Humble Ourselves. Do We?

Mat_18:4  Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

In order for us to be instructed to humble ourselves there MUST be something in us that is warring against being humbled.

Society is very contradictory on this point- admiring the humbleness while at the same time telling the humble to have more confidence, more pride in themselves. There is this fine line of humbleness and what is perceived as detrimental timidity.

What does it mean to be humble? It means to truly believe we are NOT more than what we are- created beings in NEED of their Creator. 

We were never intended to be entirely on our own, never. Recently I watched a donkey being born and it was scary for a bit there because after she was born the mother donkey kept pawing at her to get up. The people there had to intervene because they were very scared the mother donkey would end up hurting the baby. In this, not so normal, donkey birth the baby- being a bit premature -didn't have that immediate instinct to get up like a baby donkey is supposed to have. This instinct is a self-preservation instinct born out of the necessity of the animal to quickly move so predators wouldn't attack a vulnerable, helpless, baby donkey.  Much was discussed about this situation on message boards in this group hosting the donkey cam and in the course of the discussions there was talk of what is considered normal and what isn't for donkey births.

Many mammals while dependent upon their mothers for nurturing, for sustenance, also must be able to be capable of walking shortly after birthing. This independence is necessary. And the eventual independence after weaning and teaching survival is also necessary. Us humans are the same in many ways - we must all be nurtured and taught to function in society without our parents. However, we are NOT taught to function in society without ANY other human beings- at least 99.9 percent of us aren't.

To be taught that sort of total independence from all other humans would mean living isolated and solely by your own wits and skills, with whatever nature provides- not other humans. We all seem to depend on many different facets of human interaction- even if none of it is on a personal level such as friendship. I'm not going to list the many ways we are dependent but just a few. We depend on others for the food to be in the stores we go to. We depend on others for the electricity they have the skill to provide to us. We depend on our various employers and monetary providers to provide us with income.  Those are just a few examples. You may never personally meet the owner of the store you go to, and you many never see the owner of the electric company. Some people never meet the owner of their place of employment, just various supervisors and bosses.  Bottom line- we depend on a lot of people in our everyday lives even if we don't know them at all.

Now, pushing all that aside and going back to much simpler days pre-electricity, pre-common grocery store, pre-employment people did survive but they still did so with help of others in lesser ways. A pioneer going once a year into a town to stock up on things they need during the year without a store close by.  Let's go back even further to the Native Americans pre-invasion- did they have stores and such? For the most part they did not, however they STILL lived in tribes, in groups and not individually scattered everywhere. Their tribes had various people performing various duties that all benefitted from.

Where am I going with all this?  People, human beings and a lot of your animals, are not meant to be independent of all others.  Yet, we are mostly not humbled by our dependence.

Somewhere along the line, probably very early on in man's history after creation and the fall, people began to admire independence. People began to look up to, admiring, those who weren't humble at all but very self-confident, very prideful. 

We have so many situations in life that call for us to be humbled and we confuse that with being humiliated, and because of that we nurture resentment.  Children are to honor their parents, do you imagine this entails them being humble towards their parents? I do. Yet, the children rebel against this as they assert their own desire to be their own masters, not under the thumbs of their parents. Even little children will test their limits as to what they can do to manipulate their parents to do things they want done.

So HOW is a child humble?  The child KNOWS at some point it is DEPENDENT upon its parents, it's caregivers- for life. Very few, if any, YOUNG children can survive on their own. They may in some countries tragically become little beggars on a street- but even then they are dependent upon the mercy of strangers and usually a gang of other homeless children which form a pecking order so that the older are responsible for the younger and so on. A single young child without ANY help would die fairly quickly from hunger, exposure, sickness, thirst. This is factual.  And comprehending dependence is humbling, isn't it?

Often young children do not even recognize their dependence but we as adults comprehend it fully.

To be humble like a child can be confusing for those who have experience with all sorts of young children. We have come in contact with many 2 or 3 year old children who seem to be anything but humble in any manner. 

The Greek definition in the Bible for humble in discussion here is--

Strong's -

tapeinoō

tap-i-no'-o

From G5011; to depress; figuratively to humiliate (in condition or heart): - abase, bring low, humble (self).

Thayer's-

G5013

ταπεινόω

tapeinoō

Thayer Definition:

1) to make low, bring low

1a) to level, reduce to a plain

1b) metaphorically to bring into a humble condition, reduce to meaner circumstances

1b1) to assign a lower rank or place to

1b2) to abase

1b3) to be ranked below others who are honoured or rewarded

1b4) to humble or abase myself by humble living

1c) to lower, depress

1c1) of one’s soul bring down one’s pride

1c2) to have a modest opinion of one’s self

1c3) to behave in an unassuming manner

1c4) devoid of all haughtiness

To be humble like a child truly is to realize our dependence, our nothingness. To a society such as in Jesus' day- a child was expected to be obedient, their place in the grand scheme of things was very minimal, they had no rights, no voice to be heard especially one of disrespect. They had no position of any authority whatsoever. Today we've elevated children to such a place they often think they have a lot of authority and they rule over their parents in a lot of situations. How often have we heard of children being disobedient to parents- we witness it for ourselves in the stores we frequent. We've begun to coddle children to such a point they've lost their position of humbleness.  And this has happened because of a misguided sense of sympathy for children being misunderstood. I say misguided because so much in our world truly is misguided and not always from a bad place but even in attempting to do good people can be misguided.

We need to HUMBLE OURSELVES.

We need to be HUMBLE as LITTLE CHILDREN.

Why? Because we ARE LITTLE CHILDREN - and our God is our FATHER.

More on this tomorrow by the grace and will of our LORD, our SAVIOR, JESUS CHRIST, now and forever!

AMEN.