I was at a conference once when one of the presenters asked me: “Do I have to become a Mennonite to be as humble as you?” Maybe so, though this Mennonite is not actually all that humble.  I want to grow in humility, because I’m convinced the Christian life is humble at heart.  

Christian humility is a response to God’s grace.  God acted first. God loved us.  God saved us.    We can respond to what God has done, or not, but we can’t make anything happen on our own.  “Apart from me, you can do nothing,” said Jesus (John 15:5).  Humility is the soul-deep realization of just how true Jesus’ words are.  We got nothing, and we know it.  

The Scriptures hold out Moses as the pinnacle of humility.  Numbers tells us that Moses was “a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (12:3 NIV).  This may surprise us, because Moses lived a great big life.  The Lord placed the stone tablets of the Law into Moses’ hands on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 24).  God used Moses to liberate the people from Egypt (Exodus 14).  Moses performed miracles and made wise judgments and led the people in battle and even managed to write a psalm on the side (Exodus 4, Numbers 12; Exodus 18:13-16; Exodus 17; Psalm 90).  But Moses was humble, and his humility flowed from the fact that he knew that none of his greatness was his: not the staff he bore, not the deliverance he led through the waves, not the leadership capacities that had been instilled in him as a young prince of Egypt.  For Moses, everything began in God and pointed to God.  “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here,” he said to the Lord.  “For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us?” (Exodus 33:15-16).  Without God’s gift and presence, he’s got nothing, and Moses knew it.  

We see the beginnings of Moses’ humility when he was pastoring his flock in the wilderness and he spotted the burning bush.  He said to himself “I must turn aside” (3:5).  That was the moment when the seeds of humility were planted in him.  Moses turned aside from himself and turned toward God.  He took off his sandals (Exodus 3:5).  Moses’ humility began in reverence.

We might not realize that humility begins in reverence before God, maybe because we don’t always have well-developed instincts for reverence.  So much of our cultural palette is tinted with cynicism and flippancy and even, as theologian Carl Trueman has pointed out: a kind of childishness.  These days, we might walk right by that burning bush because we’re playing on our phones.  

A lot of us live with a reverence deficit, in part because we lack spaces to enact reverence.  Most of our cultural prompts for reverence are tied to patriotism, like standing hand-over-heart for the national anthem.  But what of reverence for God in church, the “fear of the Lord” referred to so frequently in the Scriptures?  It seems to me that our worship services aren’t always built for that type of reverence.  They don’t always position us for the kind of encounter that the apostle Paul expected in first century Corinth—the astounding, heart-squeezing awe at God’s movement that would lead a visitor to bow down and declare “God is really among you” (1 Corinthians 14:25).  That kind of brush with the holy God is a rare animal in our churches, only furtively appearing at baptisms, and maybe (though not always) at funerals. 

But how can we “walk humbly with [our] God” without reverence (Micah 6:8)?  Reverent love for God opens us up to reverent respect for others.  They, just as us, have been created with purpose, with giftings, with dreams.  In turning aside in awe of God, we begin to internalize habits of turning aside in reverence for the polychrome lives of other people.  That’s what moves us to humility: the realization that God is doing “far more than all we can ask or imagine” across the broad horizon of others’ lives (Ephesians 2:20).

In fact, that’s just what Moses saw at the end of his life.  Moses’ humility was book-ended by two movements: the “turning aside” to approach God in fire and the time just before the end when God directed him up a mountain where “the Lord showed him the whole Land” (Deuteronomy 34:1).  Moses gazed out over the panorama of what God had prepared.  The people had grumbled and foot-dragged their way through the desert, but there it was: the Promised Land, glorious and undeserved, the broad horizon of God’s work in and for his people.  

God granted Moses a grace with that vision, a beautiful dream of the future.  Well done, good and faithful servant.  And yet, standing on that mountain looking over the Promised Land was also a sign for Moses—and for us all—that even with all Moses’ leading and long desert wandering, his striving and suffering, he was not the center of the story.  God at the beginning.  God at the end.  God the warrior liberator of his people through and through.  Moses had a part to play, but he wasn’t the star of the story.  That’s a humbling experience.  

Moses saw the land, and then he died.  And in the ultimate act of humility, Moses who was “unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform” was buried in an unmarked grave (Deuteronomy 34:11, 6).

It took Moses a lifetime—120 years—to grow into that humility before God and man.  Humility will take us a life of following Christ who is “gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29).