Humility and Fellowship

In humility we are becoming less concerned with our prestige. Our wills are breaking and we are not demanding our rights anymore. Fear is losing its grip as we cling to our identity in Christ. Pride is being starved because we are letting go of or need to be right and our desires to be recognized. Humility is freedom to see who we are and become like Jesus.

But to see who we are, we must be seen by others. To use Dan Allender’s phrase, “You can’t see your own face.” That is, when God shines light on our lives, we become visible to others. And if they are honest they will tell us what they see – the good, the bad, and the incidental.

It’s not that other people’s opinions are absolute truth, but neither are our isolated opinions of ourselves. Humility in this sense is being willing to be seen as we are, by at least a few people, over time. Our pride resists this kind of exposure, but it takes humility to become humble. A final thought from The Way of The Cross on this topic:

Anything which shows us what we really are is light. But when we in any way try to hide what we are or what we have done, that is darkness. The first thing which sin in our lives will make us do is to hide what we are. When our first parents knew that they had sinned, they hid behind the trees of the garden. Sin has had the same effect on all of us ever since. When we have sinned, we try to hide it in some way.

We cannot show our real self, so we pretend to be different from what we are. We say one thing to someone and a different thing to someone else. We like to make things look better than they are. We excuse ourselves and put the blame on others. We can all do this by being silent as well as by saying or doing something. This is what John calls “living in the darkness.”

Perhaps the sin is only being self-conscious: but, remember, everything that comes from self is sin. Perhaps we hide it by pretending to be what we are not. Even this is living in darkness.

We cannot be in the light with God, and in the darkness with our brother. We must be as willing to know the truth about ourselves from our brother as to know if from God. We must be ready to let him hold the light to us, and we must be ready in the same way to hold the light to him. We must be willing to know ourselves for what we really are, and we must be willing for our brother to know this as well.

We will not hide ourselves from those with whom we should be in fellowship. We will not cover our faults. We will speak the truth about ourselves with them. We will be ready to give up our spiritual privacy. We will not keep bad feelings in our hearts about another person.

If we aspire to love one another, then we aspire to be humble enough to give and receive whatever the light reveals.


SCRIPTURE READING: 1 John 1 and 1 John 4:7-21