Quotes about Humility

God is mobilising an army, but it is a broken army that marches on its knees.

I'm coming to the conclusion that to be used by God we must be weak and foolish rather than all-conquering heroes. I reckon God is sick and tired of people posing as overcomers with permanent grins, as if they somehow avoided the Fall and went hang-gliding instead. He needs us weak and childish to be used by him.

Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the world with humble, open, and vulnerable eyes—and ourselves as members and participants rather than masters and conquerors. We will see our unfathomable cosmos and the people in our cosmic neighborhood as God's creation, not as objects for our own manipulation or unholy mischief.

Following Jesus isn't like a burden we carry on our shoulders. It's an internal process so radical and painful that the best way to describe it for people of that day is as the act of being bound and nailed like a criminal to a piece of wood lifted above the ground where you are left hanging in naked humiliation and intense pain until you suffocate.

I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I've hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn't the endgame here. Loving as God loves is.

Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the "sin of certainty.

But at least I didn't do any harm. Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God's eyes.

Humility, love, and kindness are our grand acts of faithfulness and how we show that we are all in. "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12). Loving each other is the closest we get to seeing God.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread, until you return to the ground—because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

that I will not accept even a thread, or a strap of a sandal, or anything that belongs to you, lest you should say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’

Then Abraham answered, “Now that I have ventured to speak to the Lord—though I am but dust and ashes—

“Drink, my lord,” she replied, and she quickly lowered her jar to her hands and gave him a drink.