Quotes about Humility

Not only does sin blind, but as sinners, we participate in our own blindness. We all swindle ourselves into thinking that we are better than we are, that what we're doing is okay when, in fact, it's not okay in the eyes of God. The spiritual reality is that we're like naked homeless people, but we see ourselves as affluent and well-dressed.

You are most loving, patient, kind, and gracious when you are aware that there is no truth that you could give to another that you don't desperately need yourself.

It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.

A selfish person will never learn the joy of giving and being a blessing to others.

The day we start taking credit for the fact that he answers prayer we are in deep, deep trouble.

God is mobilising an army, but it is a broken army that marches on its knees.

I'm coming to the conclusion that to be used by God we must be weak and foolish rather than all-conquering heroes. I reckon God is sick and tired of people posing as overcomers with permanent grins, as if they somehow avoided the Fall and went hang-gliding instead. He needs us weak and childish to be used by him.

Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the world with humble, open, and vulnerable eyes—and ourselves as members and participants rather than masters and conquerors. We will see our unfathomable cosmos and the people in our cosmic neighborhood as God's creation, not as objects for our own manipulation or unholy mischief.

Following Jesus isn't like a burden we carry on our shoulders. It's an internal process so radical and painful that the best way to describe it for people of that day is as the act of being bound and nailed like a criminal to a piece of wood lifted above the ground where you are left hanging in naked humiliation and intense pain until you suffocate.

I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I've hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn't the endgame here. Loving as God loves is.

Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the "sin of certainty.

But at least I didn't do any harm. Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God's eyes.