Chapter Ten: Humility and the Gospel
HUMILITY AND THE GOSPEL
And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
LUKE 5:31-32
The apostle Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians about AD 54. In it he referred to himself as the “least of the apostles” (1 Corinthians 15:9). In AD 62, in his letter to the Ephesians, he considered himself as the “very least of all the saints” (that is, all believers —Ephesians 3:8). In about AD 63–64, in his first letter to Timothy, he referred to himself as the foremost of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).
From the least of the apostles, to the very least of all the saints, to the foremost of sinners, all in the space of about ten years. On the surface it seemed as if Paul was regressing in his Christian life, but in actuality he was progressing. Paul was growing in humility, one of the two most basic character traits of a Christian (the other being love).
If you have honestly evaluated yourself in the light of the eight character traits in the Beatitudes, you have probably seen yourself to be a worse sinner than you thought. You might even want to join the apostle Paul as the foremost of sinners. If that is your self-evaluation, you are in a good place. That is a sign that you also are growing in humility. What is it, though, that will keep us from becoming discouraged as we become more and more aware of the sin that still dwells within us? The answer is the gospel.
It is in the gospel, the Good News, that our sins —however many there may be, and however ugly they are —have all been forgiven through Christ’s death on the cross. And furthermore, not only are we forgiven, but we also are actually credited with the righteousness of Christ Himself.
Most Christians assume that the gospel is only for unbelievers. They see the gospel only as a door you walk through to be saved. The reality, though, is that the gospel is more like a path that you walk along for the rest of your life until you go to be with the Lord. To put it in plain words, believers need to appropriate the gospel for themselves every day. Why? Because we are still practicing sinners every day, and without the daily assurance of the gospel, we can begin to think that, at least for that day, we have lost the favor of God.
Some people who genuinely want to grow in Christian character say that it seems as if “God keeps moving the goalposts”: The more they grow, the more they see they need to grow.
The truth is, however, that God does not keep moving the goalposts. He has established one unmovable goalpost that none of us can ever reach. That goal is stated in Galatians 3:10:
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.”
Note the phrase “all things.” In context, all is an absolute term. It means “without exception.”
The “all things” of Galatians 3:10 refers to the “Book of the Law.” Someone has counted that there are over six hundred laws from God just in the Old Testament. But Jesus summed them all up in just two:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.
MATTHEW 22:37-40
Jesus summed up all those six-hundred-plus commandments in just two: Love God supremely, and love your neighbor as yourself. That is God’s unmovable goalpost. And none of us has even come close to reaching it, even on our very best days.
That is the bad news. But the good news is that there is One who did reach it: our Lord Jesus Christ.
During Jesus’ thirty-three years on earth, He lived a perfectly righteous life. He never once sinned. The New Testament writers consistently testify to Christ’s sinlessness. Paul said He “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The writer of Hebrews said, “In every respect [He] has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The apostle Peter wrote, “He committed no sin” (1 Peter 2:22), and John said, “In him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5). Jesus Himself said, “I always do the things that are pleasing to [the Father]” (John 8:29).
Yes, Jesus reached the goalpost of perfect righteousness. In fact, we shouldn’t say He reached it; rather He was always there, from the moment of His birth until the moment He gave up His life on the cross. Thirty-three years of perfect righteousness, and He lived it all in our place as our representative before God. At the end of that perfectly righteous life, He willingly died on the cross to satisfy the justice of God, again in our place and as our substitute before God.
The first chapter in this book is titled “Precepts and Promises,” but there is another word association that is equally valid: “precepts and penalties.” Every law, even in our temporal realm, has to have a penalty attached to it; otherwise, it is unenforceable. And with God’s law, the penalty is death —both physical death and eternal, spiritual death (Romans 6:23). Jesus both perfectly obeyed God’s law and then paid the penalty for our failure to perfectly obey it. We return to the beautiful observation that “he lived a life we could not live and died the death we deserved to die.”
This is the gospel, the message of “good news.” This is the door each of us must walk through by trusting in Christ as the One who bore our sins in His body on the cross. But as I said earlier, the gospel is also a path we must walk along until the day we die. As I walk along, I learn that Jesus not only died in my place, but He also lived that perfectly righteous life in my place. That’s when the good news of the gospel really becomes good news!
How, then, does this good news of the gospel help us live our daily lives in humility? For one thing, it frees us up to be honest with ourselves about our sin. We can face our sin squarely when we know that it is forgiven. Even when a particular sin is vile in our eyes —not to mention God’s eyes —we can call it what it is, and thank God for His forgiveness.
