“Well, I’m just doing what God tells me to do.”
This is usually my response to anyone praising ARMR Collective. “It’s not me, it’s all Him,” I’ll say, dismissing myself. But a small voice says, “It is Him, but you’re actually listening and following through.” And then I squish that voice down again.
I constantly feel the need to add disclaimers, to make sure nobody thinks I’m putting myself on a pedestal. Even writing this feels weird, like I’m humble bragging or something. I was brought up to always be humble, but where’s the line where we fall into self-deprecation and start apologizing for our victories?
Why can’t we just celebrate our success? Why do we feel like obedience, growth, and doing the right thing all need to come with an apology attached? Why do we keep minimizing our victories?
The Qualifying Phrases We Tack Onto Every Victory
Let’s say you’ve been battling trauma or mental health issues. You’ve been going to therapy and working on healing. Finally, you feel you’ve had a breakthrough. You feel almost back to normal. But you don’t want to seem like you’re humble bragging about your breakthrough. You might tell the story of your healing, but make sure to add “I mean, I’m still working on it. It’s not like I have it all figured out.”
Maybe after chronically people-pleasing to a fault, you’ve finally set a healthy boundary. Instead of sharing the victory, you might try to downplay it and add, “It’s really not that big of a deal” to the end of your success story.
Or maybe you’ve finally said yes to what God is calling you to do. Of course, you’re still a sinner like everyone else, but you’re following God’s instructions. You could be doing anything else but decided to obey. When sharing the story, you make sure to tack on a good, old-fashioned, “I’m just doing what God says. It’s all Him.”
We’ve fallen into a pattern where after we experience victory, growth, and breakthrough, we feel momentary joy and healthy pride, but immediately panic about what people might think. We add qualifying statements to shrink the victory, and we walk away from the conversation feeling…nothing. Or worse, maybe feeling guilty for feeling good about your victory.
We’ve trained ourselves to preemptively apologize for having done something right. But why?
The Fears That Make Us Shrink Our Victories
Why can’t we just let our victories stand? Because underneath all the qualifying phrases and preemptive apologies, there are deep fears. Fears that have convinced us celebrating victories is dangerous—to our reputation, our relationships, and even our future.
Fear #1: Being Seen As Prideful
Growing up in church, we learn all about acceptable behaviors and the Fruits of the Spirit. And at the very top of the “Good Christian list” is humility. But somewhere along the way, humility stopped meaning “having an accurate view of yourself before God” and turned into “never acknowledging anything good about yourself ever”. We absorbed unspoken rules like if we mention growth, we’re bragging, and if we share what God’s doing in us, we’re making it about ourselves. I know not every church is like this, but if you’ve experienced it, you know exactly what I mean. So, of course the only safe behavior is self-deprecation. We confuse confidence with arrogance and acknowledging victories with pride.
The enemy tries to tell us, “Truly humble people never acknowledge their victories.” This lie says that acknowledging God’s work in us somehow takes glory away from Him. So it’s no wonder we’re so afraid of appearing proud. We add disclaimers to every victory. We preemptively apologize before sharing good news. We deflect every compliment. We shrink ourselves to stay “safe”.
We confuse humility with self-erasure.
We’d rather minimize God’s work than risk being called proud. In turn we police ourselves harder than anyone else would. We ask, “What will people think if I acknowledge this?”
But we should be asking, “What does God think when I minimize what He’s done?”
Fear #2: The “Who Do You Think You Are?” Voice
Imposter syndrome is the feeling that you’re a fraud, that any success you have is luck, not legit success. It feels like you’re “faking it” and that someone will “expose” you at any moment. We don’t feel like we’re “qualified” to speak or do certain things. Sometimes this happens from comparing ourselves to other Christians. We think “real Christians don’t struggle like I do” or “real Christians would be further along by now”. This skews our thinking because whenever we DO have a victory, we think, “Well, this doesn’t count, because I’m not a real Christian anyway.”
Maybe we internalize certain things people have said to us in the past and decide it’s better to stay silent. We might think only certain people are “qualified” to hear from God; maybe someone told us we’re not spiritual enough. We start second guessing our victories until they don’t even feel like victories anymore.
