Humility and Gratitude: Why so hard?

Main idea: While humanity's status as contingent on a good and great God is the logical and reasonable basis for humility and gratitude before God, we humans find this difficult to remember.


We are called to be gracious and humble and, while we struggle to live these out, they are not contrary to our makeup.

Humility. Humanity is created in the image of God. By design, we reflect his glory most accurately of all his creation. But as impressive as we are, we remain contingent. We rely on him for life and breath. Indeed, we depend on him for our very atoms to hold together. Every human lives by God's grace, whether they believe it to be the case or not. Humility toward God and one another is the logical outcome of our state.

Gratitude. On a basic, earthly level, everything good is from God, from sunset to coffee to penicillin. But there is more. Humanity squandered its glorious design almost from the beginning, rejecting God as God and attempting to be gods ourselves. This flawed project has been an utter failure, resulting in eternal death as our persistent state apart from God. But God is love, and in his love, he became flesh, lived a real human life, gave up this human life in death, and picked up life again in the resurrection. Because he gave himself, all who choose to trust him rather than themselves live an eternal life of love and glory with him. So, while we who trust him were broken and lost, through no work of our own but only by his gracious gift of a paid death debt and a forever life, we now live.

Forgetting to remember. If we remember how undeserving we are and how great Jesus’ love is, how could we help but overflow with gratitude? I think we have some remembering to do. It's hard to remember because we're a mess. We fill our lives with busyness but are too lazy to take time with God. We glory in our pride, ignore our deceived state and discount our forgetfulness as being just how it is. This on top of a rebellion stained us thoroughly. Even we who trust Christ have scars and remnants of that stain, highlighting our scarred glory and hiding our utter contingency. We think we have got this, but we don't. We bear his image and proclaim it for our own. We forget our former condition that we were dead.

Remembering. We need to remember that God alone lifts up and brings down, and we need his help to be humble and trust him alone for our care (Psalm 76). We need to confess that living life on automatic puts us in a dangerous position and that remembering his work in us is safety.

A final word. Gratitude and humility are products of intentional remembering, calling to mind our poor estate and God's amazing grace.

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(C) Laura Springer

Musings of a peripatetic wannabe-sage by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License..