A distinguishing feature of our modern world is restlessness. Everywhere I look there are restless souls (mine included). We are restless at home, at work, at school, at play, at church and everywhere in between. Our growing problem with insomnia seems to indicate we are even restless at rest! The problem is not just an inability to sleep; restlessness makes us unstable, impulsive, and impatient. It greatly reduces our ability to make good decisions, decisions that take eternity into account.
What are we to do? Take more vacations? Move to a new city? ‘Chill-out’? Avoid responsibility and the things that burden us? Believe it or not, the answer to restlessness is remarkably simple. It is found in Matthew 11:28 where Jesus makes this invitation: ‘Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’ (MKJV). If Jesus has promised us rest for our souls and we have come to Him, then why are many of us still restless? Maybe it’s because His rest comes with a condition: ‘Take My yoke on you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest to your souls’ (verse 29, MKJV). To get the rest Christ promises we must bow our heads and allow Him to place His yoke on us.
Jesus did not say, as some TV evangelists think, ‘Take fame upon you, learn of me, for I am rich and charismatic and you will find pleasure for your souls’. Jesus cuts right across the grain of self-absorbed prosperity teaching. Instead, Christ desires that we be meek and lowly in heart. In other words, Jesus wants to yolk us with humility. Only in humility will we find true rest for our souls. Humility is not only the cure for restlessness but ‘the one indispensable condition of true fellowship with Jesus’ (Andrew Murray). Humility is foundational to biblical Christianity. It is the one thing Jesus most wants us to learn from Him.
Christ’s humility made His incarnation possible. All the grace and virtue that flows from Jesus comes from His humility. If humility is Jesus Christ’s most distinguishing feature and ‘the one indispensable condition of true fellowship’ with Him, then why is there so little said or written about it? The only good book (outside the Bible) I have found on this topic is Humility by Andrew Murray which was first published in 1895. It will never be a ‘best-seller’, but it’s truly a ‘must-read’ and a book I will unashamedly continue to quote from. (You will not find Humility, the book or the virtue, in the ‘self-help, become-a-better-you’ section of your local Christian book store.)
Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue. — Andrew Murray, Humility (p. 6)
Humility is not about looking down on ourselves; it’s about not looking to ourselves at all! The first step in humility is dependency. The independent arrogance of modern man is astounding. We need to stop and think sometimes: where did the air come from that we breathe into our lungs? Did we create it? Or what about our lungs, did we craft them? Or our eyes, did we design them? Or the mind, did it think itself into existence? We are already, as Murray says, ‘at the place of entire dependence on God’. The issue is whether we will acknowledge it. Only our pride can stop us from admitting the truth that we are totally dependent on God. Pride blinds us to reality, humility opens our eyes.
As truly as God by his power once created, so truly by that same power must God every moment maintain. — Andrew Murray, Humility (p.5)
Humility is not about being quietly spoken, nor is it something God does to us. Humility is ‘simply the sense of entire nothingness, which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all’ (Humility, p.7). God is the centre, the source of all truth, beauty and goodness. God is incomparably great. The fact of the matter is this: we are nothing in comparison to God. Seeing ourselves as nothing is something our pride will rile against, so let us consider a few things.
For creatures who consider the Grand Canyon ‘big’, how do we measure up to a God who exceeds the size of the known universe? If the Hubble Space Telescope has taught us one thing, it is that we are infinitesimal. Not only are we are infinitely small; we are also infinitely weak. If the power of wild weather and tsunamis blow us away, then how do we contend with a God who can sprinkle colossal stars across the heavens like dust? Compared to God; our knowledge is nothing, our creativity is nothing, our goodness is nothing. The reality is we were made from nothing!
What makes us significant amongst creation is our capacity to appreciate and act on the truth that in comparison to God, we are nothing. Dogs, cats, birds, worms and the like are not aware of their comparative nothingness and therefore are unable to experience the privilege of awe and wonder. This glorious gift to the human race is what sets us apart from all that God has made.
… humility is simply acknowledging the truth of his position as creature, and yielding to God his place. — Andrew Murray, Humility (p. 7)
We need to do more than admit we are nothing; we need to follow Christ and become nothing. Philippians 2:6-7 says that Christ ‘did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant’ (ESV). Making ourselves nothing and becoming a servant hits on an area our pride is particularly precious about – our rights. We believe we have a right to everything these days: a right to continuous pleasure, a right to wealth, a right to any sexual experience, the right to sue, the right to divorce, a right to do anything we feel like!
And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. — Philippians 2:8
Becoming like Christ is not about getting rights, it’s about losing them! Jesus gave up His rights. He became nothing. He was obedient. He humbled Himself. The humility of Jesus Christ is completely revolutionary to the way our world thinks. If we are going to follow Jesus then we must embrace the life of a servant and stop demanding our rights.
Humility is the bedrock of the Christian faith and the reason why its founder is the ‘Prince of Peace’. Andrew Murray was right: ‘Nothing can be our redemption, but the restoration of the lost humility, the original and only true relation of the creature to its God. And so Jesus came to bring humility back to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us.’ Humility is the way to salvation and the only cure for our restless souls. All the peace and rest we long for is locked behind a door that only humility can open.