By Ann Weaver.
In common culture, the word “humility” is deceiving. We think of it as the opposite of pride, and in some ways it is. When a person is proud, they like to boast about themselves and their achievements. When they’re humble, they typically refrain from that. Because of this, humility and pride are usually seen as polar opposites.
Unfortunately, when we withhold from praising ourselves outwardly by boasting, we often end up praising ourselves inwardly for not being boastful.
We commend ourselves for saying nothing of what we did, and when someone mentions it, we only grow more gratified. We feel a little glow of satisfaction that someone noticed that we weren’t bragging. We may even vaguely recall Proverbs 29:23, which says that “A man’s pride will bring him low, but a humble spirit will obtain honor.” and believe that we just obtained honor for being humble. But then our conscience gives us a twinge, and suddenly we realize the horrible truth. That little glow of satisfaction we enjoyed when we thought we were being humble? It was actually a sign of pride!
We groan and shake our heads; then determine to try again. We set out again to perform a task or keep up a certain attitude, trying to remember that we need to keep our heads down and remain humble. We complete our task and feel relieved that we were able to evade the compliments or humbly turn them down, and then that little glimmer of satisfaction appears again.
And we’re back to where we started.
This cycle may occur many times. After a while, we end up feeling defeated. We’ve tried and tried to be humble, but we keep realizing the humility we think we have is false; a sham that our brains create in order to gain more pride from pretending to be humble. We wonder how it went wrong. We never told anyone what we did or showed ourselves off, but still our pride has risen up to envelop us. We grow frustrated and wonder where the root of this pride took hold, when we were doing our very best to keep ourselves humble the entire time?
The key to our trouble is in the last question. When we were doing our very best to keep ourselves humble. Though our motives were good, we were still thinking of ourselves. Instead of centering our words and actions on how “good” they were in order to boast, we were centering our words and actions around the intention of not boasting. In plainer words, though we had different intentions, we were still centering our words and actions around ourselves and our goals. In both instances, we were thinking of ourselves.
In order to have true humility, we must stop centering our words and actions around ourselves—for any motive. Whether our reasons are good or bad, they’re still being focused on ourselves. Instead of caring about what we’re doing for ourselves, we need to turn our focus outward and start centering our actions around God and others. We need to stop looking for what makes us appear “good”—or what makes us appear at all.
We need to stop thinking about ourselves. Instead, we need to cast our pride away with God’s help, and begin thinking about how we are honoring Him with whatever we do. (1 Corinthians 10:31.) We need to forget ourselves entirely, no matter how grand or insignificant our task may be, and focus on doing whatever gives God honor and glory. We can remember that all our skills and abilities come from God, and we are only using what He gave us to honor Him.
As we strive to look to God rather than at our own lives, we need to pray continually for God to take our focus off of ourselves and onto Him. We need to pray continuously that He will help us to avoid this perilous sin, until we can say with Paul in Philippians 3:7: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.”
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