A headline came across my reading this morning that I kept coming back to: Christian Humility Isn't Just 'Thinking of Yourself Less.' No scandal, no crisis, no outrage — just somebody taking a familiar saying and pressing on it to see if it holds. I like that kind of writing. And I think the writer is right.
You have heard the line. It gets passed around on coffee mugs and in small groups, sometimes credited to C. S. Lewis, who never quite said it that way: Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it's thinking of yourself less. There is real wisdom in it. It rescues humility from the sad business of self-loathing, which plenty of sincere people have mistaken for holiness. But as a definition, it stops one step short.
The half-truth we keep repeating
Here is the problem. Thinking of yourself less is a subtraction. It empties the room but never says who walks in. You can spend a whole week not thinking about yourself and still not love a single person. Distraction will do that. So will busyness. So will a good novel or a hard job or a long scroll through your phone. Self-forgetfulness by itself is not a virtue; it is just an absence.
Paul does not leave it as an absence. He writes: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others" (Philippians 2:3-4). Notice that humility there is not a mood. It has a direction. It has a verb. Value others. Look to their interests. Humility is what happens when attention stops circling your own life and lands on somebody else's.
Humility has a direction
I watch this in leadership constantly, in the church and in business. The most genuinely humble people I know are not the quietest people in the room, and they are not the ones running themselves down. They are the ones who notice. They see the newcomer standing near the door with nobody to talk to. They remember that the man in the third row buried his father in March. They ask the question that helps somebody else get heard.
You can be the loudest laugh in the fellowship hall and be deeply humble, because your eyes are on people and not on your reflection. And you can be painfully self-conscious, hardly saying a word, and still be completely occupied with yourself. Shyness is not humility. Self-criticism is not humility. Humility is love with its head up, looking around.
What the Spirit actually does with us
This is not a personality upgrade you achieve by effort. Paul keeps going: "In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant" (Philippians 2:5-7).
The mindset comes from a Person. And the Holy Spirit is the one who works it into us — usually not in a dramatic rush but in small, specific moments you almost miss. You feel a nudge to make the phone call you had talked yourself out of. You are halfway through a sentence defending yourself and you sense the Spirit quietly say let it go, and to your own surprise you do. Somebody at Wednesday Bible study says something you disagree with and instead of correcting them you find yourself curious about them. That is God at work. He is doing it now, in ordinary West Michigan lives, and He is patient about it.
Where humility stops being an idea
We come to the Lord's table this Sunday for Communion, and that is where all of this stops being a concept. Nobody gets a better seat at that table. Nobody earns their piece of bread. We receive from the hands of the One who took the nature of a servant, and then we turn and look at the person beside us in the pew — the one whose week we know nothing about — and we are meant to see them the way He sees them.
If you read the famous line and quietly concluded that you have failed at humility, hear this instead: you do not have to manufacture a smaller opinion of yourself. You have to look up. Christ has already emptied Himself for you, and He is not embarrassed by you. Come and receive, and let Him turn your attention outward. That is what humility is, and He is generous with it.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.