The lie under it all is, “You’re not special enough to celebrate that.” We think we need to be “more” before we’re allowed to acknowledge “enough”. We become our own harshest critics and treat our spiritual journeys like they don’t count. Even when God tries to affirm us, we dismiss it. Instead, we wait for other people to validate us. We make ourselves smaller and smaller, because if we’re small, we can’t be disappointed. But this just keeps us from experiencing the fullness of God’s provision.
This fear hits me hard. I question myself all the time about ARMR. My brain screams, “Who am I to claim God told me to do this? What if I’m just doing what I want and calling it ‘God’s will’?” Instead of saying, “I’m doing what God called me to do, and I’m showing up consistently, and that’s worth celebrating”, I hide behind, “I’m just doing what God told me to do. I’m not special. He could’ve picked anyone, and if I refused to do it, He’d just pick someone else.”
I’m afraid that if I acknowledge that I hear from God, and I’m obeying Him, people will think I’m putting myself on a pedestal. Even writing this feels like nails on a chalkboard. I want nothing more than to delete it. But the truth is, acknowledging that I hear from God and obey Him IS testimony. It’s not a pedestal, but honesty.
Fear #3: Comparison Culture
Ah, the good old comparison trap. It gets us all. “My victory isn’t as impressive as theirs” or “Other people have overcome way more than I have” try to minimize what we’ve experienced. Somewhere along the way, we started treating victories like they’re in competition with each other. Like there’s a leaderboard and only the top performers get to celebrate. We think big testimonies matter more than small victories, and dramatic conversions are more impressive than quiet obedience. Someone else’s success always seems bigger than ours.
Social media just makes this worse. The highlight reel effect shows us everyone’s best moments, biggest breakthroughs, and most photogenic victories. We compare their highlight reels to our behind-the-scenes, making us forget we’re only seeing what they choose to show. We see, “I’ve been sober for 5 years!” We don’t see the days they struggled. We read, “God completely healed my depression!” We don’t read about the ten years they couldn’t get out of bed even to turn on the light. We don’t see the full, messy, real stories behind the victories.
We start comparing our Day 1 to their Day 1,000. We look down at our small step and compare it to their giant leap. We compare our private victory to their public celebration and decide ours doesn’t count.
The enemy says, “If your victory isn’t impressive enough, don’t mention it.” This lie says that victories have a minimum size requirement—if it’s not dramatic, it’s not worth sharing. If someone has overcome more than us, our victory is immediately diminished. We create a hierarchy and, of course, our success story is at the very bottom.
In turn, this can have lasting effects on our outlook on life. We start ranking victories like it’s a competition and miss that every single one of them, no matter how big or small, are all victories. They’re all proof of God’s faithfulness. We minimize our own growth by measuring it against others. “I stopped a panic attack, but she overcame a decade of panic disorder.” We forget that we’re on different journeys, at different stages, with different battles. We might hide some of our victories because they feel too “small” and silence our own testimonies because we‘ve decided it’s not impressive enough.
We miss what God is actually doing. He shows up in the smallest and biggest of ways. He sees the quiet, daily obedience as much as the dramatic testimony. But we’ve decided only the big victories count.
“Is my victory big enough to matter?” we ask ourselves. But we should be asking, “Since when did God start ranking victories by size?”
Fear #4: The Pedestal Panic
“If I share this, people will think I’m putting myself on a pedestal. They’ll think I’m judging them for not doing what I’m doing.”
Sound familiar? We’re afraid of hearing those dreaded words: holier-than-thou, one of the worst things you can be called in Christian spaces. This means we think we’re better than everyone else, we judge others, and that we’ve forgotten we’re a sinner too. Maybe we’ve seen someone get torn down for their successes. Someone might share their victory only to hear “must be nice” or “good for you, I guess”. Or maybe it’s happened to us. Maybe we set a boundary and said no to something and the response was, “You think you’re too good for us now?” We learn that sharing victories leads to being accused of superiority.
We know people are struggling in this world. Maybe we’ve experienced growth but look around and see people in the place we just left. We know they’re still battling what we overcame and don’t want our victory to make them feel worse. So, we hide it to protect them AND ourselves from their response. We’ve internalized “don’t make others feel bad”. We decide that talking about our blessings when others are struggling is insensitive.
We think that our joy should be conditional on everyone else’s circumstances.
The enemy lies and says, “Talking about your growth means you think you’re above others.” We confuse celebrating breakthroughs with making others feel bad for still struggling. Our testimony becomes an attack on anyone who hasn’t experienced the same thing. We feel responsible for how our victory makes other people feel.
