Humility - An Essential Virtue

Elder Steven E. Snow's Conference talk, "Be Thou Humble" talked about both the value of hymns and the importance of humility. I love hymns, but right now, I think I'd rather blog about humility, partly because it's the opposite of pride.

President Ezra Taft Benson famously described pride as "the universal sin, the great vice." President Uchtdorf went on to say that "every other sin is, in essence, a manifestation of pride." With pride being such an important sin, its opposite, humility, must be an important virtue, and it is.

In his Conference talk, Elder Snow taught us that "Humility is essential to gain the blessings of the gospel. Humility enables us to have broken hearts when we sin or make mistakes and makes it possible for us to repent."

These are rather stunning statements. According to Elder Snow, repentance would be impossible without humility. Without humility, we won't be able to change for the better because we won't be able to admit the need to change. If we are not sufficiently humble, we won't be able to make any progress at all.

This would, of course, defeat at least one of the fundamental purposes of our existence: becoming like God. It is humility that lets us accept that His ways are better than our ways. Unless we are humble enough to accept His teachings and counsel, we will forever remain about as ignorant as foolish as we are now. Ironically, unless a person is humble, they will never become great.

We would do well to be humble and teachable so we could learn what we need to learn and do to become better. The proud may boast of having great traits, but the best traits take humility to acquire. We need humility in order to become Christlike, and we need to become Christlike if we ever hope to become perfect. When we are perfect, maybe then we will have some license to take pride in our accomplishments, but until then, we would do well to be humble enough to learn how we can improve.