A Reflection on Humility (expanded)
(Originally published on March 18th, 2016 and expanded on December 1st, 2025).
My personal understanding of what it means to be humble has changed drastically over the last nine months (2016). For a long time, I carried a definition that sounded spiritual on the surface, but felt heavy in my hands when I tried to live it. I believed humility meant refusing praise, dismissing skill, downplaying ability, shrinking whatever good someone saw in me until it disappeared. If someone named a strength, I would feel the reflex to swat it away like a compliment was a threat. I told myself that was virtue.
Underneath that posture was fear. I was afraid that receiving affirmation would make me guilty, or self-important, or somehow disqualified from being “humble” in the way I imagined God required. So I tried to stay safe by stepping down from anything that sounded like significance.
Yet at the same time, I carried the quiet ache that many of us carry, the desire to be seen, the desire to be approved of, the desire to belong. That combination was exhausting. When a person longs for acceptance and also believes they must refuse it on principle, the heart gets stuck in a loop.
I could tell something wasn’t clicking, even when I could not yet name what was off. It kept me from receiving love with open hands. It kept me from being honest about what I could do well, and equally honest about what I could not. It made conversations awkward, because I had to manage the moment rather than simply be present in it. It’s strange when you notice that a “humble” posture can still revolve around the self, around how I look, how I might be perceived, how I might be measured. Even rejecting praise can become a kind of performance when it is driven by anxiety instead of peace.
It wasn’t until I began to sit with my definition and truly examine it that I found a different way to understand humility.
In one of my classes here at Fuller Theological Seminary, a professor offered up this defintion, one that despite being in Church all my life, had never heard:
A right understanding of ourselves and the world before God, in which we mourn the sin and brokenness in our lives and the lives of others, but also know ourselves to be called and empowered by God.
When I first heard that, I felt the steadying force of it. There was room in it for grief, and room in it for calling. Room for repentance, and room for courage. It held together two truths that I had separated, as though accepting one required me to reject the other.
This definition highlights a kind of tension that feels deeply human. We live with limits, we also carry responsibility. We are dust, and we are loved. That blend can feel paradoxical, and I have come to believe that flourishing often involves learning how to live inside that paradox without forcing it to collapse into something simpler.
Expanded
In that sense, humility begins to look like a posture. It is an attitude a person wears in the bones, long before it shows up in words. A posture can be closed off or open. It can be braced for threat or settled in trust. It can communicate fear without speaking, and it can communicate peace without explaining. Humility, as I am beginning to understand it, carries a kind of settled openness. It keeps both truths in the same room without letting either one dominate the conversation.
God has given me, just like you, a unique set of gifts, skills, and abilities that reflect something of who He is. That idea used to make me uncomfortable, because it sounded too close to confidence, and confidence felt risky. But now I wonder if refusing a gift is also a kind of refusal of the Giver. If God places something in a person’s hands, humility can include the willingness to hold it with gratitude instead of embarrassment. Gratitude keeps the gift oriented upward. It reminds me that what I have has a source, and what I have is meant to be stewarded, not hoarded, not hidden, not used as a way to build a private kingdom.
To embody humility, then, means I can accept these gifts as blessings and use them for the glory of His name. That requires intentionality. It requires me to ask whether I am using my gifts to serve, to love, to build, to heal, to contribute. It also requires me to watch the quieter temptations that can sneak in, the desire to be admired, the desire to be needed, the desire to be untouchable. Humility does not demand that I deny my strengths. It asks that I hold my strengths without gripping them like my identity depends on them.
At the same time, humility mourns what is broken. It does not avoid the hard truths in me. It grieves sin and selfishness, the ways I want control, the ways I can harden my heart, the ways I can make life about my preference and my comfort. That mourning has a tenderness to it. It carries sorrow, and it can carry repentance. It can also carry compassion for others, because the more honest I become about my own brokenness, the less interested I am in being superior. I can see my need for grace, and that makes me quicker to offer grace.
This is where humility has begun to feel like a road to courage for me. There is a particular kind of freedom that comes when you stop trying to manage your worth and start living from a received worth. I feel more willing to take the right kinds of risks. I feel more willing to step into responsibility instead of waiting until I felt invulnerable.
And that is part of why this change feels so significant. A distorted humility kept me small because smallness felt safe. A truer humility has begun to steady me, because truth has a steadiness that performance never offers. When I am grounded in who God is and who I am before Him, I do not have to scramble for approval, and I do not have to hide from it either. I can simply receive kindness, remain grateful, and keep moving.
