1 Micah 6:8 and What God Actually Wants
Micah 6:8 is one of the most famous summary verses in all of Scripture: "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Three requirements — but Pastor Kim Kesecker opens with an important reframe: God doesn't just want something FROM us. He wants something FOR us. Humility is not primarily about meeting a divine standard; it is about entering a mode of life that is liberating, joyful, and deeply sane.
Key Points
- Micah 6:8 — three divine requirements: act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God; these are not burdens but the description of a life that works.
- God doesn't simply want something from us — He wants something for us; the requirements are invitations into flourishing, not demands for performance.
- Humility is not primarily a religious duty but a description of what a truly human life looks like when lived in right relationship to God.
- Reading "require" as design specification rather than obligation changes everything — it frames walking humbly as liberation rather than restriction.
2 Two Hindrances to Humility
Before defining what humility is, Pastor Kim identifies two things that prevent us from even recognizing our need for it:
1. Faulty Comparisons
We compare ourselves to the wrong standard. If I compare myself to someone obviously arrogant or obviously cruel, I can always look humble by contrast. But the standard is not other humans — the standard is God Himself. Isaiah 6:1-8: when Isaiah saw the Lord, he didn't compare himself favorably to anyone. He said "I am ruined, for I am a man of unclean lips." The comparison to the right standard always produces appropriate humility.
2. False Assumptions
Many people assume that because they don't consider themselves obviously prideful — they don't boast loudly, they don't walk around with a sense of superiority — they are therefore humble. But the absence of obvious pride is not the presence of humility. Humility is an active orientation, not the absence of arrogance.
3 Seven Categories Revealing a Lack of Humility
Pastor Kim offers seven categories that reveal where humility is absent in a person's life:
- The need to exalt self — finding ways to draw attention to one's own accomplishments, status, or importance.
- The need to control — insisting that things go the way I want; difficulty trusting others with outcomes.
- Unwillingness to learn — believing I already know; difficulty receiving instruction, correction, or new perspectives.
- The tendency to look down on others — subtle superiority; judging, dismissing, or devaluing people who are different or lower-status.
- Loving self more than others — Philippians 2:3-4: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."
- Managing image — the preoccupation with how one appears; the gap between the public self and the private self; the energy spent on reputation management.
- Poverty mentality — the inability to celebrate others' success; the sense that someone else's flourishing takes away from my own.
4 The Root Problem — Genesis 3 and the Dethroning of God
The theological root of pride goes all the way back to Genesis 3. Before the fall, the design was: God at the center, humans in relationship to Him, creation in right order. But the serpent's temptation was a challenge to the arrangement: "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." The decision to eat was not just disobedience — it was a coup. Self took the throne.
The immediate consequences: broken trust led to shame, shame led to fear, and fear installed self-protection, self-promotion, and self-satisfaction as the operating system of every human being. These three "selfs" now run as default programs in every human being:
- Self-protection — avoiding vulnerability, pain, and exposure at all costs.
- Self-promotion — securing status, recognition, and advantage.
- Self-satisfaction — prioritizing my own comfort and desires.
5 A New Way of Thinking — About God, Others, and Self
Humility requires a radical reorientation in three directions:
1. A New Way of Thinking About God
Psalm 100: "Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his." Romans 11:33-36: "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!" When I genuinely grasp who God is, the question of who gets to be at the center of the universe is settled.
2. A New Way of Thinking About Others
The compare-and-compete cycle is the natural default. I see someone with something I want and I either feel inferior (comparison) or superior (judgment). The humble person breaks the cycle by genuinely desiring others' flourishing and celebrating it when it comes.
3. A New Way of Thinking About Self
C.S. Lewis's famous quote: "Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less." Kim Kesecker adds her own nuance: "It's thinking of yourself differently — accurately. Not inflated, not deflated, but honestly calibrated to what you actually are in God's sight." Romans 12:3: "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment."
6 The Gifts of Walking Humbly
Walking humbly is not self-diminishment — it is self-liberation. What does it actually give you?
Freedom
Freedom from the exhausting work of managing your image, protecting your status, and defending your ego. The humble person has nothing to prove and no one to impress.
Joy
Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight." The person who has surrendered the need to be right about everything is free to be surprised by God.
Peace
Matthew 11:28-30: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." The yoke of self is heavy; the yoke of humility is light.
The faucet illustration: a faucet is most useful when it is connected to the water supply and its purpose is to let water flow through it — not to generate the water itself. Humility is understanding that we are faucets, not reservoirs. Our calling is to let what God has given us flow through us to others. That is not a diminished life — it is the most useful and most alive kind of life.