Humility is a greatly misunderstood grace or virtue. Too many Christians think of it as trying to think what you don’t think, see what you don’t see, and know what you don’t actually know. This approach to humility is closer to the eastern and mystical way of emptying yourself than it is to the biblical way of seeking to think that which Christ teaches you to think.
In short, humility is changing your mind not emptying your mind.
C.S. Lewis somewhere said that humility is not thinking less of yourself, but rather thinking of yourself less. It is a matter of what you are thinking about, not whether you are thinking.
A humble man is thinking, meditating, ruminating, all the time. The use of that word ruminating is suggestive. A ruminating animal is one that chews the cud—and there has to be something substantive there to chew.
Christian meditation is content rich. The “grass” we chew is supposed to be everlasting grass, and we meditate on it with eternity in view. This is why we meditate on the Scriptures—which are forever, and on how we may bless our brother or sister, who will live forever. We do not meditate on anything that is transient or fog-like.
When you think about yourself and your own pleasures, trying to edify yourself that way, there is an essential contradiction involved. You are trying to see your own eyeball with your own eyeball. But you were made to look into your neighbor’s eyes, not your own. And the only way it is safe to look even indirectly into your own eyes is when you are using a mirror—and it has to be the mirror of the Word.
If you use the mirrors of the flattering world, you will be combing your hair in accordance with the fun house mirrors at the carnival.
” I never go around mirrors,
It just tears me up to see a grown man cry.” (Willie Nelson ?)
At my age both kinds of mirrors can be pretty harsh. But there is more hope in the mirror of the Word than the glass kind.