Not Yours To Be Modest About

Six of them up the stone stairs on a Thursday evening, and the chamber smells of old rope and radiator dust and somebody's tea, and Ken has brought a tin of shortbread because his daughter has had a baby.

They go up in rounds first, which is the polite way to start, everybody looking at everybody else's hands. Then Ken calls a touch and it all begins to move, and for about ninety seconds it is genuinely lovely, six people making one thing out of six separate pulls.

And then the fifth comes in early. Not badly. A hair early, the way it has been coming in early every Thursday since the winter before last, and it is not the ringer's fault at all, because the rope has stretched and the sally sits a fraction lower than it did, and nobody has said so.

You know. You have known for the better part of two years. You could stand at the bottom of the stairs and tell anyone what is wrong and how long it would take to fix, and the fixing is not difficult, and you have never once opened your mouth about it, and here is the reason: saying it would mean you thought you could hear something the other five could not. Which you can. Which is exactly the problem.

So instead you have a sentence ready, and you have used it for years, in this tower and everywhere else. I only do the tenor. I would not want to say. I am probably wrong. And you have called that sentence humility, and it has been so useful, and it has cost you almost nothing except every true thing you have not said inside it.

Afterwards, coats on, Ken says how did that feel, and you say, lovely, and you go down the stairs.

The sentence God would not let a man finish

There is a young man in Scripture who had a sentence exactly like yours, and God's response to it is one of the strangest and kindest things in the whole book.

His name is Jeremiah. God tells him he was known before he was formed and set apart before he was born, and appointed as a prophet to the nations. And Jeremiah says what any decent person would say.

Ah, Lord God. Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.

Notice first that it is true. He was young. He almost certainly was not much of a speaker at that stage, because nobody is at that stage. This is not false modesty and it is not a fishing expedition for reassurance. It is an accurate report on himself, offered reverently, in the presence of God, which is precisely the shape of the sentence you use in the tower.

And God does not argue with the fact. He does something much more interesting. He forbids the sentence.

Do not say, "I am only a youth"; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak.Jeremiah 1:7

You are not permitted to keep using a true fact about yourself as a reason for silence, and that boundary is God's own, drawn in His word for the comfort of the person standing behind it. I am not tightening a screw on you; the sentence is His, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient refusal and lays it gently over a Thursday evening two and a half thousand years later.

Read the reason He gives, because it is the whole answer. Not: you are better than you think. Not: you will grow into it. The reason is to all to whom I send you, you shall go. The qualification is the sending. It was never the speaker.

What a courier is not being modest about

Then comes the part that unlocks this for you, and it is a physical detail the text does not have to include and does anyway.

God reached out and touched his mouth, and said: I have put My words in your mouth.

Sit with the ownership of that. The words are not Jeremiah's. He did not draft them, he cannot amend them, and he certainly cannot claim credit for them, and that is the fact that makes the whole thing safe.

Because pride, actually defined, is a person's own word carried as though it had weight that it does not have. It is announcing your private policy in the accent of a king. And what is being described here is the exact opposite motion: a word that came from somewhere else, put into a mouth, and carried to the people it was for. A herald does not compose the proclamation. He carries it into the street and says it as given, and nobody in the history of the world has ever accused a courier of arrogance for knocking on a door.

You have been handed something that is not your property, and you cannot be modest about a parcel that has somebody else's name on it. That is straight out of what is written rather than out of my sympathy for your situation, and His Spirit is the one who put the hearing in you in the first place; it did not arrive by your own cleverness and it is not yours to be shy about.

So look again at what has actually been happening in that tower. It is not that you have been humble. It is that a true thing has been sitting in your hands for two years and never got delivered, and the reason it never got delivered is that you had decided the delivery would say something flattering about the courier.

Two things have been wearing the same word

Here is the distinction, and once it is clear it tends not to go away again.

Humility is about your size in front of God. It means knowing exactly what a person is and exactly whose they are, and it sits perfectly well with standing at full height. Hiding is about your safety in front of people. It looks identical from outside, it uses the same vocabulary, and it feels far more virtuous, because it costs something and anything that costs is easily mistaken for obedience.

The plain test is not how small you feel. It is whether you are able to speak when there is a true thing to say. Humility can. Hiding cannot, and calls its inability a virtue.

You have never once been asked by God for your silence, and nothing written anywhere in Scripture asks a person to hold a true thing back in order to stay lowly. His word puts words into mouths and sends people out with them, and His Spirit is called the Spirit of truth, which is not the character of anybody who wants a true thing kept in a tower.

And now the guard on all of this, because it matters more than the point does. None of that is a criticism of you and none of it is a deadline. If you go up those stairs next Thursday and say nothing again, you have not failed anything, and this article does not become an accusation on the way home. What has been lifted here is a wrong reason, not a new obligation.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep quiet is that somebody near you punishes you for speaking, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Tell one person who can act, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.

And say the plain thing with me before we go further: humility is not thinking less of yourself, and it never was. A silence that costs somebody else the thing you were given to hand them is not the low posture God asked for. It is a good instruction aimed at the wrong number.