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“Humility is not about timidity, and it’s not about self-denigration.”

A thought by Brant Hansen (2015-04-14) from his book, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better (p. 190). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title of the book to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

There are some character qualities that we want and others we don’t.  The problem with humility is we probably don’t understand what it really is. 

Brant says, “When we choose, ahead of time— before conversations, before meetings, before our day begins— to be unoffendable, we’re simply choosing humility.”

He goes on, “You’ll become difficult to offend simply because there’s so much less of you to defend. When you are headed into a stressful social situation, with difficult, offensive people, and you decide in advance, ‘I’m not going to let these people offend me; I’m forgiving them in advance,’ you are dying to yourself. You are sacrificing yourself on their behalf. You are making yourself less. You’re willingly giving up your own interests and desires, because of your conviction about who Jesus is.”

He then says, “And Jesus tells us there’s a reward for this: ‘Those who want to save their lives will give up true life, and those who give up their lives for me will have true life (Matt. 16: 25 NCV).”


So I think that is a great quality to have.  Don’t you?

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