Humility is Freedom
Author Patricia Kenyon. Edited by Claire Carter
Humility is recognising that it is God who brings the fruit from the work we do for him, just like it is God who makes the plants grow after the farmer sows the seed.
Humility is not low self esteem.
It’s being free to think about yourself less.
It’s freedom from self obsession.
It’s knowing our place.
It’s a certainty that God is good, that God is big and that God, though he chooses to partner with us and delegate authority to us, out of love, He is perfectly capable of managing everything without us.
Joseph, son of Jacob, got himself into trouble because he said what he thought. He gave a bad report about his brothers and then he told his brothers and his father about dreams in which they bowed down to him, suggesting that he would be in authority over them. He was only 17 and maybe he was a bit arrogant because he was his father’s favourite. The passage in Genesis doesn’t tell us what he really thought or how he felt. But I suspect that he just relayed what had happened to him, without thinking much about their reactions and their feelings.
Although his father, Jacob, told him off for relating such dreams, he also kept the conversation in mind. He thought about it over the years. When Jacob had deceived his own father into giving him the blessing of the first born, in place of his older brother Esau, his father Isaac had prophesied in his blessing that Jacob would be Lord over his brothers. Here, the Lord appears to be saying the
same about his younger son – that he would be Lord over his brothers and not just them but his parents too.
No doubt, Jacob had also been told by his mother, Rebekah, that when she was pregnant with her twins Jacob and Esau, they wrestled together in her womb and when she asked the Lord about it, God had told her that the older would serve the younger. No doubt Jacob had passed this story on to his sons, so Joseph knew that there was precedent.
He knew that sometimes God overrules the cultural norms and chooses the younger to be the leader.
However, there is no sign of Joseph trying to make it happen. There’s no way that he could make it happen. But isn’t it such a temptation when God gives us some hints about what’s to come, when he gives us a vision, we try to run ahead and make it happen and we get stressed when its not a quick and straightforward journey?
When Joseph was sold as a slave to Potiphar and Potiphar’s wife tried to manipulate Joseph into having an affair with her, Joseph says to her,
“My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9).
At this point you could think that the position has gone to his head. He’s calling himself great. But, if he was arrogant or complacent, if he was taking his position for granted, would he not have likely fallen to this temptation? He would have thought, “everything is mine, I’m the greatest and this woman is throwing herself at me, so why not accept it as part of the package?”. But instead what he says is this “My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?”
He knows his position. He does not play it down. But he does not take it for granted or assume that it is because of his own talents and goodness. Instead his calls his master, “master,” He knows his position and says that to take more than he has been assigned, would be a sin against God. He knows that God is his provider, whether of positions or provisions.
When he is again unfairly treated and is thrown into prison because of the lies of Potiphar’s wife, we do not hear him complaining. That doesn’t mean that he never had a conversation with God about his trials, but he seems to get on with doing his best in each situation, accepting it, as it is, and trusting God to be with him and to use him wherever he is.
In prison, he does not take his gift of dream interpretation as his own talent, but says, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8b). And again when he is released in order to interpret a dream for Pharaoh, he says, “I cannot do it..but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires” (Genesis 41:16). He is humble and honest, he is not grasping for control or praise, he trusts God to back him up, God trusts Joseph with power and he becomes second to Pharaoh and is used to save thousands from starvation.
Jesus says, in Matthew 5:5 “blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth”.
Time and time again, God chooses people who are humble, people who trust him and know that everything comes from him – their skills, their talents, their food, their favour, their children, their positions, their work.
Abraham, Moses, David, Joseph and Mary, to name a few. God does great things through them, not because they are great but because they trust him, they lean into his presence, his love, his power. They believe what he says.
My own experience has been that God has put a lot of time into helping me to develop some humility and he really has his work cut out! He had to take away from me for a number of years the kind of ministry opportunities that I enjoyed in church, because I had started to get my joy and sense of identity from being on the stage, or having gifts that people admired or having a position of control. So he took that away. Eventually he showed me that it was not the people who weren’t seeing me or giving me opportunities. It was God, out of love, pruning me of the need to be seen and chosen and affirmed by people and of the need to have control.
Through those 14 or so years, he enable me to be OK being one of the crowd, taught me not to look for praise except his smile, not to need human affirmation or make decisions based on what people will think of me. It’s taken a long time, getting me to look to him and not myself or other humans for success in achieving the visions I believe he has given me and I still have to look out for those tendencies. I worry sometimes about whether I will succeed in my project. I worry what people think. When someone else is asked to speak or to lead something, my first thought is sometimes, why not me? And at other times I think “I could not do that”, forgetting that it is God who gives us abilities and that when he calls us, he equips us.
Humility is such a precious quality, that God will spend our lifetime cultivating it in us, if he needs to. Because only when we have true humility, will his power be able to truly flow through us, unhindered by pride, insecurity and human thinking. True humility brings humans back to the state they were in when he first made us – in charge of the world but fully trusting God; in unblocked connection with God and able therefore to work and love and rule with wisdom.
But God also wants us to have humility because he loves us. He made us in love, for love, and he made us to be productive and to enjoy our work. We’re all working in the field of addiction now because we care about people who have become trapped in destructive patterns of behaviour and we want to see them set free. We were designed to have purpose in our work and this work gives us a great sense of purpose. But it’s also full of constant frustration. We can’t change people. We can’t rescue them and make them clean and sober, make them instantly healed of their traumas, their sin patterns, their choices. For every person who gets sober and stays sober there are others who don’t and some who die.
Our human nature can so easily find that exhausting and can question whether we’re cut out for this work. We can look at our “performance” and think it’s not good enough and be down on ourselves. Humility gives us freedom from that condemnation. Humility hears the voice of the tempter saying “you’re rubbish” and says “Maybe I am but that doesn’t matter. God, the one who’s power matters, is Amazing! Thank God that however weak I am, however lacking in knowledge, God is strong and God knows everything. Not only is God not put off by my weakness but he delights in my willingness and availability. He delights to take this frail jar of clay and fills it with his presence.
Humility gives us freedom from the need to control things that we can’t and shouldn’t. It partners with God, sharing the yoke with him, letting him take the weight and set the direction.
Paul talking about his impressive qualifications says in Philippians 3:8 “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” Jesus, did not consider equality with god something to be grasped but made himself nothing. It also says in John 2 that he did not entrust himself to men and he did not need men’s approval because he knew what was in a man. The same goes for our own opinion of ourselves, whether we puff ourselves up or put ourselves down. God knows us so much better than we know ourselves. He is not surprised or disappointed when we make a mistake, a wrong decision or a mess, or overly impressed when we do something great. He loves us and he sees all and he still delights in being with us. His own Holy Spirit has come to live inside us, to be that intimate and he does not make mistakes.