Humility And Sin

Humility is the essence of holiness and blessedness. In order to attain it, Christians should displace themselves and let God be all. The real purpose of grace is to take sin away; therefore, let's have strong expressions of self -condemnation and self-denunciation, for grace to be with us.

"Sinners, of whom I am the foremost." 1 Timothy 1:15 umility is often identified with penitence and contrition. As a consequence, there appears to be no way of fostering humility but by keeping the soul occupied with its sin. We have learned that humility is something more. We have seen in the teaching of our Lord Jesus and the epistles how often this virtue is inculcated without any reference to sin. In the very nature of things, in the whole relation of the creature to the Creator, in the life of Jesus as He lived it and imparts it to us, humility is the very essence of holiness and blessedness. It is the displacement of self by the enthronement of God where God is all, and self is nothing.

It is this aspect of the truth I have felt it especially needful to press the new depth and intensity of man's sin and God's grace given to the humility of the saints. We only have to look at a man like Apostle Paul, to see how, through his life as a ransomed and a holy man, the deep consciousness of having been a sinner lives inextinguishably. We all know the passages in which he refers to his life as a persecutor and blasphemer.

"I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God… I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me." (I Cor. 15: 9, 10) . "To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ" (Ephesians 3:8). "Though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief… Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost." (1 Timothy 1: 13, 15) . God's grace had saved him.

God remembered his sins no more forever but, never could he forget how terribly he had sinned.

The more he rejoiced in God's salvation, and the more his experience of God's grace filled him with unspeakable joy, the clearer was his consciousness that he was a saved sinner, and that salvation had no meaning or sweetness except as the sense of his being a sinner made it precious and real to him. Never for a moment could he forget that it was a sinner God had taken up in His arms and crowned with His love.

The texts we have just quoted are often appealed to as Paul's confession of daily sinning. One has only to read them carefully in their connection, to see how little this is the case. They have a far deeper meaning, they refer to that which lasts throughout eternity, and which will give its deep undertone of amazement and adoration to the humility with which the ransomed bow before the throne, as those who have been washed from their sins in the blood of the Lamb. Never, even in glory, can they be other than ransomed sinners. Never for a moment in this life can God's child live in the full light of His love, but as he feels that the sin, out of which he has been saved, is his one only right and title to all that grace has promised to do.

The humility with which he first came as a sinner, acquires a new meaning when he learns how it becomes him as a creature. And then ever again, the humility, in which he was born as a creature, has its deepest, richest tones of adoration, in the memory of what it is to be a monument of God's wondrous redeeming love. The true impact of what all these expressions of St. Paul teach us is to come out strongly when we notice the remarkable fact that, through his whole Christian course, we never find from his pen, even in those epistles in which we have the most intensely personal unbosomings, anything like confession of sin. Nowhere is there any mention of shortcoming or defect, nowhere any suggestion to his readers that he has failed in duty, or sinned against the law of perfect love.

On the contrary, there are passages, not a few, in which he vindicates himself in language that means nothing if it does not appeal to a faultless life before God and men. "You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers." (1 Thessalonians 2:10). "For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you." (2 Corinthians 1:12).

This is not an ideal or an aspiration, it is an appeal to what his actual life had been. However, we may account for this absence of confession of sin, all will admit that it must point to a life in the power of the Holy Spirit, such as is but seldom realized or expected these days. I wish to emphasize that the absence of such confession of sinning only gives more force to the truth that it is not in daily sinning that the secret of the deeper humility will be found, but in the habitual, never for a moment to be forgotten position, which just the more abundant grace will keep more distinctly alive, that our only place, the only place of blessing, our one abiding position before God, must be that of those whose highest joy is to confess that they are sinners saved by grace.

With Paul's deep remembrance of having sinned so terribly in the past, ere grace had met him, and the consciousness of being kept from present sinning was ever coupled by the abiding remembrance of the dark hidden power of sin ever ready to come in, and only kept out by the presence and power of the indwelling Christ.

"For I know that nothing good dwells in me;" - these words of Romans 7:18 describe the flesh as it is to the end. The glorious deliverance of Romans 8:2 "For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death" is neither the annihilation nor the sanctification of the flesh, but a continuous victory given by the Spirit as He mortifies the deeds of the body. As health expels disease, light swallows up the darkness, and life conquers death, the indwelling of Christ through the Spirit is the health, light, and life of the soul.

With this, the conviction of helplessness and danger ever tempers the faith in the momentary and unbroken action of the Holy Spirit into that chastened sense of dependence, which makes the highest faith and joy the handmaids of humility that only lives by the grace of God. The three passages above quoted all show that it was the wonderful grace bestowed upon Paul, and of which he felt the need every moment, that humbled him so deeply. The grace of God that was with him, and enabled him to labor more abundantly than them all, the grace to preach to the heathen the unsearchable riches of Christ, the grace that was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus, it was this grace of which it is the very nature and glory that it is for sinners, that kept the consciousness of his having once sinned, and being liable to sin, so intensely alive.

"Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" Romans 5:20. This reveals how the very essence of grace is to deal with and take away sin, and how it must ever be the more abundant experience of grace and consciousness of being a sinner. It is not sin, but God's grace showing a man and ever reminding him what a sinner he was, that will keep him truly humble. It is not sin, but grace, that will make me indeed know myself a sinner, and make the sinner's place of deepest self-abasement the place I never leave.

I fear that there are not a few who, by strong expressions of self-condemnation and self- denunciation, have sought to humble themselves, and have to confess with sorrow that a humble spirit, a "heart of humility," with its accompaniments of kindness and compassion, of meekness and forbearance, is still as far off as ever. Being occupied with self, even amid the deepest self- abhorrence, can never free us from self. It is the revelation of God, not only by the law condemning sin but by His grace delivering from it that will make us humble.

The law may break the heart with fear, it is only grace that works with sweet humility which becomes a joy to the soul as its second nature. It was the revelation of God in His holiness, drawing nigh to make Himself known in His grace that made Abraham and Jacob, Job and Isaiah, bow so low. It is the soul in which God the Creator, as the All of the creature in its nothingness, God the Redeemer in His grace, as the All of the sinners in his sinfulness, is waited for and trusted and worshipped, that will find itself so filled with His presence, that there will be no place for self.

So alone can the promise be fulfilled: "And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low, and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. “Isaiah 2:17.

It is the sinner dwelling in the full light of God's holy, redeeming love, in the experience of that full indwelling of divine love, which comes through Christ and the Holy Spirit, who cannot but be humble. Not to be occupied with your sin, but to be occupied with God brings deliverance from self.