“Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue (cf. Col. 2:18, 23). Even “humble” attitudes can be masks of pride. The English, it has been said, take pride in not praising themselves! Rather, humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. That is the pattern of humility modeled in the incarnation (Phil. 2:5-11). It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe. Those who have best learned this kind of godliness know that what may seem like the most awful loss is actually true liberation.”
-David Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover It’s Moral Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 204.
