v. 5 "those who are older" is the same word "elder" as at v. 1. The NIV takes the term now to refer not to church officials, but simply to older men in general. The word can be used of either. You have a similar transition from its general to its technical use in 1 Timothy 5:1, 17. Or, it could here still be a reference to the church officials who have been the subject of the previous verses and to whom young men perhaps, as a group, find humility before and subjection to a special problem. In any case, the next sentence indicates that the young men are but the representatives of all the Christians in the church, young and old, who are summoned to humility and a spirit of servanthood

The gist of Peter's words here is not difficult to grasp: he is telling them and us that the spirit of submission, of humbling oneself before others to serve them for Christ's sake is not confined to the leaders of the church only but is the calling of every Christian. It may be that he comes to this application because he is still thinking about these Christians' suffering persecution for their faith. Humility in the first case for them, then, involves a submission of their hearts to God who has permitted them to undergo this trial. "Humble yourselves under God's mighty hand" refers then to an acceptance of their lot, knowing that, ultimately, it is from God who could have protected them from persecution but, for reasons sufficient to him, has not done so. God knows best. Put your hand over your mouth and submit to him. But, that sort of humility requires a more comprehensive lowliness of heart and spirit, the kind of humility that expresses itself as much toward other human beings as toward God himself. Humility, like the other central virtues of the Christian character, is all of a piece. You either have it or you don't. And if you have it, it shows up everywhere, not just at one point. A man who will be humble before God in times of trial, is a man who will be humble before others at any time. That seems to be the gist, adding verse 5 to verse 6.

And, then, to encourage us in the difficult work of humbling ourselves before God and others, he reminds us that God promises his grace to the humble, promises that those who are low before him will in due time be lifted up, and that we can safely leave our fortunes in God's hand. In other words, we have no need to worry that our being humble, our turning from serving ourselves will be to our own disadvantage, because God will care for us. It is better to have God looking out for lifting you up than to look out for it yourself!

That much is plain and it is hardly a message unique to Peter.

We read this emphasis on humility in one form or another countless times in the Bible.

For this is what the High and Lofty One says -- He who lives forever, whose name is holy:
"I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite." (Isaiah 57:15)

This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word. (Isaiah 66:2)

You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty. (Psalm 18:27)

And many other texts like that. I thought, this being the last Sunday of the year, perhaps I should preach on a subject related to the passing of the years or the importance of some new commitments for the coming year. But then I looked at this short paragraph, which is the next paragraph before us as we continue to the end of 1 Peter and I realized that I could not touch on a subject more vital, more necessary, more near the heart of what everyone of us needs more to be and do as a Christian, than this humility that Peter is commending to us.

Now, we need to be clear on one point as we consider this summons to humility. It is easy enough to claim to be humble before God. How will anyone know? But in the Bible the truly humble spirit is measured primarily by humility before other human beings -- for if we cannot be humble before the people we can see, how can we be humble before the far greater One whom we cannot see? I suspect that this is why Peter, whose primary subject, given the larger context, seems to be our humility before God in time of trial, turns naturally and immediately to our humility before one another.

We need to be clear about this, I say. And in this point in particular: the Lord does not ask us to be lower than we actually are, to feign humility, to behave as though we were deserving of a low place before others when in fact we are not.

Paul puts it in a more homecoming way: we are not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. But, in putting it that way, he acknowledges our problem, which is that we all tend to think of ourselves far more highly than we ought. We all have a higher view of ourselves than we deserve.

The Bible leaves us in no doubt that if we thought accurately and honestly about ourselves, we would see the need to be humble and to behave humbly before others. For we are not worthy of the admiration and the worship of others that we crave and seek and, in our heart of hearts, feel we deserve!

We are, in truth, deeply flawed people, every one of us, more deeply and in more ways than any of us thinks or knows. And this is why humility is so essential to true Christian living. Humility in the Bible is fundamentally simply an honesty about oneself, an honesty that frees the soul to see its true relations both to God and to others: to see how deeply dependent we all are on the grace and mercy of God, because we do not deserve his favor at all; and how little right we have to demand, even to expect the service of others. In this freedom faith flourishes and so does love and gratitude and obedience. No wonder Augustine should have replied, when asked to name the three cardinal virtues of the Christian heart: "humility, humility, humility."

