Are You Humble?

I have been meditating on a forefather in our most holy faith that was! I wanted to share some of Thomas Brooks’ wisdom with you (he’s the guy who wrote ‘Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices’ that classic spiritual warfare book). James 4:7 says that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. Only Christ was perfectly humble; we can only learn true humility in Christ as we draw nearer and nearer to God, trusting less in ourselves and more in Him!

What are the chief characteristics of a humble man?- Thomas Brooks, ‘The Riches of Christ’
1) A humble person, no matter how much spiritual growth, he never forgets his former sinfulness and his outward, undeserving commonness.
2) A humble person overlooks his own righteousness, and looks and lives upon the righteousness of Jesus Christ alone.
3) For a humble person no work or service is “too beneath” or “too humbling” for him.
4) A humble heart will submit to every truth of God that is made known (revealed) to it; even to those truths that most offend.
5) A humble person lives not upon Himself, but upon the sufficiency of Christ alone.
6) A humble person prizes the least of Christ: the least smile, the least good word from him, the least good mercy from him, etc. She is thankful for a crumb from the table if she cannot get all of the Manna.
7) The humble heart can never be content to pray enough, hear enough, mourn enough, believe enough, love enough, fear God enough, joy enough, repent enough, loathe sin enough, nor be humble enough!
8) A humble person seeks to smite and mortify both great and “small” sins.
9) A humble person quietly bears burdens and takes blows, and will receive disrespect and dishonor and make no noise.
10) A humble heart withdraws all strength and credit from Christ alone.
11) A humble person desires to honor and glorify God in afflictions rather than seeking to get out of afflictions.
12) A humble person seeks not great things of this world; looks not after great things.
13) A humble person rejoices in the growth in grace that they see in other Christians, as much as they rejoice in their own.
14) A humble person will never disdain to be taught by a fool, someone beneath them in dignity, one less learned, and even one who doesn’t truly care for him.
15) A humble heart is a constantly thankful heart.

“A humble heart cannot be satisfied with so much grace as to bring him to glory, with so much heaven as will keep him from dropping into hell; he is still crying out, ‘Give, Lord, give! Give me more of yourself; more of your Son; more of your Spirit; more of your light, more life, more love.” – Thomas Brooks
May we learn more of Christ and learn more humility by His grace.
Reformation Theology

Humility exalts

I like Augustine’s observation here because it confronts the false notion that when we are humble, we feel low and somber all the time.

“There is, therefore, something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.  This seems, indeed, to be contradictory, that loftiness should debase and lowliness exalt.  But pious humility enables us to submit to what is above us; and nothing is more exalted above us than God; and therefore humility, by making us subject to God, exalts us” (City of God, 14.13).

Soliloquium

Insidious Pride

From Jerram Barrs' wonderful book on evangelism, wonderful not because it gives new insights so much as old reminders.

Scripture teaches us that God resists the proud but gladly receives the humble. Humility is to be a lifelong attribute, not simply the attitude of our hearts when we first come to Christ. Every day we are to remember our own need of God's mercy, the problems and failures in our own lives, rather than making ourselves blind to our own sins by concentrating on those of others. . . . Even biblical knowledge can make us proud, not because sound biblical knowledge is a problem, but because of the pride in our hearts that clasps on to anything that will help us to feel a little better about ourselves than about our fellow believers.

--Jerram Barrs, The Heart of Evangelism (Crossway 2001), 164 
Dane Ortlund