It was because this humility was not only a temporary sentiment,
wakened up and brought into exercise when He thought of God, but the
very spirit of His whole life, that Jesus was just as humble in His
intercourse with men as with God. He felt Himself the Servant of God
for the men whom God made and loved; as a natural consequence, He
counted Himself the Servant of men, that through Him God might do His
work of love. He never for a moment thought of seeking His honour, or
asserting His power to vindicate Himself. His whole spirit was that of
a life yielded to God to work in. It is not until Christians study the
humility of Jesus as the very essence of His redemption, as the very
blessedness of the life of the Son of God, as the only true relation
to the Father, and therefore as that which Jesus must give us if we
are to have any part with Him, that the terrible lack of actual,
heavenly, manifest humility will become a burden and a sorrow, and our
ordinary religion be set aside to secure this, the first and the chief
of the marks of the Christ within us.
Brother, are you clothed with humility? Ask your daily life. Ask
Jesus. Ask your friends. Ask the world. And begin to praise God that
there is opened up to you in Jesus a heavenly humility of which you
have hardly known, and through which a heavenly blessedness you
possibly have never yet tasted can come in to you.
Humility: The Beauty of Holiness
IV.
Humility in the Teaching of Jesus.
_'Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart.'_--MATT. xi. 29.
_'Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant, even as
the Son of Man came to serve.'_--MATT. xx. 27.
WE have seen humility in the life of Christ, as He laid open His heart
to us: let us listen to His teaching. There we shall hear how He
speaks of it, and how far He expects men, and specially His disciples,
to be humble as He was. Let us carefully study the passages, which I
can scarce do more than quote, to receive the full impression of how
often and how earnestly He taught it: it may help us to realise what
He asks of us.
1. Look at the commencement of His ministry. In the Beatitudes with
which the Sermon on the Mount opens, He speaks: _'Blessed are the poor
in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek;
for they shall inherit the earth.'_ The very first words of His
proclamation of the kingdom of heaven reveal the open gate through
which alone we enter. The poor, who have nothing in themselves, to
them the kingdom comes. The meek, who seek nothing in themselves,
theirs the earth shall be. The blessings of heaven and earth are for
the lowly. For the heavenly and the earthly life, humility is the
secret of blessing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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