Good morning and welcome to summer in the Flathead! Thanks for being here! We are in a summer sermon series called 7 virtues of an authentic Christian life. We looked at faith, hope, love and last week on Father’s Day, we looked at courage. Those messages are available on our church website clcwhitefish.com.
Virtue means strength, power, quality. Virtues are gifts from God that strengthen the core of our being. It’s good stuff to get us through the tough stuff. Today we look at the virtue of humility.
One of the interesting things about humility is as soon as you think you have it, you don’t. And when you know you don’t have it, you might. We get the words “humility” and “human” from the word “humus”. It means dirt.
God formed us out of the dust of the earth and one day our bodies will return to the dust from which we were made. So if someone calls you a dirt bag, which is not a kind thing to do – on one hand they would be right, our bodies are made of the dust of the earth.
But there is much more to a human being than just a bag of mud. We were created in the image of God. We were designed to live with God in a relationship of love and be partners with him in his work in the universe. There are therefore no accidental or disposable people. God calls us his cherished possession, his beloved children, his chosen ones.
In John 3:16 Jesus said, “For God so loved the ethos, the people of the world, that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. That makes us more precious in God’s sight than we can fully comprehend. Our LOGOS youth program has a motto that goes like this. Everyone is to treat everyone else as a child of God. No one has the right to treat anyone else as if they do not matter.
Humility is rooted in an accurate self-assessment. It’s built on what God says in his Word about who I am and why I am here and what the purpose of my life is.
That’s where we get into trouble. We have an enemy of our souls – actually 3 enemies – Luther called them the world, the devil, and our own sinful flesh. These 3 are continually trying to deceive us into believing lies about who we are and why we are here.
There is a battle line that stretches from Adam and Eve right to the present and it runs right through each of our hearts. It’s a battle for sovereignty – that means, who will be Lord, who will be master in our lives and in our hearts. Will I be honest with myself or chose to believe a lie?
I love golf. I didn’t start golfing until I was nearly 40 years old. Golf is a humbling game. But that doesn’t mean that golfers are necessarily a humble. I said humility is an accurate self-assessment? You’d be amazed at how golfers bend the rules in order to avoid an accurate self-assessment. Golfers, hang with me here and don’t start throwing shoes.
We have these things called mulligans, do overs, gimme putts – which are really lame ways to justify cheating. If humility is an accurate self-assessment then mulligans, do overs, and gimme putts have nothing to do with humility. We are pretending to be what we are not.
One of the definitions of sin is to miss the mark. But as long as we justify our mistakes, we will never own up to our failures and we’ll never get any better. Owning up to our short comings and mistakes so God can help us improve involves humility and an accurate self assessment.
Satan was once one of the greatest angels of heaven. In fact, God gave him the name morning star or bearer of light. What an amazing gift – to be a bearer of God’s light in creation! But instead of bearing God’s light, he chose to believe he was the light. That he was even greater than the one who created him. Now that’s even more delusional than mulligans and gimmes!
The Scripture says he exalted himself and claimed to be equal with God. How could anybody be that stupid and incompetent? In his arrogance, he became an utter fool, the greatest fool!
Yet, the truth is, we’ve done the same thing. Sin turns us in upon ourselves so that we see ourselves as the center of the universe. We want God to get out of our way so we can do whatever we want yet we still expect God to be there to rescue us when things come apart.
We expect God to provide for us, yet we hoard what we are given and refuse to share what we’ve been given. We expect God to take care of us, but we refuse to obey him. We refuse to recognize his right to be sovereign over our lives and claim that sovereignty for ourselves.
We’d call somebody who claimed to be God insane, yet we behave as if we were. Humility is the virtue that puts back into our right mind – restores our sanity – puts our life back in order with God and the rest of creation. Humility is coming to terms with who we are and who we are not and discovering the true purpose for our life.
Open your Bibles to Mt 18. The disciples come to Jesus with a question about humility. They ask, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” They want some tips on being successful.
Jesus calls a little child, a toddler, and had the child stand before them. Then he said, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 18:3-4
What is it about little children? Dependent, teachable, trusting, honest, obedient. How quickly the world begins to knock that out of us.
If we want to really understand humility, we need to get close to Jesus. Here was a man with what seemed to be unlimited authority and power. He multiplied bread, raised the dead, calmed the storm, healed every kind of disease, yet he never used his power and authority to exalt himself. Instead he chose submission and obedience to his Heavenly Father.
The Apostle Paul describes humility like this in Ph 2. “If you've gotten anything out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care, do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends.
Don't push your way to the front; don't sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don't be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself.
He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death--and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion.
Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever, so that all created beings in heaven and on earth--even those long ago dead and buried--will bow in worship before this Jesus Christ…”
I find it very challenging that when Paul describes Jesus humbling himself and taking on the form of a servant – he literally means, one who does toilets. Not KP duty, but latrine duty – for the likes of us who hadn’t done any thing to merit that kind of love and service.
So how do we learn humility? The key is Jesus. Following Jesus, dying to ourselves and submitting to Jesus. Making him Lord of my life, my time, my talent, my treasure, my heart. Until we submit to him, we will never be successful at submitting to serving one another.
This is a daily battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. It’s true meaning of my baptism. When we were baptized into Christ, we were buried with him so that he could raise up a new person to live in a right relationship of faith, trust, teachability, generosity, and surrender before him. When that happens it changes everything. It changes our desire for worship, for prayer, hunger for God’s word, our desire to serve others.
One final thought. Suffering is probably God’s most powerful tool in teaching us humility. Suffering brings us to the end of ourselves and all our pretensions that we are something we are not. Suffering reminds us that we aren’t God, but we need God. Suffering humbles and softens us and teaches us empathy for others who are suffering.
We don’t need mulligans, do-overs, gimmes – we don’t need anything that keeps us from owning up to the real depth of our failures. We need the forgiveness and grace that only God can provide. When quit depending on excuses and own up to the failures in our game, God can begin his work of transforming our swing, and helping us play to our full potential. AMEN
