The Charter of the Church (6)
Therefore, I, the prisoner of the Lord, exhort you to walk worthily of the calling in which you were called, with all humility and meekness, with long-suffering, bearing with one another in love; being eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Ephesians 4:1-3
Humility – Do you remember axios, the Greek word for “worthily”? This word comes from the idea of a balance scale. The manner in which we live stands on one side of the scale. On the other side are God’s weights. To answer the invitation to the church is to live your life so that your actions are in equal balance to the weights God adds to the other side of the scale. Attending this party has conditions. The first is to send back the RSVP. Then you are placed on the guest list. But once you arrive, you discover that life at the party does not look like life outside. God places His weights on the scale to see if your life is equally balanced with His Son’s.
The first of those weights is tapeinophrosune. Don’t throw up your hands and say, “I can’t even pronounce that word!” It comes from an adjective tapeinos that is much easier to read. The word may be Greek, but Paul’s thought is not. In the Greek culture, humility was a state of mind. We have inherited the same view. When we think of humility, we think of a mental or emotional state expressed by lowliness. We see humility as the opposite of self-importance. But this is not the Biblical view. Paul is thinking in Hebrew and in Hebrew, the word for “humble” comes from ana, a word that means “oppressed”. In Hebrew thought, humility is an action not a state of mind. That means it does not depend on how I think. It depends only on how I behave.
What does this mean for us? Humility is the action of placing yourself below others. It is the behavior of bowing down in obedience, of complying, of acting as a servant regardless of your thoughts or feelings. God knows that you cannot become humble by going through a mental or emotional self-deprivation diet. You have to get out there and act as the servant of others before your inner constitution will be transformed. Humility is the result of obedience, not the result of selfish abstinence.
The Greek world stands behind our contemporary culture. Greeks loved freedom. So do we. We think that being free is the most important quality of being human. Since we prize freedom beyond all else, we consider the humility of submission as degrading. We are wrong! God knows that our mythology of freedom leads us away from the truth. Obedience to God, humility in action before Him, is the most important weight on the scale of equality with His Son. Without obedience, there is no humility. Without humility, there is no equality with Jesus. And without equality with Jesus, the church is a shame.
