JESUS HUMBLED HIMSELF

 “Many would be scantily clad if clothed in their humility,” someone noted. 

Most of us may know of someone who was proud but “his chickens came home to roost” and he got his “comeupins,” a slang word for “comeuppance,” meaning “a well deserved rebuke or penally.”

The Bible says, “Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:8 NKJV).   

James 4:10 says, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.”

This Old Testament verse sums up the idea: “Before honor is humility” (Proverbs 15:33). 

“Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil’s reach as humility,” Jonathan Edwards said.

Dwight L. Moody said, “God has nothing to say to the self-righteous. Unless you humble yourself before him in the dust, and confess before him your iniquities and sins, the gate of heaven, which is open only for sinners, saved by grace, must be shut against you forever.”  

“Humble” is defined as “having or showing a modest or low estimate of one’s own importance; not proud or haughty; not arrogant or assertive.”

“Humility is being free from pride and not thinking of yourself first,” someone said. “It is realizing your talents and gifts are from God, putting your worth in Him, admitting you can never live up to His holiness and perfection, seeing how much you need Him and asking for His help.”

Jesus Christ laid aside his Deity (his divineness) and demonstrated the greatest humility. 

Paul writes about Jesus’ humility in Philippians 2. Paul says, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, Who, being in the form of God … .” 

Paul says that Jesus was “in the form of God” but did not count equality with God a thing to be used for his own benefit. Jesus emptied himself, left heaven, and was born in human form, taking on the role of a servant. 

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:8-11).

Pastors refer to “the incarnation.” “Incarnate” means “embodied in flesh.” Jesus was born on earth as a baby — he took on flesh, was “embodied” in flesh. God assumed a human body and human nature and became a man in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity. Christ was truly God and truly man during his earthly mission. 

In the New York Times Magazine, Nancy V. Raine told a story heard years ago from a friend named George: 

"In those days, work crews marked construction sites by putting out smudge pots with open flames. George’s 4-year-old daughter got too close to one and her pants caught fire like the Straw Man’s stuffing. The scars running the length and breadth of Sara’s legs looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In the third grade she was asked, 'If you could have one wish, what would it be?' Sarah wrote: 'I want everyone to have legs like mine.'"

“When we suffer pain, we want others to understand,” says Craig B. Larson, who reported that story. “We want others to be like us so they can identify with us. We don’t want to be alone. … God does understand. When Jesus became a man, he did something far more difficult than having legs like Sarah’s.”

Jesus humbly put on a garment of flesh. “He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8).