Humility is often identified with penitence and contrition. When it is thought of like this, there appears to be no way of fostering humility but by keeping the soul occupied with its sin. But humility is something else and something more. In the teaching of our Lord Jesus and the Epistles, often the virtue of humility is urged without any reference to sin. Humility is the very essence of holiness and of blessedness, whether in the very nature of things or in the whole relation of the creature to the Creator, or in the life of Jesus as He lived it and imparts it to us.
Humility is the displacement of self by the enthronement of God. Where God is all, self is nothing.
Man's sin and God's grace give new depth and intensity to the humility of the saints. We have only to look at a man like the Apostle Paul to see how, through his life as a ransomed and a holy men, the deep consciousness of having been a sinner cannot be extinguished. We know the passages in which he refers to his life as a persecutor and blasphemer:
"I am the least of the apostles, that am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God...I labored more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me" (1 Cor. 15:9,10).
"Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach to the heathen" (Eph. 3:8). "I was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious; howbeit I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief...Christ Jesus came unto the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief" (1 Tim. 1:13,15).
God's grace had saved him. God remembered his sins no more forever. But never, never could Paul forget how terribly he had sinned. The more he rejoiced in God's salvation, and the more his experience of God's grace filled him with joy unspeakable, the clearer was his consciousness that he was a saved sinner, and that salvation had no meaning or sweetness except as the sense of his being a sinner made it precious and real to him. Never for a moment could he forget that it was a sinner God had taken up in His arms and crowned with His love.
The texts we have quoted are often appealed to as Paul's confession of daily sinning. One has only to read them carefully in their connection, to see how little this is the case. They have a far deeper meaning. They refer to that which lasts throughout eternity, and which will give its deep undertone of amazement and adoration to the humility with which the ransomed bow before the throne as those who have been washed from their sins in the blood of the Lamb. Never, never, even in glory, can they be other than ransomed sinners.
Never for a moment in this life can God's child live in the full light of His love, but as he feels that the sin out of which he has been saved, is his one only right and title to all that grace has promised to do.
The humility with which first he came as a sinner, acquires a new meaning when he learns how fitting it is for the creature. Then ever again, the humility in which he was born as a creature, has its deepest, richest tones of adoration in the memory of what it is to be a monument of God's wondrous redeeming love.
The true impact of what these expressions of St. Paul teach us comes out all the more strongly when we notice the remarkable fact that, through his whole Christian course, we never find from his pen anything like confession of sin. This is true even in those epistles in which we have the most intensely personal confessions coming. Nowhere is there any mention of shortcoming or defect, nowhere any suggestion to his readers that he has failed in duty, or sinned against the law of perfect love. On the contrary, there are not a few passages in which he vindicates himself in language that means nothing if it does not appeal to a faultless life before God and men.
"Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily, and righteously, and unblameably we behaved ourselves toward you" (1 Thess. 2:10). "Our glorying is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and sincerity of God we behaved ourselves in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward" (2 Cor. 1:12).
This is not an ideal or an inspiration; it is an appeal to what his actual life had been. However we may account for this absence of confession of sin, all will admit that it must point to a life in the power of the Holy Ghost such as is but seldom realized or expected in these our days.
The point which I wish to emphasize is this--that the very fact of the absence of such confession of sinning only gives the more force to the truth that it is not in daily sinning that the secret of the deeper humility will be found. Rather it is in the habitual, never-for-a-moment-to-be-forgotten position, which only the more abundant grace will keep more distinctly alive, that our only place, the only place of blessing, our one abiding position before God, must be that of those whose highest joy it is to confess that they are sinners saved by grace.
With Paul's deep remembrance of having sinned so terribly in the past, before grace had met him, and the consciousness of being kept from present sinning--there was ever coupled the abiding remembrance of the dark, hidden power of sin ever ready to come in, and only kept out by the presence and power of the indwelling Christ.
"In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing"--these words of Romans 7:18 describe the flesh as it is to the end. The glorious deliverance of Romans 8:2--"The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath now made me free from the law of sin, which once led me captive"--is neither the annihilation nor the sanctification of the flesh, but a continuous victory given by the Spirit as He mortifies the deeds of the body.
As health expels disease and light swallows up darkness and life conquers death, the indwelling of Christ through the Spirit is the health and light and life of the soul. But with this is the conviction of helplessness and danger which tempers the faith in the moment-by-moment and unbroken action of the Holy Spirit, making it a chastened sense of dependence. This makes the highest faith and joy the handmaids of a humility that only lives by the grace of God.
Grace, Not Sin Keeps Hearts Humble
The three passages above quoted all show that it was the wonderful grace bestowed upon Paul, and of which he felt the need every moment, that humbled him so deeply. This grace of God that was with him enabled him to labor more abundantly than they all, and to preach to the heathen the unsearchable riches of Christ, and was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. It was this grace, of which it is the very nature and glory that it is for sinners, that kept the consciousness of his having once sinned, and being liable to sin, so intensely alive. "Where sin abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly" (Rom. 5:20).
This reveals how the very essence of grace is to deal with and take away sin, and how it must ever be--that the more abundant the experience of grace, the more intense the consciousness of being a sinner. It is not sin, but God's grace showing a man and ever reminding him what a sinner he was, that will keep him truly humble. It is not sin, but grace, that will make me indeed know myself a sinner, and make the sinner's place of deepest self-abasement the place I never leave.
There are not a few who, by strong expressions of self-condemnation and self-denunciation, have sought to humble themselves. But they have to confess with sorrow that a humble spirit, a "heart of humility," with its accompaniments of kindness and compassion, of meekness and forbearance, is still as far off as ever. Being occupied with self, even amid the deepest self-abhorrence, can never free us from self.
It is the revelation of God, not only by the law condemning sin, but by His grace delivering from it, that will make us humble. The law may break the heart with fear; it is only grace that works that sweet humility which becomes a joy to the soul as its second nature.
It was the revelation of God in His holiness, drawing nigh to make Himself known in His grace, that made Abraham and Jacob, Job and Isaiah, bow so low. It is the soul in which God the Creator, as the All of the creature in its nothingness, God the Redeemer in His grace, as the All of the sinner in his sinfulness is waited for and trusted and worshipped--that will find itself so filled with His presence, that there will be no place for self. So alone can the promise be fulfilled: "The haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the Lord alone be exalted in that day" (Isa. 2:17).
It is the sinner dwelling in the full light of God's holy, redeeming love, in the experience of that full indwelling of divine love, which comes through Christ and the Holy Spirit, who cannot but be humble. Not to be occupied with your sin, but to be occupied with God brings deliverance from self!
From Humility, The Beauty Of Holiness by Andrew Murray
