What looks good on you? Do you like the color red, green or purple? Or any one of the wonderful colors we enjoy in clothing? When people say, “That color looks awesome on you!,” do you have a tendency to wear more of it?
A blog post by my friend, Tabbitha Easley, inspired me to think about the admonition in Colossians 3:12 to clothe yourself with humility.
What if we started saying to each other, “Humility looks good on you!” When we see someone walking in humility or behaving in humble ways, what if we admired it?
The term humility to some people has gotten a negative reputation. Humility does not mean humiliating or allowing yourself to be put down. Humility does not mean being weak. Humility does not mean inferior or false modesty.
Humility means to have a right estimate of your strengths and shortcomings. Humility means you are willing to admit you may not be right about an issue.
Humility means you’re willing to listen and to consider another person’s perspective.
Humility is a willingness to admit to mistakes and take responsibility for them.
Humility shows a willingness to realize the world doesn’t revolve around you and motivates you to be considerate of others.
Humility is gentle, kind, compassionate and patient and doesn’t lord it over others or try to force them to do your will.
Humility chooses to influence, suggest and invite and even at times, woo someone to your point of view.
Humility is powerful and winsome.
I hope you now see humility as the beautiful quality that it is.
We could probably come up with many other qualities and examples of humility and all it’s expressions of kindness, gentleness and compassion. Perhaps that would be a good thing for us to do, like creating different outfits with the color red, blue or purple.
There are probably as many ways to express humility as there are people. Like the same color or clothes look different on each person, humility is going to be expressed and look different on each person.
Again, please beware of the trap of false humility. Putting yourself down, denying your gifts, abilities and strengths is false modesty. This may look like humility but it’s not true humility.
True humility walks with dignity and strength and it’s gorgeous. Humility is true beauty, inner beauty.
What if we began to affirm true humility in others with all it’s attractive expressions? We get more of what we give attention to. Maybe intentional affirmation would cause us to seek to wear humility, gentleness, kindness, compassion and patience more.
Then we would have real beauty, inner beauty which doesn’t depend on the clothes we wear.
“…clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Colossians 3:12