Humility and How I Attained It

This appeared recently at Forward Progress, the blog of Michael Kelley under the title Humble Casting.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you at the proper time, ⁷ casting all your care on Him, because He cares about you (1 Peter 5:6-7).

The elusive characteristic of humility. My college roommate and I used to joke that we would someday co-author a book called Humility and How I Attained It. We would be so proud of this work. Wait… dang it.

That’s the nature of humility, isn’t it? You seek after it, but as soon as you think you’ve found it, you’ve lost it. No doubt that humility is an essential character trait that can be nurtured and developed; it’s even commanded here in Scripture. We aren’t commanded to sit around and wait for humility to come upon us like a stomach bug; we are directly told to “humble yourselves.”

But Peter also gives us the action step to doing so. Surprisingly, though, it’s not to practice self-abasement. Neither is it to walk around with your shoulders drooped. It’s certainly not to awkwardly deflect compliments when they happen to come our way. Instead, you pursue humility by casting your cares upon the Lord.

Now why might that lead to humility? Think of it like this: You are very sick. So sick, in fact, that you cannot get out of bed. You cannot fix your own chicken soup or get your own crackers. You can’t even get to the TV remote if it’s not right beside you. You have no other choice, once you recognize the frailty of your condition, but to cast your burdens upon another. That’s an incredibly humbling thing by its very nature.

The same thing holds true here. When we cast all our cares upon the Lord, we will be humbling ourselves. Problem is, we don’t really recognize the frailty of our condition. We think that we can still fix things in our lives. We can still have the difficulty conversations and carefully lay out plans. We still see ourselves as strong and capable, and therefore we do not cast. Most of the time, it takes a true moment of crisis for us to begin that casting process. We have to be, by circumstance, awakened to what’s been there all along:

Our powerlessness.

Our lack of control.

Our great need day in and day out.

But what if we didn’t have to wait until we are reminded to start that process? What if a moment of crisis didn’t have to awaken that sense of dependence? What if, instead of waiting in our false sense of power, we instead made it our practice to preemptively cast our cares upon the Lord?

And what if the really good news is that He doesn’t get tired of that? What if the fuel for the casting was the great love of God demonstrated for us at the cross of Jesus Christ?

Now that would really be something.

Wouldn’t it?

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