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Humility—When the Thing That Hurts You May Actually Help You

When times get hard and things feel like they’re falling apart, we instinctively ask why. You want to know why God is allowing you to hurt, why God doesn’t answer your prayers. Instead of asking why, consider asking what. What does God want to teach me? What does God want to change in me? What is God’s ultimate purpose in this pain?

Brokenness is something we all share, whether we want to or not. We can leverage our brokenness as a way of leaning into God, but we have to choose whether or not we will allow God to actually humble us. We don’t grow in humility without first surrendering. Jesus’s admonishment to the crowd in Mark 8 was a radical call for them to abandon their own selves as gods and to begin following the one true God who had the audacity and the authority to request their very lives as His disciples.

God takes the moments in our lives of less than and failure and embarrassment to teach us dependence, to give us a sense of scale and perspective. God never uses our brokenness to shame us. We are all fragile, vulnerable creatures whose bodies are bruised and damaged at any given time. But in moments of serving or being served, we are reminded that we are not enough—and we are humbled. 

Let’s return to the apostle Paul’s writing in Second Corinthians only this time our passage is in chapter 12, verses 8-9, because here we find a model of humility: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me, but He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

If we learn anything at all from Paul’s personal letter to his friends, we can begin injecting some hope into our hard times. We can begin seeing God’s strength at work when we are tapped out and empty of our own strength. When we believe hard times can help us, we can endure almost anything. The greater purpose in our weakness is to experience an intimacy in our relationship with God we could never know any other way. We are stronger because of His strength, and His strength is on display in our weakness.

Have you ever thought that humility leads to strength? Weakness is not your goal; but weakness is God’s way of taking us to a place of strength.