In answer to your question

First, Kerri, thank you for correspondence and for allowing me to print my response here.

In your contact message you asked, “How do I become a humble person when it is in my nature to practice one-upmanship?”

I would like to start this response with a short disclaimer. I want to be able to answer your question and to be as helpful as possible. Yet any answer I could give you, on my own and with little background information, really wouldn’t be all that beneficial I fear. With this in mind, I have prayed the Lord would lead me to the appropriate scriptures, and guide me as well as you to His answer for your thought provoking question.

The first scripture that comes to mind is Galatians 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Why this one you might ask? Clearly this must be our starting point. I have no idea whether or not you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, but this is always the starting point of becoming the humble person God desires us to be. There are many scriptures that tell us to humble ourselves but most have been written to those who have already humbly admitted their sinfulness and repented of those sins, accepting Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as payment-in-full for our sin debt. By faith and faith alone, we become born-again or born from above as some like to say, thus becoming children of the one true living God.

When we become born-again, we can boldly declare along with Paul that we have been crucified with Christ and the old us, the one born with a sinful nature, no longer lives but now the divine nature of Jesus lives within us in the person of the Holy Spirit. So when you say that it is in your nature to practice one-upmanship, I need to question whether you still have your old sinful nature or you have allowed it to be nailed to cross along with Christ?

If you are a born-again believer in Jesus Christ, please do not believe the enemy’s lies that you still have a sinful nature and nothing can be done about it. We are commanded in 1 Peter 1:16 “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” and in 2 Peter 3:11 we are told, “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness.” God only commands us to do what he has already equipped us to do. The Holy Spirit living within a believer makes him uniquely capable of humbling himself in any and all circumstances. We can boldly go to the throne of grace and ask God to help us to do this and each time we keep our mouths shut, accept undeserved poor treatment from someone, or refuse to demand our rights, it only makes it that much easier the next time.

How do we become a humble people? With prayer and self-discipline but first we must accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. May the name of the Lord be praised forever.