by Elder Mike Chon

There are many ways to decrease pride and cultivate humility in our lives. I want to highlight a few that may help in cultivating humility. Of course this is a lifelong pursuit since pride is something that we will have to continue to battle until God calls us home.

1) Love one another (Matt. 22:39; Phil. 2:3-4)

Loving someone else first means that you love yourself at least second. Find ways to encourage others by using your words, writing a letter, praying for them, and/or meeting their needs. If you know of a particular need someone has, use your time and resources to meet those needs. When we begin looking for others to love and take care of, the less time and energy we will use to think about our own wants and desires that we think we deserve. We will usually find ourselves in situations that are not convenient to our schedules or lives when we put others before ourselves, love is not about convenience. What better way to cultivate humility than to trust and love our Sovereign God and at the same time loving others.

2) Confess sins to each other (James 5:16)

Our sins bring us back to the cross of Jesus Christ. It is a great reminder of our frailty and propensity to fail. To be able to confess those failures to each other requires us to humble ourselves and be willing to admit to someone else our weaknesses. One of the signs of a prideful heart is the unwillingness to admit to any wrongdoing. Confessing our sins to each other will help our hearts from becoming prideful as well not allowing us to become familiar with sin.

3) Evangelize

Evangelism is helpful in cultivating humility by keeping us totally and completely dependent upon our Lord. When we share the gospel with someone we realize that it is the work of God that helps the person understand and accept what they hear. We are also dependent upon our Lord in what we say and helping us answer questions that those we are evangelizing to may have. If you want to cultivate humility by being completely dependent on our Lord, go evangelize.

4) Follow Christ, not others (Luke 9:23)

Following Christ means death to ourselves. We are called to deny ourselves and take up the cross and follow Him. When we start to follow man or someone in particular, we lower that calling to a person. We begin to compare ourselves to others and our lives begin to look better than they really are. Following Christ humbles us because it causes us to deny our desires, our dreams, our goals and replaces them with Christ’s.

The pursuit of humility is not something that comes easily, but hopefully as believers we see the reason why it is so important that we never grow weary in pursuing humility in our lives. May we continue to decrease so that Christ would increase in our lives.