GO LOW: Learning Humility in a Hubristic Age
This post begins a series of blogs that delves into my new book GO LOW: Learning Humility in a Hubristic Age.
Remember, Christmas is coming!
Order the book, read it, write a short endorsement on Amazon.com
(but don’t order it on Amazon because they take a 55% cut from all sales!)
Introduction to Go Low
Even in our best moments, when we’re outshining the competition, we fall short of the gold standard of absolute goodness. Some readers will balk at that last statement. They will want to justify their goodness at times by appealing to the competition: “But compared to Bob or Nancy, I’m doing pretty well.” Often, the Bobs and the Nancys are those poor souls who we judge to be beneath us. Rarely, if ever, do we compare ourselves to those morally superior to us.
Fig. 2 Side Rails
We are shocked to discover that God does not grade on a curve. We continue to riffle back and forth in our Bibles for any kind of hope for the morally bankrupt, which is what we are. Then we find it – eureka. There is indeed an up and a down in the Bible! But the categories are contrarian. The up is not goodness but a bad thing, which we refer to as pride. And the down is not a bad thing but a virtue, which we label humility.
Fig. 3 The Contrarian Ladder
If God has a home, then it is in heaven. But if God has a second home here on earth, a kind of cottage on the lake, it is with folks who are humble.
“For this is what the high and exalted One says—
he who lives forever, whose name is holy:
“I live in a high and holy place,
but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly
and to revive the heart of the contrite.” (Isa. 57:15)
“These are the ones I look on with favor:
those who are humble and contrite in spirit,
and who tremble at my word.” (Isa. 66:2).
God is contrarian in what He loves and favors. He bypasses those who are full of themselves and moves in with those who are humble, and have a proper estimation of reality and thus of themselves.
Christianity tells us that we do not ascend to God, but that God condescends, comes down, and descends the ladder to get to us. He would love to come to everyone, but alas, most are too preoccupied with themselves and their attempts at self-extension to even allow God into their lives. The baffling truth is this: God descends the ladder to step into the lives of those who are humble.[i]
“Although His (God’s) ways are higher than our ways, the way in which His thoughts are higher than ours is that we do not realize just how He delights to come. . . . Where is the heart of God, the unspeakably exalted one, naturally drawn, according to Isaiah 57:15? To the lowly. When Jesus showed up seven hundred years after Isaiah prophesied and revealed His deepest heart as “gentle and lowly,” He was proving once and for all that gentle lowliness is indeed where God loves to dwell. It is what He does. It is who He is. His ways are not our ways.”[ii]
Before we get to a heavenly home, God wants to be at home with us now.
My wife and I have recently moved from Germany, where we have lived for 37 years, to a suburb of Chicago. We are literally living in her folks’ basement (We hope to be on the cusp of a new social movement – children in their sixties moving back to live with their parents in their basement). We are beginning to converse about what it would mean to have our own place. We talk about many different features, like one story, two story; two-bedrooms, four bedrooms; no basement, with basement; big lawn, small lawn; walk-in closet, or a man-cave.
When God thinks about a living space, does He have you in mind? With trust in Jesus Christ as our salvation, the only other feature He is really interested in is that of a humble heart. Would you consider yourself to be a humble person? What if we went on a journey together to learn to be God’s kind of people in everyday life? What if we discovered how pernicious pride is and how it has infiltrated much of who we have become? And what if we had a way out? A better way? A path choked full of unexpected delight—the path of humble living where God feels right at home?
I invite you to join me on a journey to go low.
[i] „’You, Lord, who are so high above us, yet look with favour on the humble, look on the proud too, but from far off. You come close only to men who are humble at heart.’ The proud cannot find you, even though by dint of study the have skill to number stars and grains of sand, to measure the tracts of constellations and trace the paths of planets.” Augustine, Confessions. London: Penguin Books, 1961, 93.
[ii] Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 162.