My personal way of doing this is to acknowledge the particular sin without any excuses, and then quote Isaiah 53:6 to myself and to God: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned —every one —to his own way.” I stop at that point and say, “Lord, that’s me in this sin. I’ve turned to my own way.” And then I continue, “And You, Lord have laid on Him, Your Son, all of my iniquity —even this ugly sin I am now confessing.” I do this, or something similar, as I become aware of sin throughout the day.
The second way the gospel helps us live a life of humility is to show us another person’s sin in the light of our own. To paraphrase and even enlarge on the words of one of the Puritans, the proud (or self-righteous) person is so busy judging the sins of other people that he or she has no time to see the sins of his or her own heart. Meanwhile, the humble person is so busy dealing with his or her own sins that he or she has no time to judge the sins of others.
Many people, when presented with another person’s sin, repeat the cliché “There but for the grace of God go I.” Often they use the phrase unthinkingly; even worse, sometimes the phrase is used to subtly say, “I would never do that,” or to subtly put down someone who has spoken disparagingly of another person. So instead of being an expression of genuine humility, it can become an expression of self-righteous pride. Such is the deceitfulness of our renewed but still-sinful hearts. But when spoken or even thought sincerely, this is a good expression that should promote humility.
A third way the gospel helps us walk in humility is that it helps us practice meekness and mercy (see chapters 4 and 6). We can only truly appreciate the gospel when we see it through the lens of our own sin. And as we do that, we can forgive the sins of others because we have been forgiven so much.
Fourth, the gospel motivates us to want to live in purity of heart —that is, to have as our supreme goal in life to live no longer for ourselves but for Him who redeemed us to be a people for His own possession. Recall from chapter 7 that it was the love of Christ for Paul, as seen in the death of Christ, that constrained him to live that way. As I mentioned in chapter 7, I find myself often praying over a few phrases from the old hymn “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”
Take all my guilt away,
O let me from this day
Be wholly Thine!
“Take all my guilt away” —that is clinging to the gospel. “O let me from this day be wholly Thine” —that is prayer for purity of heart. But that desire is fueled by the gospel.
In summary, I would say that it is impossible to truly walk in humility without to some degree appropriating the truth of the gospel every day. The natural question then is, how does one do this? It is by developing a practice of meditating on and praying over key Scriptures on the gospel. They have to be of your own choosing —verses that speak powerfully to you. But to give you a place to begin, the following are Scriptures that I choose from for daily appropriation of the gospel.
My all-time favorite Scripture on the gospel is 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This verse needs some explanation, however, to help us understand what Paul is saying. God making Christ “to be sin” does not mean that He made Him to be a sinner but that He made Him to bear our sin. God the Father took all the sin of all of us —sins of commission and omission; sins in thought, word, deed, and motive; sins we are not even aware of; all of them —and laid them on the head of His beloved Son. He charged the entire debt of all our sins to Christ. And through His death on the cross, Christ paid the debt.
The Scripture that helps me best understand Paul’s meaning is Isaiah 53:6:
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned —every one —to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Note the latter part of the verse: “The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” That’s what Paul meant when he wrote, “[God] made him to be sin.”
You might want to also memorize the preceding verse, Isaiah 53:5, for reflection:
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
That Scripture fleshes out in more detail the meaning of verse 6.
To make the truth of verse 5 more personal, I like to change the pronouns. The verse would then read,
You were pierced for my transgressions;
You were crushed for my iniquities;
upon You was the chastisement that brought me peace,
and with Your wounds I am healed.
In that way I really do appropriate the gospel for myself —or, to use a now well-known expression, “I preach the gospel to myself every day.”
The latter part of 2 Corinthians 5:21 —“so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” —also needs some explaining. We obviously do not become in ourselves as righteous as God Himself. The key to understanding Paul’s words are two little words: in him. This is Paul’s shorthand expression for our representative union with Christ. God appointed Jesus to be the representative before Him of all who trust in Jesus for our salvation. So all that Christ did in His sinless life and sin-bearing death, He did in our place as our representative. So the expression “in him we might become the righteousness of God” means that we might be counted as righteous by God because He credits to us the perfect righteousness that Jesus lived out over thirty-three years.
The Scripture that helps me most to understand and apply what Paul is saying is Philippians 3:9:
. . . and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.
The context of this verse is Paul’s personal testimony of how he totally renounced any confidence in his own law-keeping righteousness in order to rely totally on Christ’s righteousness. Note that he speaks of “the righteousness from God that depends on faith.” Again Paul uses his shorthand expression, “in him,” to indicate that it is through his representative union with Christ that he receives this righteousness from God —or, to say it another way, God credits the righteousness of Christ to him.
