Humiliation or Humility?

In My Utmost today it talked about humiliation. I have often wondered what humiliation really is and how to properly relate to it. I know that it is not the same thing as humility, but it can be somewhat related.

It seems that humiliation may be differentiated from humility by the key ingredient of my inner perception of value. Humility is an attitude that I have to choose myself – it cannot be imposed on me. Humiliation is an atmosphere, an identity that is forced on me from the outside, and is an insistence that I am not valuable. Humiliation uses the weapon of shame to steal all of my sense of value or worth. On the other hand, humility actually requires a sense of settled value at my deepest core to empower me to live in perfect freedom.

So it strongly appears that these two attributes or perceptions may actually be opposites. Humiliation is really the counterfeit of humility. Humility contains a great deal of peace and can dissolve the walls that keep my heart from connecting with others. But I can only be “successfully humble” after I receive a sense of settled assurance that I am intrinsically valuable simply because God created me valuable and His heart jealously guards my heart. As I learn to live and relate from a position of untouchable, unaffectable value, then I can feel more free to be humble.

Many have taught that pride is the opposite of humility. But pride is simply the flesh's idea of how to induce a sense of value to fill my natural emptiness inside. But if I receive with my heart, not just my head, the reality of my value in God's opinion about me, then I no longer feel empty inside. That emptiness is the very condition that creates my greatest liability and vulnerability to fall victim to all sorts of schemes against me. Not only am I susceptible to the delusions and suggestions of pride but I am ripe for the devastation of humiliation.

Humiliation exploits my lack of feeling valuable and tries to magnify it exponentially. It sends strong messages of shame and attempts to strip away any feelings of value that I may be trying to hang onto. It insists that any delusions that I may have about being valuable to anyone else, especially God, are just that – delusions. It is a method straight from the heart of hell and originates from the great liar himself. My only defense is not to argue with the lies but to fill my heart with the real truth from the heart of God.

If my sense of value has been assembled through the use of pride using any other sources of value other than God's thoughts about me, then my identity and value are vulnerable targets for the attacks of humiliation. Humiliation knows how to infiltrate the weak points inherent in pride-assembled self-worth and can quickly strip me of all dignity and leave me defenseless. If my sense of value comes from my performance and/or dependence on what others around me think about me, I am ripe for a successful attack by humiliation. I will be devastated and will often blame God for not coming to my defense. But God cannot defend the house built on the sands of the shifting opinions of our friends or a self-assembled identity based on my own goodness.

Filling my heart with a sense of value and what God feels about me is very different than filling my head with facts and assertions about God. Those are important and need to fill my mental library to overflowing, but they cannot substitute for a vital heart connection with Jesus Christ. My only hope for successfully living in joyful humility and becoming immune to humiliation is to live my life with an open com port connected to the Spirit of God. As my heart opens more and more to receive the inflowing assurances of value from God, as I feel more and more cherished and come to deeply believe in the unfailing passion of God for my soul, I will begin to fill up the emptiness inside that allows the enemy to exploit and manipulate me. I will become immune to his lies and the oil of grace will deflect all of the dirty water that he tries to dump on me.