Piper on Humility

Here's something from John Piper's What Jesus Demands from the World (p. 131):

In Matthew 18:4 Jesus says, "Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." The Greek verb for "humble" did not generally describe a positive virtue in Jesus' day. It meant generally to crush, bring down, afflict, humiliate, and degrade. The word was chosen because Jesus' demand was not a romantic one, as though childlikeness was sweet and easy. For a strong, self-confident, self-sufficient, intelligent, resourceful, controlling person, Jesus' demand was devastating. Jesus knew that children were not the models for imitation in his day. The reason he chose them is because of "their powerlessness and their low social standing." His demand is that we end our love affair with power and status and self-sufficiency and rights and control."

Something to think about

I found this interesting little thought experiment at Christ is Deeper Still, the blog of pastor Ray Ortlund.

O. Hobart Mowrer, the psychologist, set himself to understand more deeply our hollowed-out emotional lives. He noted that, commonly, when we perform a good deed, we advertise it, display it, draw attention to it, hoping to collect on the emotional credit of it then and there. But when we do something cheap, evil or stupid, we hide it, deny it, minimize it. And the discredit from that stays with us and even accumulates with each further sin. So we make ourselves chronically bankrupt in conscience and heart. Our lives are required of us, and we are found wanting. No felt "net worth." Lost confidence, pizzazz. Our positive energies are depleted by concealing, pretending, brooding.

Then Mowrer wondered, what if we reversed our strategy? What if we spent our lives admitting our weaknesses, owning up to our failures, naming our idiot-moments, confessing our follies, errors and debts, while also hiding away from everyone's view our smart ideas, heroic sacrifices, kind deeds, charities and virtues? What if, instead of throwing back at the other guy his worst failure while trotting out our best moment, we put up our worst against his best? And so forth. What would happen? Our hearts might start filling up.