The Healing Power of True Humility
If you asked anyone in our high school to describe my friend Chris, humility would have topped everyone’s list. Chris would downplay his accomplishments and always had a self-effacing quip ready to swat away any compliment as if he were Dikembe Mutombo. Nothing evoked a stronger response than when people praised him for his humility.
As one of Chris’s close friends, I saw beneath his outward semblance of humility. Chris despised himself. He refused compliments because he had already decided that he was complete trash. His shortcomings dominated his every waking thought. It took many years for Chris to emerge from this darkness.
We face an epidemic of self-hate today that makes humility seem passe. Many seem to be saying, “Let’s treat self-hate first, then maybe one day we can worry about humility.” The prevailing answer to this epidemic is to promote self-esteem. Etsy is overflowing with defiant messages of self-worth—“Believe in yourself” and “This is about you.”
I get the appeal. Our sense of value is assaulted from both within and without. There’s some wisdom to ignoring the haters. The problem is that the momentum of the self-esteem mantras and the self-hate slanders rely on the same broken internal resources. Often our greatest critic and accuser comes from deep within our own hearts. Telling our hearts to believe another narrative about our worth is like telling an anxious person to stop worrying (spoiler: it doesn’t work).
Are You Humble or Humiliated?
Where does this leave us? Ironically, I believe we’ve jettisoned our best hope due to our misunderstanding of humility. Humility isn’t self-hate. In fact, I’d argue meekness is the best antidote to personal loathing. Humility calls us to an accurate self-understanding, even if it means relying on someone outside of ourselves to establish it. This is precisely what we need.
We can stare all day into a mirror and repeat that we are lovely, lovely, lovely. But nothing can replace the power of someone else looking into our eyes and calling us lovely. Even when someone else speaks these words over us, we feel the urge for an explanation. What do you see that is lovely? What have I done to contribute to this estimation?
When the God of the universe looks into our eyes and calls us lovely, he does so because of who he is. To question the reasoning behind the great lover’s affection is like asking why birds fly—it’s simply in their nature. Even when we can find nothing lovely in ourselves, the Lord declares his love for us.
But what of our sin? We tend to minimize or justify our sin in order to feel worthy of God’s love. But this isn’t how God’s love works, and it certainly isn’t an honest understanding of ourselves.
An Honest Assessment
If you grew up in the church, maybe you remember this illustration. Imagine you’re at Sunday worship when every sinful thought you’ve ever had begins to be projected on the screen for all to see. I always disliked this illustration for how it felt like an attempt to shame us out of our sin, but I can’t argue with its effectiveness in dispelling the notion of innate goodness for those, like me, who are talented at minimizing and justifying our sin.
This instinct for Christians to present ourselves in the best possible light is a peculiar one considering the words of Paul in 1 Timothy 1:15: “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.”
I’ve seen some commentators suggest that Paul is being hyperbolic here to simply make a point. Perhaps this is the case. But it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine Paul believing these words literally as one who once hunted down and murdered followers of Jesus.
Of course, Paul is in good company here as one who experienced a theophany. When Isaiah sees God, his immediate response is to dejectedly cry out about his sin and the sin of his people. When Simon hauls in the big catch of fish, he begs Jesus to go away from him because he’s a sinful man. There’s something about experiencing the presence of a Holy God that draws attention to our sinfulness.
When such attention is drawn to our sinfulness, we may respond in one of three ways. Two are driven by pride and one by humility. The first prideful response I’ve already mentioned; we can seek to minimize and justify our sin. The second prideful option—incessantly dwelling on and defining ourselves by sin—is often mistaken for humility, but it is merely a cheap imitation.
How is this second option related to pride? It keeps our focus inward and depends on our own resources for salvation. Often it is paired with a distorted view of God who is simmering with anger toward us, just waiting for us to screw up so he can punish us. God doesn’t ignore sin, but if we believe we are more patient with our sin than God is, then we have a severely inflated view of ourselves and an anemic understanding of God.
Our Best Resource: The Lowliness of Christ
Humility invites us to take full stock of our sin and its ugliness and throw ourselves completely on the mercy of Christ. As Robert Murray McCheyne wrote, “for every look at self, take ten looks at Christ.” Humility requires having a clear-eyed view of ourselves and our sin, but it doesn’t leave us to deal with it on our own because it has an equally dim view of our ability to fix what’s broken.
I know far too many Christians who are wracked with guilt and shame as they ponder their sin. They may say they believe in a loving Father, but you wouldn’t know it by their obsession with their sin. I also see many Christians acquiescing to the surrounding culture’s worship of self-esteem and innate moral goodness. Neither of these approaches will suffice for the very real battle we wage with the sin and our propensity for self-hate.
Take racial prejudice, for example. In some secular circles, to be labeled a racist is the proverbial scarlet letter of the twenty-first century (while in others, unfortunately, it remains a badge of honor). Even corporations are doing (or at least, saying) everything they can to make sure they are perceived to be “on the right side of history.” Likewise, many Christians also try to prove that they harbor no prejudices and distance themselves from those who do. Other Christians are wracked with shame because they are aware of how much they fall short in pursuing justice.
Humility allows us to confess sins like racial prejudice and trust in the Lord to heal us and his church. We can withstand others’ thoughts about our sinfulness knowing they are justified, but we mustn’t let the truth of our transgressions ultimately define us because we don’t have that kind of authority. By inexplicable grace, God has sought the worst of sinners to adopt into his family by the blood of Jesus. Both denying our sin and dwelling on our sin mutes the symphony of God’s grace. But the way of humility takes seriously the depth of our brokenness and finds that our sin is no match for his grace.
In this tension I’m often reminded of Shane & Shane’s song “Embracing Accusation” which contemplates the messages we hear from the evil one:
I hear him saying, “Cursed are the ones who can’t abide” / He’s right, Hallelujah, he’s right / The devil is preaching the song of the redeemed / That I am cursed and gone astray / I cannot gain salvation, embracing accusation / Oh, the devil’s singing over me an age old song / That I am cursed and gone astray / Singing the first verse so conveniently over me / He’s forgotten the refrain, Jesus saves.
The cure for self-hatred isn’t denial of the ugly things in our hearts. True freedom is found in the honesty of seeing our utter brokenness and God’s abiding love for those who don’t measure up.
The crazy reality about us is that we usually choose retaining our pride and self-hate over this invitation to humility and belovedness. God’s love comes to us by grace alone. It will not allow us to believe we have done anything to qualify. The antidote to self-hate isn’t fighting to change our internal script but rather surrendering to one that could never come from us.
Adam Salloum has served on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for over ten years and currently serve as the Area Director for South Carolina. He’s a graduate of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. You can follow him on Twitter.