In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Mount Everest with his Sherpa friend and guide, Tenzin Norgay.  What they achieved, especially with the kind of equipment available at the time, stands as one of this past century’s truly remarkable human feats.  Hillary was duly celebrated and honored for this achievement.  Later in 1953 he was knighted; in 1985 he was made New Zeeland’s high commissioner to India, Nepal and Bangladesh; and in 1995 he received the highest award in British society—the Order of the Garter (an exclusive membership of only twenty-four individuals).

But more important to Hillary than all of these honors were his efforts to give back to the people of Nepal something of what they had given him.  Through the Himilayan Trust, established in 1960, he built hospitals, airfields and schools all as a way to help the Napalese flourish.
One story captures the essence of Sir Edmund Hillary’s character and outlook.  On one of his many trips back to the Himalayas he was spotted by a group of tourist climbers.  They begged for a photo with this legend, and Hillary kindly obliged.  They handed him an ice pick so he would look the part and set up for the photograph.  Just then another climber passed the group and, not recognizing the man at the center, strode up to Hillary saying, “Excuse me, that’s not how you hold an ice pick.  Let me show you.”  Everyone stood around dumbfounded in silence as Hillary thanked the man, let him adjust the pick, and happily went on with the photograph.

This incident was not an isolated event but characteristic of Hillary’s entire approach to life.  Sir Edmund Hillary embodied well the kind of humility that is at the heart of Psalm 131.  Psalm 131 is the twelfth of the fifteen Psalms of Ascents.  The Psalms of Ascents were the traveling songs the Israelites sang as they made their own journey of ascent—not up Mount Everest but to Jerusalem to celebrate the holy festivals.  
They’re called Psalms of Ascents not only because Jerusalem was literally the highest place topographically in all of Israel, but it also provided a fitting metaphor for their spiritual journey of ascending to the presence of God in the temple.  We’ve been learning a handful of these psalms as we make our journey as disciples of Jesus—that “long obedience in the same direction.”

Psalm 131 is a short Psalm, but it is chock full of profound truth and insight.  In the words of the great preacher Charles Spurgeon, it is “one of the shortest psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn.”   Humility is not something that comes natural to any of us.  As that old country gospel song says it, “Lord, it’s hard to be humble!”  And yet humility is at the heart of faithful discipleship.

“O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high, I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.”  This is how the psalm opens.  The author of the psalm, believed by many to be David, was someone who likely had fallen into the trap of pride in the past and/or who struggled with the temptation of thinking too highly of himself even in the present.  It is a personal testimony of one who had learned what it means to humbly be satisfied in God alone.

C.S. Lewis regarded pride as “the greatest sin,” “the essential vice,”  “the utmost evil.”  “Pride leads to every other vice,” he writes in Mere Christianity.  “It is the complete anti-God state of mind.”  This may strike us as an overstatement, especially in a cut-throat culture where we not only get rewarded for being highly ambitious and proud but you get trampled on or left behind if you don’t.  The boxing legend Muhammad Ali was only reinforcing the values of our culture when he once quipped, “At home I’m a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know.  Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.”

Muhammad Ali, in contrast to Sir Edmund Hillary, was not someone who is remembered for his humility.  There’s a true story about a time when Muhammad Ali was on an airplane, at the peak of his career, and the pilots requested the passengers fasten their seat belts due to a stint of turbulence.  One of the flight attendents noticed that Ali was the only person on the plane who ignored the pilots’ request, so she said to him, “Excuse me, sir.  Would you please fasten your seatbelt?  The captain has advised this could be quite rough.”
Ali looked at her calmly and said, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.”

Without missing a beat, she snapped back, “Superman don’t need no plane!”

Muhammad Ali may be an extreme example of someone whose heart is proud and whose eyes are raised too high.  “I’m not like that,” we say.  “That’s just pure arrogance!”  In fact, one of the paradoxes is that while society values pride, we are also repelled by people who are arrogant.  We don’t like it when we see it in others, no matter how great they are.  But this is precisely why Lewis insists that pride is so deadly—because we don’t tend to see it in ourselves.  We can spot pride a mile away in others, but we are largely blind to it in our own hearts.  That’s because pride runs on self-deception. “The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides,” wrote John Calvin, “so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.” 

Here’s the thing about self-deception, and pride in particular: it leads to spectacularly bad judgments about ourselves—how smart we are, how good we are, how virtuous we are, how spiritual we are.  It distorts our vision.  And it also leads to spectacularly bad judgment about other people.  We inflate our own virtue and we exaggerate the flaws in others.  We see ourselves as better than we really are.  And we see others as worse than they really are.

Not only does pride lead to spectacularly bad judgments about ourselves and others, it also leads to poor judgment about God and what is happening in our lives.  The fact that it leads us to judge God at all just shows that pride is about us trying to take the place of God—to be the Judge.  This is the besetting sin of humanity, going all the way back to Adam and Eve—we want to be our own gods.  We want to be in charge of our own lives, and the lives of others.  “As long as you are proud you cannot know God.  A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you” (Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.111).

