Humility: Simply put, all we have comes from God; it is all a gift. So strictly speaking, we deserve nothing (except recompense for our sins). And yet we think we deserve everything. Even our basic human rights stem from our existence, which is a gift of God and not a personal achievement.
Our duty is not to rule the universe, but to serve God, to get to know him and discover his plan for us. If we do that, we will experience the peace and meaning we long for – just as flowers achieve their beauty only when they grow as God designed them to.
All good things come from God, so ultimately all praise should go to him as well. Even our talents and our opportunities are gifts of God. When we start to take more credit than is our due, we are forgetting who really is Lord. That was Satan’s mistake; let’s not repeat it.
The servant works hard, obeys, submits, and Jesus says he should look for no recompense; he’s just doing his duty. Imagine how unstable our lives would be if the intensity of God’s love for us depended on the efficiency of our service in his Kingdom. If we could increase or decrease God’s love for us just by our performance rating, we would be just as anxious, ambitious, and self-centered working for Christ as we tend to be working for money and promotions.
In the Lord’s Kingdom, God’s love for each of us is already so total, so personal, so unconditional, so untiring, that nothing we do can increase or decrease it.
And so the servant in God’s Kingdom does his work energetically, joyfully, and peacefully as a response to that gratuitous love of God. God’s love doesn’t depend on our achievements; our achievements flow from knowing how much God loves us and from wanting to thank him. This is true humility; this is what the Lord wants us to learn.
Faith unleashes God’s power in our lives. When we let ourselves be won over by God, he can do wonders with us; when we doubt him, trusting ourselves and our ideas more than his infinite wisdom and love (e.g. filtering out Church teaching that we find uncomfortable), we cut ourselves off from his grace. He won’t force his way in; he respects us too much for that. But if we invite him in, and give him full control over our lives, amazing things begin to happen.
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