How Important Are You?
This week we are focusing on love for our enemies. It’s a worthy topic, and one that I’m sure most of us could learn a bit more about.
There are also verses each day in this study that are there to help support the basic idea, and today’s verse – found in Galatians 6:3 – seems to exist to remind us that we really aren’t all that and a bag of chips.
Check it out:
3For if any person thinks himself to be somebody [too important to condescend to shoulder another's load] when he is nobody [of superiority except in his own estimation], he deceives and deludes and cheats himself.
That’s in the Amplified version. I also liked the New Living Translation:
If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.
Ouch.
This gets back to biblical servant-hood. You know, that thing we are called to as heirs to the Kingdom of God.
I don’t know about you, but serving my friends isn’t all that challenging. Serving the church, yeah I can do that (after all, it is in my job description). But serving those that I don’t really like? Not so easy. Serving those that have hurt me? Even harder.
But right there in Galatians God is telling me that I’m cheating myself when I find it beneath me to serve someone. I’m deluding myself to think that I’m somehow better than they are.
I’m just not that important.
To myself, of course, I can often times think “I don’t need to do that,” but if I follow through on that thought I’m not following God. I’m setting myself up as my very own idol on my very own pedestal… and I’m going against God.
I don’t want to go against God, because I know who will win every single time… and it ain’t me.
But I also have to fight that battle against my own flesh that wants to do things my own way and doesn’t want to have to fold the laundry or clean the toilets or pick up trash in the auditorium or set up and tear down the sound system twice each week. But I have also seen the blessings that come from doing each of those things – my family has clothes to wear, I’m not embarrassed when someone uses my toilet, the auditorium looks better when everyone else gets there, and relationships and camaraderie are built when I humble myself enough to serve others.
And you know what? I actually like to set up the sound system.
But I’m still scared to crawl under that stage to get the snake out. Can I pass on just that one?
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