So 2 Corinthians 5:21, Isaiah 53:6 (and sometimes verse 5), and Philippians 3:9 are my primary verses for daily appropriating the gospel. I sometimes also use some of the following verses:
“As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). “As far as the east is from the west” is an idiom meaning an infinite distance. Someone has pointed out that, although north and south meet at the two poles, east and west never meet. You can start flying north, to the North Pole, and as soon as you pass over it, you are immediately heading south. But if you start west to circle the earth you will always be flying west. East never meets west. So to use the expression “as far as the east is from the west” means that my sins are completely wiped away. God has put them out of His mind. He remembers them no more (see Hebrews 8:12; 10:17).
“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isaiah 1:18). This is the Scripture I go to when I feel particularly guilty of my sin. Scarlet is one of the most difficult dyes to remove from clothing. In this verse God is saying that, no matter how deep the guilt of our sin is, He will completely remove it. In the New Testament we learn that He does this through the death of Christ.
“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25). To blot out transgressions means to remove them from God’s record book. It is in a sense a legal transaction. To remember them no more is a relational act.
“You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). I love this Scripture because, as a former navy man, I know what it means for something to be cast into the depths of the sea. It is gone forever. This is a vivid picture of what God does with our sins.
“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin” (Romans 4:7-8). I especially like verse 8, which says the Lord will not count our sins against us. He will not do this because He has already counted our sins against His own Son. In considering the truth of God’s forgiveness, we must never think that God simply writes off our debt of sin, or, so to speak, sweeps it under some cosmic rug. No, the debt must be paid. God’s justice must be satisfied. But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus paid the debt in full. He satisfied God’s justice completely. It is on that basis that God no longer counts our sin against us.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). This is a good verse to go to when we feel condemned. We feel condemned because we know we are guilty. God knows that, too, but He doesn’t condemn us because He has already dealt with that sin through Christ.
“For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:3-4). This is a good passage of Scripture to go along with Philippians 3:9 regarding the righteousness of Christ that is credited to us. Note that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness. He is the end of the law for us because He perfectly fulfilled it as our representative. We now stand righteous before God on that basis. Christ is not the end of the law as far as its moral precepts are concerned. Those are still valid for us as an expressions of God’s moral will, by which we seek by obedience to please Him and glorify Him.
These are the Scriptures I use to daily appropriate the gospel. In addition to my primary ones (2 Corinthians 5:21; Isaiah 53:6; Philippians 3:9), I will choose one or two others that, for some reason, are especially meaningful to me that day.
One final thought, however, about preaching the gospel (or appropriating it) to yourself. In the Scripture at the beginning of this chapter Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32). The gospel is only for sinners, so we must come to the gospel as still-practicing sinners with an attitude of repentance toward our sin. Our sin may be only what I call “respectable” sins in our eyes, but all sin is vile in the eyes of our infinitely holy God. So we must come with the humility of the tax collector praying in the temple: “God be merciful to me, the sinner.”
As we have gone through the Beatitudes, we have found that the truly humble person
This is a formidable list, one that none of us will ever perfectly attain to. That is why we need the gospel every day. It is the gospel that will keep us from becoming discouraged and will instead motivate us to keep pursuing humility, even when we fail so often.
We also need to daily realize our dependence on the work and power of the Holy Spirit to pursue the various expressions of humility. There is a fundamental principle of spiritual growth that I call “the principle of dependent responsibility.” For example, God says through Paul, “Walk in . . . humility.” We are responsible for doing that, but we must depend on the Holy Spirit to enable us. Furthermore, we are dependent on the Holy Spirit to work genuine change in our hearts. As Paul said, “[It is] only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:7).
This principle is taught in various ways throughout the Bible, but is concisely stated in the words of Hebrews 13:21: “[May God] equip you with everything good that you may do his will.” Here the emphasis is on what we do. For example, we walk in humility, but only with His equipping or enabling power. The verse then continues: “. . . working in us that which is pleasing in his sight.” This refers to the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in our inner being as He transforms us more and more into the image of Christ. Both of these works of the Spirit are necessary.
As we grow in the Christian life, then, we become increasingly aware of our dependence on the righteousness of Christ revealed to us through the gospel. And we also become increasingly aware of our dependence on the Holy Spirit. Both of these awarenesses are expressions of humility. In our dependence on the righteousness that is in Christ and on the power of the Holy Spirit, may we all seek to grow in humility as we see it in the eight character traits of the Beatitudes.