Special Sunday Edition
Ethan Barton, Pastoral Resident, Tallowood Baptist Church
I haven’t been able to forget it, because every once in a while my mom brings it back up with a chuckle. Around fifth grade, my parents were trying to teach me the virtue of humility. One day my mom got to hear me say, “I’ve been really humbly lately. Sadly, no one has noticed.” Pure comedic irony. No wonder it still makes her laugh.
The reality is that I thought I deserved celebration for my good behavior. I was trying to make the celebration about what I could do for Jesus instead of what Jesus had done for me. I assumed that my good works were even good enough to be worth celebrating.
At some point in every Christian’s childhood, we all had to come to the terms with the fact that the goal of our lives is more than merely achieving good, moral, Christian lives. That, it turns out, is already expected of us. As servants of Christ, serving him faithfully is just our duty. But of course, none of us have ever sufficiently pulled that off. How can God expect that much of us?
Simple: God is holy. Unfathomably, overhwhelmingly, perfectly holy. And he is the standard of holiness by which we are all measured.
At some point after several years, it finally occurred to me what humility actually means. It means desiring no glory at all for myself, since I don’t deserve any anyway, but desiring rather to bring Christ glory in everything I do. We are not the main characters of our own stories. All glory and honor belongs only to the mighty king on the heavenly throne. Each and every one of us are prone to forgetting this. So may we, Christ’s unworthy servants, humble ourselves anew and strive not to glorify ourselves, but rather to faithfully do our duty and glorify our king.
