“Have you read [insert book that someone loves here]?”
I get that question often on Sundays.
Sometimes it’s after one of my sermons touches on a similar theme unbeknownst to me. On balance, that’s really encouraging when it happens, because it seems to assume that I said something helpful, something that resonated with someone, something that someone else wrote a book about, which is probably Biblical, since a fellow Christian is telling me about it. The downside is that I’m a relatively slow reader[1], and I sometimes struggle to know how to respond encouragingly and gratefully to those book mentions without obligating myself to read them.[2] It’s not that I don’t want to read more. I just struggle to find adequate time to balance reading deeply and reading widely.
That said, when my wife suggests a particular book, well, I pay more attention.[3]
Lately, I’ve been preaching Hebrews, particularly chapters 3-4, talking a lot about entering God’s rest. (Today, if you hear his voice, don’t harden your heart!) After the last few sermons, my wife has mentioned Hannah Anderson’s recent book, Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul. I hadn’t heard of the author before my wife started sending me screengrabs of really good excerpts.[4]
So this week, I read it,[5] and I was delighted by the experience. Anderson is a gifted writer, a pastor’s wife who lives in a rural area and draws upon her agricultural experiences by opening each chapter with an extended metaphor about how God grows humility in us, slowly and sometimes painfully. She opens with a story of her own restlessness and sleeplessness (even after her husband landed his dream job) and traces the root of it down to lack of humility and a prescient comment from her husband, who says he can write a book on humility in three words: “You’re. Not. God.” Her stated goal is to “explore the theological truths of incarnation, creaturehood, physical embodiment, and human limitations,”[6] and I think she succeeds. Humans have limits; humans are not God. Accepting this is the key to humility and the key to finding rest in this life, resting in God’s goodness and the goodness of His creation, which includes us.
I can’t sum up 200 pages better than that, but I’ll share a few highlights.
- Anderson is obviously well-read. I noticed John Calvin and Jane Austen, Wendell Berry and Brene Brown, and more in the footnotes.
- Anderson is a gifted storyteller. My favorite agricultural fable was about phylloxera, the rare pest that nearly wiped out the French wine industry, a tale I’ve heard before because of a relative who’s a wine nerd. Her point was that the French were too prideful, almost until it was too late, to admit that they had a problem and that American rootstocks could help. Their identity was tied to their vines, their work, their passion, their beloved terroir.
- “Jesus isn’t calling us to shoulder an extra burden; He is calling us to exchange a heavy burden for a light one.” (Page 35, on Matthew 11:28-30 where Jesus says, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”)
- In line with the quote above, she covers the way our unnecessary, self-imposed burdens hinder us at work, at church, and at home.
- On humble-bragging: “If a person must announce his humility because we wouldn’t see it otherwise, he is not a truly humble person.” (51-52)
- “Humility, then, is not simply a disposition or set of phrases. Humility is accurately understanding ourselves and our place in the world.” (56)
o Humility is “a correct sense of self.” (64)
o “Humility begins by remembering where we come from.” (66)
o “Humility is understanding who God is and who we are.” (157)
- “Our need to maintain our overinflated sense of self is also why theologians mark pride as the root of every other sin; not only does pride go before the fall, it goes before every fall.” (70)
- “When we are consumed with God’s glory, we forget to worry about our own.” (76)
- The chapter on “Local Honey” is both amusing, interesting, and insightful. Can laws (about honey sales or anything) produce behavior? Are there forms of godliness that are devoid of power, and what does this say about humility? She powerfully quotes Andrew Murray, “The chief mark of counterfeit holiness is its lack of humility. … The great test of whether the holiness we profess to seek or to attain is truth and life will be whether it produces an increasing humility in us.” (94, emphasis added in Anderson’s book)
- She also covers how to evaluate the opinions others have of us, how we respond to our emotions, and the topic of epistemological humility. “Humility teaches us to be less concerned with knowing the answers and more concerned with learning the answers.” (129, emphasis original)
- The discussion of her husband’s unemployment, his extended job search, and her relatively useless (at the time) humanities degree grabbed me because of her candid vulnerability. “But in His wisdom, He’s crafted the world in such a way that you can’t do this apart from Him. You will regularly have to take risks, you will regularly feel pressed past your abilities, you will regularly feel the husk of your life is being broken open and your seeds scattered to the wind. But this is exactly how He means to teach you humility.” (152)
- “This is how humility overcomes the world: Humility trusts God.” (185)
- On the final page, she closes with a familiar passage from Hebrews and an encouraging promise.
o “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from His works as God did from his.” (Hebrews 4:9-10)
o “You can be confident that His promise is true: When you come to Him, you will find rest for your soul.” (205)
As I said, this was a delightful read that fulfilled the promise in the subtitle: It nourished my soul. I hope it will do the same for you. I can’t promise that this book made me more humble. (And if I did that, I’d be guilty of humble-bragging; see the quote on pages 51-52 above.) But I think it might’ve helped me find a bit more rest, and for that I’m grateful, both to the author and to the reader who recommended it to me.
-Pastor Matt, 8-8-25
[1] And I take great comfort in knowing that John Piper is also a self-professed slow reader.
[2] That doesn’t mean you should stop making conversation with me after a sermon. The problem is me and my people-pleasing, not you!
[3] Someone told me recently that I don’t share a lot of stories or sermon illustrations about my family. You’re not wrong. It’s intentional, for multiple reasons. 1) My preaching professor encouraged us not to do it often. 2) My wife knows what it’s like to be mentioned often because her dad was a pastor. 3) My kids – opposite challenge. They would like the attention way too much.
[4] My wife does this often. She shares the really good stuff, and we sometimes discuss it. It’s like a Reader’s Digest experience for me. She consumes books voraciously, reading most of them for free through the Libby app, our local library, and her Kindle Paperwhite. She supplements with the Kindle app on her phone.
[5] Actually, I skimmed it. Sometimes, I get so bogged down trying to read that I just start skimming a few books so that I don’t get discouraged by my slow progress or the number of half-finished books laying around. With this book, I read the first sentence of every paragraph and slowed down to read the pages that really grabbed me.
[6] Page 11; on the next page, she restates it helpfully like this: “The goal of Humble Roots is to understand how pride manifests itself in anxiety and restlessness; and how humility frees us from the cycle of stress, performance, and competition.”