Humility
Humility is the herald which ushers in the great king; it walks before honour; and he who has humility will have honour afterwards.
There is a kind of oily, sanctimonious, proud humility, which is not the genuine article, though it is sometimes extremely like it. It arrayeth itself in the simplest dress in the world; it talks in the gentlest style; it says, “We must not intrude our own peculiar sentiments, but must always walk in love and charity.” But it is charitable to all except those who hold God’s truth, and it is humble to all when it is forced to be humble.
There will be three effects of nearness to Jesus, all beginning with the letter h — humility, happiness, and holiness.
God often clothes his children with honour in the face of their adversaries, and makes the wicked confess that the Lord is with them in deed and in truth. But God forbids our making that honour a cloak for pride, and bids us seek humility, which always accompanies as well as precedes true honour.
Humility must be genuine; the imitation of it is the nearest thing in the world to pride. Seek of God the gift of true humility. Seek to have that breaking in pieces by the Holy Spirit, that breaking in the mortar with the pestle, which God himself gives to his children. Seek that every twig of his rod may drive pride out of you.
Humble souls, rejoice; proud souls, go on in your proud ways, but know that they end in destruction. Climb up the ladder of your pride, you shall fall over on the other side and be dashed to pieces. Ascend the steep hill of your glory; the higher you climb the more terrible will be your fall.
It is not humility to underrate yourself. Humility is to think of yourself, if you can, as God thinks of you. It is to feel that if we have talents, God has given them to us, and let it be seen that, like freight in a vessel, they tend to sink us low. Humility is to feel ourselves lost, ruined, and undone; to be killed by the same hand which, afterwards, makes us alive; to be ground to pieces as to our own doings and willings; to know and trust in none but Jesus.
As truly as the Lord has humbled you, he will exalt you. And the more you are brought low, the more you are in the dust, so much the more reason you have to hope. So far from the bottom of the sea being a place over which we cannot be carried to heaven, it is one of the nearest places to heaven’s gate.
If a man says, “I have had such and such spiritual communications, I am a great man,” he has never had any communications at all; for “God has respect unto the humble, but the proud he knoweth afar off”
Humility is to feel that we have no power of ourselves, but that it all cometh from God: it is to lean on our beloved, to believe that he has trodden the wine-press alone, to lie on his bosom and slumber sweetly there, to exalt him, and think less than nothing of ourselves. It is to annihilate self, and to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ as all in alL
True humility does not continually talk about “dust and ashes,” and prate about its infirmities, but it feels all that which others say, for it possesses an inwrought feeling of its own nothingness.
If thou art a Christian I bid thee look at thy Master, talking to the children, bending from the majesty of his divinity to speak to mankind on earth, tabernacling with the peasants of Galilee, and then — ay, depth of condescension unparalleled — washing his disciples’ feet, and wiping them with the towel after supper.
Every grace seems like a nail on which precious blessings hang, and humility hath many a mercy suspended from it.
Humility holds by no means an inferior place in God’s word, and there are hundreds of promises linked to it.
Christian, be thou like thy Master — one who can stoop; yea, be thou one who thinks it no stooping, but rather esteems others better than himself, counts it his honour to sit with the poorest of Christ’s people, and says, u If my name may be but written in the obscurest part of the book of life, it is enough for me, so unworthy am I of his notice!” Be like Christ in his humility.