“Empowered, confident, humble. Ready.”

Reads a local school’s slogan. Empowered, yep. Confident, yep. Ready, yep… But humble? It’s not often that humility is celebrated in society. We lift up the go-getters, the pioneers, the self-made entrepreneurs. But the humble?

Perhaps we’ve mistaken what it means to be truly humble. Humility can be understood to mean that someone is insignificant or naïve. But humility isn’t weakness, it isn’t lack of skill or talent. Humility begins with a correct understanding of your strength, influence, capabilities… and it’s from that place of power you’re able to choose to lower yourself in order to elevate, celebrate or serve another.

The best example of humility was when God – creator, orchestrator, sustainer of the universe – chose to come to earth in human form and was obedient to the point of death (the most humiliating death) on a cross. When Jesus chose to follow through on that ruthless rescue was he displaying weakness, insignificance, or naivety? No. He was not.

The word humility finds its roots in the Latin humus which means ‘ground’ and humilis which means ‘low’ or ‘lowly’. It’s the gritty, dirty, earthen base that is where true humility comes from. And that’s where we started too. God “remembers that we are dust.” (Ps 103:14 ESV) But don’t let that knowledge lead you to a place of self-deprecation because “you are a holy people… the Lord your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure [He] did not set his heart on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other nations, for you were the smallest of all nations! Rather, it was simply that the Lord loves you…” (Deuteronomy 7:6-8a NLT)

You are chosen. You are special. You are loved.
Yes, you.

What stops us from being humble then, is a misunderstanding of who we truly are. We are stuck believing that we’re only dirt and so try to prove that we’re more than that. We find ourselves unable to lower ourselves when we seek to find our worth in the position, power, or perception of a situation. We strive to gain significance from something that is irrelevant compared to who we are in Christ.

Chosen. Special. Loved.

It is when we remember who we truly are, whose we truly are, that we can clothes ourselves with humility and serve one another in love. So yes, as Christians, let’s be empowered by the Holy Spirit, confident in the knowledge of the love of God, and humble like Jesus so that we might be ready to go into all the world.

Not such a bad motto after all.