You do agree that you are a deeply flawed human being, don't you? That your virtues are pathetic imitations of the real thing and that your vices are genuine and real and reach down into the very heart of your heart? You do admit, don't you, that you entertain a higher view of yourself than you deserve and that the passion with which you love yourself can scarcely be justified by the facts of your life?

It is not a hard thing to demonstrate, you know: how undeserving we are of the attention and the regard and the consideration we expect from God and others.

We can demonstrate that even in public ways. It is one of the facts of life that one discovers who observes human beings, whether in the flesh or by means of biographies and autobiographies, news accounts, or the like. We read a few weeks ago in the newspaper about Bob Hope -- the famous comedian and icon of American entertainment. But this story was not about his comedy but about his wife Delores and her explanation as to how and why she has stayed with him these many years given the fact that he was a notorious philanderer. We read too about his reputation for greed. And we are sorry to hear that. We wish he were a better man, especially better where it counts the most. But disappointed as we may be, we are not really surprised. We are used to hearing about celebrities' feet of clay. We have become quite used to expecting the worst.

But, you know, it is the same for Christians, even for the very best Christians, even for our Christian heroes. I have been reading of late a new study of Abraham Kuyper, the Dutchman of a hundred years ago and more: theologian, journalist, politician, even Prime Minister, a renaissance man, who devoted his extraordinary gifts and energies to the renewal of biblical Christianity in his homeland and then to its application to every facet of Dutch national life. He is rightly a hero to all Christians who believe in the sovereignty of God and who long to see that Divine sovereignty acknowledged in every area of life. It was Kuyper who said in his most electrifying way, in his inaugural address at the Free University of Amsterdam, a University he founded by the way: "There exists in all the universe not the breadth of my thumb, but Christ says, 'It is mine!'"

Up to this point I'd only read a single biography of Kuyper and it was the sort of celebratory biography that evangelicals often indulge in. Hero-worship more than the whole story. I knew there was more, because Herman Bavinck -- Kuyper's great contemporary, the greatest Reformed theologian of the last two hundred years but also a man of prodigious accomplishments in other fields, politics among them -- had a falling out with Kuyper later in their careers, and I knew enough to suspect that a man who fell out with Bavinck probably had something to answer for! Well, now I have read about the true Kuyper. Now don't mistake me. I still admire Kuyper greatly. He was a man of great gifts, of prodigious energy, and he truly did devote them to the cause of Christ. He was a devout Christian and a faithful servant of the Lord. But there were things about this man that are deeply disappointing. He was harsh and intemperate in criticism of those who did not agree with him, like many great men he tended to identify himself with his cause and considered any lack of respect and regard for him as a person as tantamount to a betrayal of the Christian cause. He expected his friends to agree with him and could be unforgiving when they did not. One of the things that deeply disappointed me to hear was that this man, one of whose greatest interests was the reformation of the church, was irregular in his own church attendance. Many of his justly famous more popular books, such as To Be Near Unto God and The Work of the Holy Spirit, are collections of the weekly meditations he wrote for the Christian newspaper, The Herald, that he also edited. Many of these meditations were written on Sunday mornings when he should have been in the house of God!

Now, perhaps you don't think quite so highly of Kuyper. Well, I imagine my view of him will never be quite the same, but I still admire him greatly, and perhaps it is easier for me to do so, because that Kuyper had feet of clay was no surprise to me. Every Christian hero has had feet of clay, because every Christian, even the greatest of them, continued to be a sinner, profoundly a sinner, all his days, all her days in this world. Calvin had a terrific temper. He apologized for it on his deathbed! So did the saintly Rutherford, who could be stupidly unbending in a disagreement, even with his closest friends. Whitefield, the greatest preacher of the 18th century, struggled, and not always successfully, with vanity. I admire Robert Dabney, the 19th century American southern theologian, a great deal. His few pages on the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments are better, more useful, more clear-headed than anything that had ever been written before -- much better than Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Owen or Edwards --. And in many ways Dabney was a great Christian. But he said things about slavery that will curl your hair. He was far, far too much a conservative in the worst sense of the word -- a defender of the status quo. He was so sure that the Presbyterian tradition in which he stood had got everything right that he once had the temerity to say, "The [Westminster] Confession will need no amendment until the Bible needs to be amended." ["The Doctrinal Contents of the Confession," cited in BOT 423 (Dec. 1998) 23.]