So, we dim our light so others don’t feel dark. We shrink our experiences so other people don’t feel bad. We stay silent so no one can call us prideful. We confuse sharing with showing off and lose the ability to tell the difference between pride and honesty.
But in staying silent about our victories, we’re actually robbing others of encouragement.
What if our victory gave them hope? What if our obedience inspires them? What if our testimonies would show them it’s possible? But they’ll never know if we stay silent.
Instead of asking, “What will people think of me if I share this?”, we need to ask, “What if my silence robs someone of the hope they needed?”
Fear #5: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
This is where we become the happiness police and prevent ourselves from feeling joy. “If I celebrate this, something bad will happen” or “I shouldn’t get too excited, it probably won’t last” repeats in our minds. This fear roots itself in the belief—sometimes conscious, sometimes subconscious—that celebrating good things invites bad things to happen.
Now, I work in healthcare, so I am well aware that we NEVER speak about how slow it might be one day. We can’t afford to jinx it! The same thing can happen when experiencing successes. This can develop in experiences where we went through loss after joy. Maybe we celebrated a victory but then immediately faced a setback. Maybe we shared good news, but then got our hearts broken. Our brains then connect celebration with loss, even if they weren’t actually related. Maybe we were burned by false hope. We thought we were healed, but the struggle came right back. We thought we overcame the sin, but fell back into it. We thought things were finally stable only for them to fall apart again. We start to believe that hope is dangerous, so we protect ourselves by not fully embracing victories.
Trauma can reinforce this thinking: when we’ve been hurt repeatedly, joy feels vulnerable. When we’ve been disappointed often, hope feels naive. When we have lost things we love, celebration feels risky. Staying guarded feels a lot safer than being fully present in the victory.
I relate to this fear as someone who has experienced a lot of grief. In the midst of losing two family members within two years, good moments felt dangerous. Like if I let myself feel okay for even a second, something terrible would happen. Small victories and moments of peace felt like traps. I couldn’t celebrate anything because I was braced for the next loss. I was convinced someone was next, and I couldn’t rest.
The lie underneath it all is, “If you celebrate this, you’ll lose it.” The enemy tries to tell us that feeling joy means pain is coming and saying it out loud will jinx it. We think good things are conditional on us not noticing them too much, like a toddler finally playing independently—DON’T. MAKE. EYE. CONTACT.
But this thinking forces us to live in perpetual anxiety about losing what we have. We rob ourselves of joy in the moment because of what might happen later. We minimize victories as a protective mechanism and numb ourselves to joy to avoid potential pain. Maybe we postpone celebrating indefinitely, telling ourselves, “I’ll celebrate when I know it’s permanent.”
We create self-fulfilling prophecies; we’re so convinced something bad will happen that we can’t fully engage with the good. And then when struggle does come (because life always includes struggle), we say, “See? I knew I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”
We miss the whole point of testimony. God gives us victories to celebrate NOW. He gives us breakthroughs to enjoy IN THE MOMENT. And He gives us joy to experience FULLY, not to hoard in fear that it will be taken away. It’s like never wearing a beautiful coat for fear of it getting dirty. What’s the point of having it if you don’t wear it and keep it hidden away in a closet?
We need to stop asking, “What if I celebrate this and then lose it?” and instead ask, “What if I miss the gift God gave me today because I’m too afraid of what might happen tomorrow?”
The Core Fear Beneath It All
All of these fears have one common thread: we’re afraid to feel good about victories. We think doing the right thing isn’t supposed to feel like a victory and that we’re doing something wrong by celebrating. But minimizing victories doesn’t make anyone feel better. In fact, this is just another form of self-rejection.
Minimizing Victories: Self-Rejection
I know the sentiment behind wanting to stay quiet about our victories: We think we’re staying humble and being relatable by minimizing our successes. We think we’re keeping ourselves in check and protecting others from feeling bad. We might even look at it as following Jesus’s example of humility. But we’re actually doing the opposite.
By minimizing our victories, we’re refusing to receive God’s work in our lives. We teach others that growth should be hidden or dimmed. Obedience becomes something to be apologized for, and we believe the lie that we don’t deserve to feel good about good things.
We rob God of His glory—if He did it in you, why minimize it?
