Last week, I graduated from Keele University with First class honours. Despite living with chronic illness since the age of eight, and becoming a wheelchair user practically overnight half-way through my degree, I came out top of my Philosophy class, with two academic awards (The Clare Coleman Memorial Prize and Professor GAJ Rogers Student Prize for Philosophy), and was shortlisted as a Finalist for the overall Student of the Year Award. It meant that at graduation, I had lots of people congratulating me, and also complimenting me. The university wrote up an article about me (available here), which was also published in my local newspaper, and I was interviewed about it on BBC Radio Leicester. Everyone kept telling me how ‘amazing‘ and ‘inspirational‘ I am, and I struggled to receive and process that many compliments.

Compliments are a strange phenomenon to navigate, especially when as Christians we are told to be humble. But being humble doesn’t mean that we cannot accept compliments when they are rightly deserved or earned, and this is something I, personally, have been working through recently.

First of all, I want to distinguish compliments from flattery. For the sake of this piece, I am going to distinguish the two as compliments being genuine and reflecting the truth of someone’s situation, whereas flattery does not. Flattery is done with the intention of buttering up the receiver, and doesn’t come from a place of sincerity. Proverbs 26: 28 warns that: “a flattering mouth works ruin”. Therefore, when praising someone it is important to ensure your comments are from a place of sincerity and not selfishness; that the comments are to encourage the other person and not to seek advantage from them. It also means that when receiving a compliment, we should check ourselves – is this person giving you a genuine compliment, or is it mere flattery. If it is the latter, this is something we should guard ourselves against and not let ourselves fall prey to their seemingly kind words. However, if their comments are genuine and their words reflect your situation, then this is something we should accept with grace.

But how do we do that?

As Christians, we do not want to let receiving compliments go to our head and make us feel superior to our actual situations. However, it is good and right to allow compliments to let us see the many blessings God has poured into our lives, and how we have been able to use our God-given talents.

So, when receiving compliments, I found these three things important to bear in mind:

1. Handle it with true humility

True humility does not mean diminishing our achievements, nor letting what we have done go to our heads – it means having a healthy sense of proportion about our work. When God tells us to be humble he doesn’t want us to disregard or diminish the talents he has given us, he simply wants us to acknowledge that we aren’t infallible and greater than we are.

2. Give credit where credit is due

For me, acknowledging the strength God has given me, and the support of my friends and family, was really important in receiving compliments. This isn’t to say that you should pass off the compliment as the work of others, but accrediting the help of others in getting where you have got to today, helps us in staying humble.

3. Remember your ultimate goal

At the end of the day (or, should I say, the end of days), the goal is not to make ourselves look great in the eyes of others, but to glorify God and display that to others. We are not working for ourselves, but for the Kingdom of God, and, as such, the focus should be on lifting Jesus’ name on high. This doesn’t mean we should dismiss compliments directed at our own achievements, but that we should bear in mind that this isn’t our end goal. We are achieving these things that people are complimenting us on in order to further the Kingdom of God. It doesn’t matter whether the achievements are directly building God’s Kingdom, because our entire lives should be lived for the glory of God, whatever we are doing.