Now, to be sure, you sometimes have to dig to get the whole picture. Christians for reasons both good and bad tend to present their heroes at their best. Ian Murray published a very fine and very scholarly biography of Jonathan Edwards a few years ago, and somehow neglected to mention that Edwards held and sold slaves. When called on that point he could only say that the practice was so universal in Edwards' day that he didn't think it bore mentioning. But, the fact is, that single fact, and others that could be mentioned, change the way any modern Christian thinks about Jonathan Edwards.

I don't say this to diminish these men from the church's past, heroes as they rightly are. They were holy men: they were wise faithful husbands, fathers, earnest, committed Christians. I mention these facts only to make the point that all of us are, as all Christians always have been, deeply flawed. They continue to be sinners and those who lived close enough to them to observe their lives could tell you in what obvious ways they continued to be sinners! Listen, I come from a family in which there have been a number of substantial Christian men: my grandfather, my own father, my uncle, who founded Young Life. All my life I have had people praise those three men in my hearing, and I love that, because I am proud of them all and proud to be connected to them by blood. I am always pleased to hear people say how much they admired them, how much they owed to them. But, I could tell you things about those three men that would not be so complimentary. That would take some of the luster off their reputations. I have no need to do that, no interest in doing that, except to remind you that we are all, the very best among us, we are all people, even as Christians, with a great deal to be humble about!

And so far, my brothers and sisters, I have spoken only of those things in someone's life that are known to others. What of that world of things within us -- attitudes, thoughts, intentions, desires, daydreams, loves and hatreds, and, above all, the infernal preoccupation with ourselves -- that no one else sees or knows but God.

Samuel Rutherford once wrote of himself: "I have seen my...vileness; if I were well known, there would none in this kingdom ask how I do. Many take my ten to be a hundred, but I am a deeper hypocrite, and shallower professor, than every one believeth. God knoweth I feign not.... And, upon my part, despair might be almost excused, if everyone in this land saw my inner side." [Letter CLXVII, pp. 313-314 (Bonar ed.)] William Law, the author of the immortal A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, said of himself that he would rather be strangled and thrown into a swamp than that anyone be allowed to see into his heart. [Cited in Whyte, Bunyan Characters, iii, 156]

Well, if those men, those Christians, should say such things about themselves and what they were inside, what of us? For we have the very same vices they had and not nearly so much of their virtue. What would people say of our devotion, of our love of holiness, of our love of God and Christ; what would they say of our devotion to God's Word, of our faithfulness in prayer, of our hatred of sin, of our love of others, of our purity, our patience, our selflessness and humility, if they could look inside us and see what is there day in, day out? How many friends and admirers would we have if they saw the true person, our heart and mind and soul, and made their judgments about us knowing the full story?

So, I say, brethren, the Scripture is not asking you to have a lower view of yourself than the facts require. It is asking nothing of you but simple honesty. It is asking you to relate to God and to others in keeping with the truth about yourselves. That is all!

But that is the most important thing. For, you will notice that Peter does not tell you how to be humble, only that you should be. He doesn't give you several steps to take, certain strategies to employ with your soul. Godly people have developed such strategies over the ages as they have sought to obey the Word of God and to be humble before God and others, they figured out what to do to corral the wild beast of their pride.

"Talk not about myself" Simeon writes to himself in his Journal.

"Desire to be unknown" says Thomas a Kempis. "Be ambitious to be unknown," was the advice of Archbishop Leighton.

"O teach me to love to be concealed," prayed Jeremy Taylor.

