40acts: Ready to ActSample

Act 7: You First

‘After you.’ It’s not something you hear very often in our preoccupied, me-first society. Yet, how easy it is to offer a higher place in the queue, your seat on the bus, the chance to go through a road junction first. And what a blessing to receive it!

Jesus tells a story about the sort of people who love to be put first, bumped up the queue, sat next to the important – the ones who make their way to the top seats at the banquet to be close to the in-crowd. And then he flips it. They, Jesus says, are the exact sort of people who’ll be kicked off the table altogether. Those who sit at the back row? They get pulled up to the place of honour (Luke 14).

The shock of his story was who he was telling it for: the religious in-crowd, who ‘had it all together’. Jesus was firing scriptural truths they would have known inside out, directly at them, at point-blank range. They suddenly had to reckon with well-read verses they never suspected could have been about them. When we read Proverbs, we find the signposts they should have seen coming: ‘humility comes before honour’ (15:33); ‘before his downfall a man’s heart is proud, but humility comes before honour’ (18:12); ‘a man’s pride will bring him low, but a humble spirit will obtain honour’ (29:23).

And yet they didn’t see themselves in there. The danger, of course, is that we might miss it too with our uncomfortable drive to be noticed, to be made something of. 

The good news is simply this: these are attitudes that God knows live in our hearts, and he doesn’t ignore them. That’s why the Bible has lots to say about honour: what sort of honour to chase after, where it comes from, and what kind of heart posture leads to honour. The answer, over and over again, is humility. Knowing who we are before God, and how he wants to give the humble honour, frees us up to put others first in every situation, not just when we’re feeling cheerful. Pay attention: what does that do in your heart? How are you feeling? What can you bring to God from all of that?