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Measuring One's Humility

The Essential Christian Character

Humility is the most essential character quality of the Christian. Humility allows one to respond properly to conviction of sin, as one is being led to Christ. Living by faith is contrary to living with a prideful attitude. In describing the righteousness of faith, Paul quotes Habbakuk 2:4, but the whole verse indicates that righteous living is contrary to prideful behavior. Isaiah also reveals the necessity of humility for one to be esteemed in God's eyes.
And as walking as Christ walked we should consider his practice of humility:

Sources of Humilation

"To keep me from becoming conceited
because of these surpassingly great revelations,
there was given me a thorn in my flesh,
a messenger of Satan, to torment me."
2 Corinthians 12:7

In God's program to develop humility in us He often subjects us to humiliating circumstances or otherwise provides sources of humilation in our life. Thus our goal should not necessarily be to remove or avoid the thorns of life. For these are necessary to some extent to the health of our spiritual well-being in helping us develop and maintain humility, which is most essential to Christian character. What are your sources of humiliation? Your spouse? Your children? Your social or financial or marital status? Your physical flaws? God has many ways to bring humiliation into our lives. What are we afraid of? Perhaps those very things are the things God will bring into our lives in order to humble us. But perhaps we shouldn't necessarily consider that a bad thing. For it is healthy to have sources of humiliation.

But if you lack sources of humiliation then you've got a problem. A nervous system reacts with pain if something is wrong physically. A conscience reacts with a feeling of guilt if sin is committed. A humble character similarly is contrite and reacts with lowliness and self-debasing when pride springs up. But the proud person may not recognize pride in themselves. And those who are not subject to humilation tend to develop pride. Thus for example Jesus  speaks of the pride of the wealthy. For wealth can be a source of pride as poverty a source of humiliation. Indeed those religious leaders who had Christ crucified had too many sources of pride and too few sources of humiliation. And a source of humiliation for one person may be a source of pride for another. What are your sources of pride? Your family? Your social or financial status? Your strength or beauty? Your position of authority? There can be many sources of pride as there are sources of humiliation.

Part of Jesus' ministry, and indeed a part of Christian ministry, is to humiliate the proud. Why did they seek to kill him? What was the real reason? It was because he humiliated them. Yet as the great physician he was simply giving them the medicine of humiliation which they were in need of if they were ever to be saved.

Measures of Humility

Now without going into how one develops humility, let's consider how one might measure the level of one's humility. These are some ideas:


The Berean Christian Bible Study Resources Jan 30,2022