"Lucifer himself would be an humble angel with his wings over his face if he had a past like yours, and would often enough return to look at it." That was Alexander Whyte's recommendation for the cultivation of true humility.

And many of you know of St. Francis' method, who took a young monk around with him and whenever someone came up to Francis and praised him, the monk was to whisper the truth in the Saint's ear: insulting words about Francis' boorishness and selfishness and fruitlessness as a servant of God.

And many wise men and women will recommend to you that you thank God for all of those ways in which you are lowered in your own estimation, every thing that helps to bring you down in your own eyes: every defect, weariness, failure! I read the other day that Isaac Watts, who lived his life as a bachelor, once proposed to a young woman, Elizabeth Singer, who was also an accomplished poet. She refused his proposal telling him that "though she loved the jewel she could not admire the casket [setting] which contained it", a blunt reference to Watts' physical appearance. Her judgment may not have been kind, but the surviving portraits of Watts are demonstration enough of how accurate it was. What if you are plain, as so many of us are? That is not a bad thing if humility is, in fact, the most precious thing of all in a human spirit. Perhaps that is why so many are plain, because God loves a humble heart and knows how much help we need in keeping our hearts low.

And all of this is very useful advice. Humility, being so much against the grain of our hearts, will not come easily and without effort and determination and clever devices on our part. But key to it all is motive and desire. And that comes first from the recognition of one's own genuine unworthiness which is what we have been talking about and second from the realization that it is humility that God loves, humility that he rewards, humility -- true humility, for remember, he looks upon the heart -- that opens the door to everything truly wonderful in life.

"He opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." "Humble yourselves...under God's mighty hand, and he will lift you up."

Or, as Alexander Moody Stuart put it: "There is not one humble heart in all the world that the High God is not dwelling in." [Memoir, 247] And Rabbi Duncan also: "The man that understands the evil of his own heart, how vile it is, is the only useful, fruitful and solidly believing and obedient person..." [Cited in Packer, Quest for Godliness, 194]

And don't you see how that must be? For the one who sees himself down at the bottom, who faces the truth about his own sin and sinfulness, is down too far himself or herself to look down upon another human being. He will always think kindly of those who treat him with kindness, knowing that he does not deserve it; and will never take note that others neglect him because he simply does not think in terms of what he deserves from others. "No," you say, he will be depressed and morose and defeated in life, if he has such a view of himself and is constantly carrying around with him a sense of his own badness.

Ah, that would be the case. Except for this. That it is in humility that one experiences again and again the gospel of Christ and the love and compassion and mercy of God. You see, what is Christian humility, honesty about oneself, except every day, day after day, and in many different ways, coming to yourself and saying to your heavenly Father "I am not worthy to be called your Son." And what does your Father in heaven do when he hears you say that to him except once more say to his holy angels, "Bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and a ring on his finger, and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate." Remember? It is the son who refuses to be humble, who thinks himself better than his brother, who refuses to go in to enjoy the feast and to enjoy the food and the dancing and the merriment of all.

No, humility does not discourage or depress, it opens the door to the love of Christ and the full experience of that love. And that experience makes a man or a woman the most cheerful and useful friend to others. We love them, however unlovely they may be from time to time, because when we were still more unlovely, God loved us and Christ gave himself for us.

Lewis put it this way. "Do not imagine that if you met a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.... He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all." [Mere Christianity, 114]

No, he will not. He will be thinking about Christ and Christ's love to him. And that love will liberate him to live his life not forever thinking about himself; the sad, the unhappy lot of those who do not know Christ. They must love themselves most of all, an object hardly worth so much affection and certainly unable to lift their affections higher and purify and ennoble them. Self, as Alexander Whyte put it, is simply a more homely, a more home-coming name for sin. To love yourself in that way, is simply to love sin. On the other hand, humble yourself to accept that you need from Christ a love you do not and cannot ever deserve, and not only will you experience a life-changing love from God, but will be free so to love others that you yourself will become so much more lovely yourself. And that is the perfection and the genius and the goodness of Jesus Christ and his gospel.

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