She Calls It Humility

There is a sentence that arrives before she opens her mouth, every single time.

Who am I to say that in here.

It comes fast, and it comes with a feeling of rightness attached, and she has been listening to it for something like fifteen years.

She has always called it humility.

And she has been, if she is completely honest, rather proud of it, which she is aware is its own joke and which she has never said to anybody.

Here is what happened about six weeks ago.

Her friend said, in passing, over exactly this kind of coffee: humility is thinking about yourself less. It is not thinking less of yourself. Those are different things.

And she said, I know that. I have heard that a hundred times.

And she went home and did not sleep.

Because when she looked at it properly, in the dark, she could not find a single occasion on which her sentence had made her think about herself less. Every time it arrives, she thinks about herself a great deal: about how it would look, about whether she is the sort of person who should be saying this, about what they would think.

That is not thinking about herself less. That is an entire paragraph about herself, arriving at speed, dressed as a virtue.

And underneath that there is a harder thing, which is the one that actually kept her awake.

There are things she saw that never got said. Not many. Three or four, over fifteen years, that she can name.

And somebody paid for each of those, and in every case it was not her.

If you have been calling something humility, come and get a coffee. Nobody in this hall wants anything from you this morning.

The word in the middle of that verse

There is a verse about how to think about yourself, and almost everybody quotes the first half and stops.

For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.Romans 12:3

Not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think. Everybody has that one.

But to think soberly.

Soberly is not nothing. Soberly is accurately. It is the word for a person seeing a thing at its actual size, without inflation and without deflation, and it is put in that sentence precisely because Paul knew the correction could be over-applied.

And then the ground of it. According as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.

A measure was dealt. To every man. Including you. Sober thinking means seeing that measure at its real size, and a woman who reports that she has been given nothing is not being humble, she is being inaccurate about a gift.

You are being told to think about yourself accurately rather than to think about yourself as nothing. Romans 12:3 puts soberly directly after the correction about thinking too highly and grounds it in a measure God has dealt out, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named a few verses later as the one distributing the gifts through that body, which means the sentence that arrives in your mouth has been reporting a shortage that heaven did not issue.

What the sentence actually does

Now let us look at what happens in the four seconds after who am I arrives, because that is where the real evidence is.

You think about how it would look. You think about whether you are the sort of person who says things like that. You think about what they would think. That is three thoughts about yourself in about two seconds. Humility is not a feeling about your own smallness. It is a lack of interest in the question. A genuinely humble person says the useful thing and forgets they said it by lunchtime, because the question of how they came across never got raised.

You have been running a self assessment at speed and calling it self forgetfulness. Philippians 2:4 says look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others, and it moves the attention outward rather than downward, and it is the same Spirit who works that mind in a person, which means the direction humility travels is away from yourself and not further into yourself.

The three or four

Here is the part that kept you awake, and it should be handled carefully rather than turned into a whip.

There are three or four things you saw that never got said.

That is real, and it is not being softened here, and pretending it does not matter would be dishonest.

You were not the only person responsible for any of those, and nothing about them is being laid at your door tonight. 1 John 3:20 says if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things, and it is written for people whose self accusation runs harder than the facts, and it is the same Spirit who convicts in order to restore rather than to crush, which means what you are carrying about those three or four is being handled gently and is not a sentence.

What they are is information. They tell you the cost of the sentence, and now you know it, and now it can be put down.