Lesson 6 of 11 · Chapter: Humility

Humble Courage

Read time: about 7 minutes · Skill: leading with humble courage

Lesson 5 reframed the score. This lesson reframes the throne. The world's leader ascends a mountaintop and plays people like chess pieces. The King of the universe rides a donkey. And Chapell's first move is to tell us: that is not weakness. It is the strongest thing a person can choose.

The story that frames the chapter

Jim Collins studied 1,435 companies for the business classic Good to Great. Only eleven achieved true greatness, defined as superior returns over fifteen years following a major transition. What set them apart was the person at the top. Collins called them "Level 5 leaders," marked by a paradoxical blend of personal humility and a fierce resolve to put the company's good above their own. They shunned adulation, channeled ambition into the organization, and set up successors to outdo them.

As a Christian, you want to cheer. See, the Bible was right, even secular research proves nice guys do not finish last. But Chapell taps the brakes. Two problems. First, Collins never explains how you get humility. Second, he never guarantees the results. A Level 5 leader can still be sunk by a bust economy or an obsolete product or genuinely evil people. The punchline lands: humility is not a business plan. It is a quality of character built in the heart, for a kind of success no profit-and-loss statement can measure. To learn it, we need Jesus.

A king who rides a donkey

Matthew 21 hands us a picture that contradicts every movie conqueror. You know the scene: the king rides home on his battle steed, trumpets blare, troops raise swords, servants roll out a red carpet of rare cloth and gold thread, and he ascends his throne. Now look at King Jesus:

A lowly carpenter on a donkey, not a war horse. The crowds are common people, not ranks of royalty. They lay down palm branches because no one can afford rare cloth, and their own cloaks because there is no carpet. He will ascend to a cross before he ever ascends to a throne. Zechariah gave this prophecy five hundred years earlier, under King Darius, the man who threw Daniel to the lions. This king is not like Darius. He saves his people from the real lion, Satan himself.

The crowds know something is happening. They shout "Hosanna to the Son of David!" Hosanna stitches two Hebrew words, hoshia na, "save us," sharing the very root of Jesus' own name, Yeshua. They lay robes before him the way Israel once hailed King Jehu. They wave branches the way their ancestors celebrated liberation from the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes. Prophet, priest, king, all riding toward them on a borrowed donkey. Hosanna in the highest!

What humility actually is

Now comes the definition Chapell wants us to carry into Monday:

Humility says, "For the sake of a greater purpose, I choose to forgo my personal interests."

Read that slowly. Humility is a choice, never a circumstance forced on you. It is for the sake of a greater purpose, not low self-esteem. And it costs something real, a bonus you deserved, a promotion that would have moved your family, an advantage you could have pressed. We see Jesus make this choice again and again in this chapter, despite who he is and despite the claims being made about him.

Never confuse it with timidity

Here is where the chapter bites. This humility has teeth. The same Jesus on the donkey walks into the temple and flips the money-changers' tables. At Passover the place ran on profit: as many as 250,000 lambs sold, two and a half million pilgrims changing foreign currency, the retail profits of Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July packed into a week. Jesus upends all of it. He is challenging both unfair profit and the false belief that you can buy God's pardon. The whole city was "stirred up" (Matt. 21:10).

And he did it with his eyes open. Matthew 20:17-19 tells us he had already told his disciples what was coming: condemnation, mocking, flogging, the cross. He knew what was coming. Yet he kept coming. Paul puts the arc in one sentence:

So banish the picture of humility as a doormat. Honoring God with genuine humility requires genuine courage. At work it looks like standing for what is right when you know it will cost you. As another writer Chapell quotes puts it, it requires that we "be willing to show up for the suffering."

Humility with a fierce resolve

Luke says of Jesus, "When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). He would not be diverted. Collins calls a single unrelenting purpose a "Hedgehog Concept." Following Jesus, a single purpose can lead not only to worldly success but to suffering that succeeds in God's purposes.

Chapell watched Christian business owners face exactly this in the 2008 recession. Two of them could have sold their companies to larger firms scooping up small players at bargain prices, and walked away wealthy. They refused. They knew the consolidation would cost many of their employees their jobs. They chose to forgo personal wealth so their people could keep working. That is humble determination: self-sacrifice clothed in resolve.

Then there is Matthew Secich, one of the nation's super chefs in Washington, DC. The relentless chase for a four-star rating had turned him into a tyrant. One night, punishing a line chef who botched an order, he held the man's hand over an open flame. That night broke him. He went home, got down on his knees, and "asked forgiveness from the God who had humbled himself on the cross." He walked away from the fame, set up a deli in rural Maine, and his story went around the world. He had decided to show up for the suffering, to sacrifice glory for the testimony of Jesus and the people he loves.

Love is the engine

Notice the word Isaiah adds that we usually miss: "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (Isa. 56:7). Not just Israel. All nations. Jesus' heart is stirred because he is driven by his Father's compassion, a compassion wide enough to embrace the world. That compassion carried him through mockery, scourging, and the agony of the cross, so we could know God's forgiveness.

Now he calls us to follow. And Chapell makes a searching claim: the Great Commission will never be fulfilled by those straining for personal recognition. The gospel can only be honestly proclaimed by those who humble themselves, expressing the courage, determination, and compassion of a Savior who put others' needs above his own, who died to self so others might live. Love is the only engine that can sustain humility. Without it, you are just enduring, and endurance runs out.

Make it real this week

Humble courage is a choice you pre-decide before the moment demands it. These answers save in this browser, so you can revisit them when the cost is actually in front of you.

Go deeper

Where this is going

Humility asks how you lead. Next we ask what your work is actually for. Chapter 7 turns to Glory, and it opens in the Chicago sewer department, where eight hundred workers rallied under a banner that read "Bringing Sewers Above Ground." You were made, Chapell will say, to carry God's glory into the grimiest corners of your job, and all honest work, done in faith, is priestly worship. The Reformers insisted even a father washing diapers gives God glory. Your desk is holier ground than you think.