Jesus told us that the least will be the greatest. People quote this a lot in Christians circles but sometimes I don’t think that we fully grasp the gravity of this statement and what Jesus was really saying.
So what does Jesus mean by these words? In Luke 9 Jesus takes a little child and says that if anyone receives this little child then he receives Jesus himself. In Matthew 18 he says that if we don’t become like little children we will never inherit eternal life. So what is Jesus telling us? Little children depend on their fathers for everything, for their daily bread, clothes, and direction in life. They depend on their fathers to tell them what they should and should not be doing. They depend on their fathers for their basic needs for survival. They depend on their fathers for protection. They depend on their fathers for everything.
Jesus is telling us that we need to trust the Father for everything. We need to know and trust that He is good and that He cares for us. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden they made a decision that they were not going to trust in the Father anymore but they were going to trust in their own abilities. They made the decision that they would be in control of their own destiny. This has been the overarching problem with all humanity since that time, we want to be in control and we want to do things our way.
This desire for control has manifested itself in two completely opposite ways but at the core is the same underlying motivation. People try to gain control over their lives by either breaking God’s rules or by keeping them. The person who breaks all of God’s commandments is making the statement that he doesn’t need God and all of his rules and that he can do it on his own. This one is obvious and we can easily spot it. We look at him and say, “Yep there is a sinner look at want he did”. Then there is the person that keeps all of God rules to be able to control God himself. We have this idea that if we keep his rules then he has to be good to us. This type of person believes that God actually has to accept him because of how good he has been. This mind set is much harder to identify both within others and within ourselves, especially within ourselves. This person appears to know Jesus because they tend to look like a good Christian when in fact their heart is in total rebellion to God.
If we look back to the Old Testament one thing that we see is God always takes the initiative. In 2 Samuel 7 David decides that he is going to do God a favor. He thinks that God’s living conditions are pretty pathetic while his are pretty good so he decides that he must be the guy to build God a temple. God speaks through the prophet Nathan and tells David that he isn’t going to build a house for him and in fact it is God who was going to build a house for David, and it was God that had done and initiated everything on David’s behalf up until this point.
When we see Jesus on the cross we need to understand that He died for our sins. For us to be saved it took God himself to leave Heaven, come to earth, and die the death that we should have died, he took the initiative and we aren’t the ones who can. No other sacrifice would do. This is how bad we are. To think that we could actually do something to merit the favor of God and gain eternal life is anti-gospel thinking. Yet we do it a lot. Have you ever looked at another person and thought “Well I would never do that”. Essentially what we are saying is that I am good enough because I would never commit a sin bad enough that God would reject me. In reality we have all committed sin and as a result we all deserve to live for all eternity apart from God in everlasting torment, Hell.
What the gospel does is tell us that we are a sinner and it points to how bad we really are. I love the hymn text,
Ye who think of sin but likely.
Nor suppose the evil great.
Here may view it’s nature rightly.
Here it’s guilt may estimate.
Mark the sacrifice appointed.
See who bears the awful.
Tis the one the Lord anointed.
Son of Man and Son of God.
When we are able to fully understand the nature of the gospel and see how bad our sin truly is it is a very humbling experience. No longer can we look at people and think I am better then they are. No longer can we think that if we could just be good enough then we can demand that God look at us and listen to our demands. No longer can we think that I deserve anything. We then at that point become like little children, depending on the Father for everything and understanding that it is only by His goodness that we are even allowed to breath. Until we come to that point we have no hope of eternal life.
Humility is not something we can achieve on our own, if we do then we will be proud of the fact that we are humble and that is not humility. Humility is something that God grants to us through Jesus and His death on the cross. Jesus is the true humble servant that not only gave up His position as King but gave up His very life so that a retched sinner like me may be saved.
