Humility and Truth

Transcript:

Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective!

What is humility? Increasingly in our historical moment, we confuse humility with a relativistic view of truth. We falsely think anyone who believes that there is objective truth or is too confident in what they believe about the truth, by definition, cannot be humble. We assume that the truly humble person would speak like this: “For me, 2 x 2 = 4. But that’s just my personal truth. Far be from me, to impose my viewpoint on others. I’m a humble person.” My friends, this is not humility; it’s the essence of irrationality.

Humility is not taking truth less seriously, but taking ourselves less seriously. Humility is not relativizing the truth. No, humility is recognizing and submitting to it.

Listen to the witty G.K. Chesterton:

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from…ambition [and] settled upon…conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed….

“We are on the road to producing…[people] too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”

~G.K. Chesterton in the third chapter of Orthodoxy (1908)

Well put!

This false humility is increasingly everywhere. If we are not aware how this enemy has invaded the spirit of our cultural moment, we will unwittingly be sucked in by it.

And that’s something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

~ Mathew 23:8-12 (ESV)

“He has told you, O man, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”

~ Micah 6:8 (ESV)