The psalmist wants to avoid all of this.  “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me.”  Translation: “I am not trying to be you, God.  I’m humbling myself, assuming my place as the creature and not the Creator.  You alone are God.”
But what does it mean to humble ourselves?  If pride is about thinking too highly of ourselves and looking down on others, does humility (which means “low”) call us to think lowly of ourselves?  No, not at all.  In fact, one of the biggest misunderstandings about humility is that it means thinking badly about yourself, putting yourself down, beating yourself up.  Nor is humility about being a doormat for others or denying your talents and gifts.
Humility is about thinking of yourself rightly—seeing yourself as God sees you.  Paul puts it this way in Romans 12:  “Don’t think too highly of yourself (or too lowly of yourself) but think of yourself with sober judgment.”  And how should we think of ourselves?  The next couple lines in Psalm 131 give us a wonderful picture of true humility.

In contrast to a proud and noisy soul that clamors for attention , the psalmist writes:“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”  I really like how The Message renders this verse: “I’ve kept my feet on the ground, I’ve cultivated a quite heart.  Like a baby content in its mother’s arms, my soul is baby content.”

Humility is about cultivating a quiet heart—a content heart—like a child content in its mothers arms.  Whereas pride is about wanting to be god, humility is about finding contentment in letting God be God and we, God’s children.  Where else have we heard this image of a child used to describe a genuine and humble faith?
In Matthew chapter 18, Jesus and his disciples are traveling together and his disciples ask him, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  Do you remember how Jesus responds to this question?  He takes a child in his arms and says to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you become like this child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

We find contentment when we humbly embrace who we are in God’s eyes—sinners who have been saved by grace, adopted as sons and daughters of God in Christ.  Psalm 131 speaks of a kind of dependence on God, a satisfaction in God, that keeps God at the center.  It doesn’t put ourselves at the center, insisting that God exists (and so does everybody else) to meet our needs and to make us happy.  No, like a weaned child, we humbly rest in God’s embrace and take God on his own terms. 

This description of a child who is “weaned” is important to understanding humility.  A weaned child is not a fussy infant who cries loudly for his mother’s milk, but a content child who sits quietly in his mother’s lap, happy in being with her.  Do you see what the psalmist is saying in terms of what it means to have a humble and mature faith?  We don’t desire God only for what we can get from God, how God can satisfy our desires.  To be a “weaned child of God” is to love and trust God simply for who God is.  Even when we don’t understand God’s ways or get God to do want we want, we confidently trust that God is with us and is working out his good purposes in our lives.  This is what spiritual maturity looks like.  Have you learned to love God for himself and not merely what you can get from him? 

Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “Christian faith is not a neurotic dependency but a childlike trust.  We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies.” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.154).  And this is what gives us hope—that God does hold our destinies in his good hands.  “O Israel,” says the Psalmist, “hope in the Lord, now and forevermore.”
All of this talk about humility may raise some questions then about ambition.  We may wonder, “Well, is ambition a bad thing?”  How does a quiet heart not slip into a lazy heart?  How does a content soul not atrophy into a complacent soul?

God is not opposed to ambition, so long as it is ambition that embraces humility and does not lead us to try to take the place of God.  Good ambition is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  It is the creative energy that moves us to love God and love others by taking responsibility, being innovative, creating art, solving problems, striving for excellence, tackling injustice, caring for the weak and the poor and vulnerable, reaching the world with the gospel, seeking first the kingdom of God.  St. Paul himself talked about “pressing on for the prize” and working hard with all the energy that the Holy Spirit inspires within him.  God wants us to be content, most definitely.  But never complacent.  And there is a huge difference between the two.

In fact, embracing humility will not lead us to complacency or laziness or apathy but will always compel us to take up the cross and follow Jesus more passionately.  It will always lead us to a more courageous obedience, a deeper conviction, a stronger resilience.  Some of the greatest men and women in history have also been the most humble.  Just think again of Sir Edmund Hillary.

According to the story, when Sir Edmund Hillary reached the Summit of Mount Everest, he marked his achievement by leaving a small crucifix in the snow.  It’s puzzling as to why Hillary did this, being that he wasn’t an overtly religious man.  Perhaps it was a token of his own humility, trying to honor a “higher power” at his moment of triumph.  Regardless of Hillary’s intent, it is a most fitting gesture.  It is the cross where Jesus shows us the ultimate example of humility, and in his resurrection that we see God’s greatest triumph for the sake of the world.  

In the Cross, Jesus has lowered himself so that we might ascend to God—doing for us what we could never accomplish on our own.  And in the Cross, Jesus gives us an example of what it means to be faithful disciples who ascend to greatness by humbly becoming a servant to all.  And so St. Paul writes (Phil.2:3-11):

Do nothing from selfish ambition or vain conceit,
but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.   
Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who,
though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore, God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

And all God’s people said:  Amen!