We take “die to self” to the extreme and turn humility into self-erasure. We think we’re supposed to do the right thing WITHOUT feeling good about it, like it’s our duty. But this damages our worldview. We never let ourselves fully celebrate, and we deflect encouragement. Hiding growth gets taught to others by our example, and we stay stuck in shame even when we’re doing well.
We treat our own obedience to God as something embarrassing.
Ask yourself, “If God did this work in me, if He called me to this, if He’s helping me grow—why am I acting like it’s something to be ashamed of?”
What Scripture Says About Celebrating Victories
The Bible has a lot to say about sharing your victories. And while Jesus occasionally asked people to wait before sharing during His earthly ministry (usually to manage timing or crowds), after His resurrection, the command flipped entirely: Go. Tell. Share what God has done.
In John 4:28-30, Jesus encounters the woman at the well and offers her “living water”. He knows all about her own life and later reveals that He is the Messiah. Immediately, she runs into town to tell everyone what Jesus did. “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did!” she exclaims. She didn’t qualify it or minimize it. She didn’t say, “I’m not saying I’m perfect, but come see the Christ!”
In Mark 5:18-20, Jesus heals a demon-possessed man. After he was healed, the man wanted to follow Jesus, but Jesus told him, “Go home to your own people and tell them what God has done for you.” He went and proclaimed his healing throughout the entire region. Jesus COMMANDED him to share his victory. Sharing wasn’t optional, it was obedience.
And it’s not just those two examples. The Psalms are filled with celebrations of what God has done (Psalm 66:16, “Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul”). Paul constantly shares what God accomplished through him, not as bragging but as testimony to God’s power.
God’s people are supposed to proclaim His victories. The celebration is worship.
Pride says, “Look what I did!” Testimony says, “Look what God did.” But here’s the thing, even when it’s “look what God did”, we’re still minimizing it. We’re so afraid of pride that we won’t even give God credit sometimes.
This begs the question, if God did something in your life and you refuse to acknowledge it, whose glory are you protecting? Certainly not His.
When We Let Our Victories Stand
When we refuse to minimize what God has done in our lives, we give others permission to celebrate their own wins. We model that growth isn’t something to hide and break the cycle of minimizing for those who might be watching us. We actually give God glory—testimony isn’t bragging, it’s worship. When we acknowledge God’s work, we point to Him.
We learn to receive good things when we let our victories stand. We practice believing we’re allowed to feel good about growth and stop deflecting encouragement. We can let joy exist without immediately killing it. We’re able to model healthy self-acceptance—God doesn’t want us living in shame. People are able to see that it’s possible to be humble AND confident. We can prove that obedience doesn’t require shame.
When we stop treating our victories like they’re problems, we’re able to stop punishing ourselves for doing well. We can practice receiving instead of only striving. And we’re finally able to honor the work God did. If He called us to it, why apologize for doing it? If He’s growing you, why hide it? Your obedience is worth celebrating.
Now, here’s the reality: some people might respond negatively when you stop minimizing your victories. They might call you prideful or say you’re bragging. And if that happens consistently, it might be a sign that those relationships aren’t safe spaces for your growth. Healthy people celebrate with you. Healthy communities make room for testimony. If your victories consistently threaten someone, that’s about them, not you.
Next Time You Have A Victory, Let It Stand
Catch yourself before sharing a success story and notice when you want to add a qualifier (“It wasn’t that big of a deal”, etc). Recognize the impulse of wanting to minimize the victory and STOP. DON’T DO IT. Let the victory stand on its own. Even practice saying, “I’m proud of this” without the “but”. It sounds simple, but it’s very difficult. I caught myself multiple times during this post trying to qualify what I’m writing. “I’m writing this blog because God told me to.” That’s it.
Remember, this isn’t pride—it’s honesty. It’s not arrogance—it’s testimony. It’s not bragging—it’s receiving. We are allowed to celebrate doing the right thing. We glorify God by spreading news of His goodness and faithfulness. We’re called to share what God has done in our lives and spread His light.
What victory have you been minimizing? What growth have you been apologizing for? What work has God done in you that you’ve been too afraid to acknowledge?
Let it stand. Just this once, let it stand.
Not because you’re perfect, none of us are. Not because you’re better than anyone else. But because God did it, and He doesn’t do small things. Even when we try to make them small.
Your obedience is worth celebrating. Your growth is worth acknowledging. Your victory is worth letting stand.
So let it.
