about sexuality: On the one hand, a natural appreciation for beauty becomes equated with lust, resulting in shame for even noticing the attractiveness of a woman (or another man). But when age causes a man’s sex drive to wane, the same shame tells him to seek out small blue pills to recover his manhood.

Suddenly they could see clearly, and their bodies were a glaring, painful reminder of their creaturehood and their attempted rebellion. If pride told them that they could be like God, their physical bodies told them in no uncertain terms that they absolutely could not.