Jesus Puts Us In Our Place…

Jesus Puts Us In Our Place…

I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me…
Living, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you
not misinterpret yourselves as people who bring this goodness to God.
No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves
is by Who God is & what He does for us, not by who we are & what we do for Him.

Romans 12:3 The Message

The RMS Titanic was nearly three football fields long, weighed a staggering 100 million pounds,
cranked out over 40,000 horsepower, required over 1 million pounds of coal PER DAY to operate,
and cost the modern equivalent of over $400 million to build. Titanic was so large that some
commented that she was “practically unsinkable,” with one deck hand reportedly stating that “God
Himself could not sink this ship!” Tragically, Titanic sank less than three hours after hitting an
iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean on her maiden voyage in April of 1912.

Mohandas K. Gandhi stood 5’3” tall, weighed as little as 90 lbs., and took a life-long vow of poverty
and non-violence. Despite his seeming lack of power, finances, and connections, Gandhi devoted his
life to help grant India political independence from world superpower Britain while striving to ease
the suffering of millions of his countrymen mired under poverty and oppressive caste systems.

As we commemorate Jesus’ journey to the Cross, we read in Luke 20:41-21:4 about Jesus lowering the mountains and filling in the valleys of earthly social status. Here Jesus elevates a poor widow who gives two copper coins to the Temple treasury because she sacrifices to God 100% of her earthly wealth, all she has to physically live on. In this same passage Jesus also humbles the teachers of the Law of Moses who practice religion to increase their own fame and not God’s. Let us note that Jesus causes this powerful social earthquake—indeed that He shakes up our pre-conceived notions of “greatness”—as He marches to the Cross, where He will torturously demote Himself to a criminal’s cruel death so that all who trust in Him can be gloriously promoted to a joyful eternal life. Jesus doesn’t just tell us what to do…He shows us how to do it.

So may we, with each remaining day, follow Jesus’ example by living to show the world how great God is and by placing the eternal and earthly needs of ALL others before our own.

QUOTES
“The cure—even with all the pain—has pleasure too: we creep
home, tired & bruised, into a state of mind that is really restful,
when all our ambitions have been given up. Then we can really
for the first time say ‘Thy Kingdom come.’ For in that Kingdom
there will be no pre-eminences and we must have reached a stage
of not caring two straws about our own status before we can
enter it.”
C.S. Lewis (The Most Reluctant Convert p. 163)