September 29, 2011
Little Children
The teacher wrote the word crocodile on the blackboard and six year-old
Lydia raised her hand and politely told the teacher that the word was
misspelled. The teacher knew the spelling was correct, but Lydia was insistent
and wouldn’t let go of the matter. So the teacher and student got out the
dictionary and together they discovered that Lydia was in fact correct, the
teacher had misspelled crocodile. It’s hard for me to imagine a first grader in
this situation having the ability to stand firm in their own knowledge. Jesus
said that we must become like children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven
and I’ve always thought of that childlike character in terms of humble,
innocent and trusting. Now I’m thinking that unwavering conviction is also a
characteristic of a little child. Jesus said, “I
tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a
little child will never enter it.” (Luke 18:17 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Unwavering conviction is not as much a characteristic additional to humble, innocent, and trusting as it is an natural consequence of them. People incline towards the “modest” , “low in rank”, “insignificant”, and “not proud or assertive” definitional aspects of “humble” offered by most dictionaries. I consider these merely to be phenomenal traits of the word’s more substantive aspects: “unassuming”, “respect and deference”, “submissive“, “lacking pretension”, and “not arrogant”.
-----It is easy to see how the former can arise as a phenomena of the latter. But when you treat their accusatives discriminately by Biblical principles, you begin to see an aspect of humility quite different from its usual connotations. Unassuming does not accept concepts without sufficient study (Prov 2:3-5). Respect attends the truthful characteristics of its target with appropriate deference (Phil 2:3-4, I Tim 2:2b). Respect is indelibly attached to the truth. If there were deference to a falsehood, then there would be no interest taken in the actuality of the target. So, respect is a deference to the good because good is a consequence of truth. (Eph 4:15) Deference is standing one’s self down so something more appropriate can stand up; it is vacating a position for its availability to improvement. (Rom 15:1-2). Submission adds to deference a willingness to be directed or controlled. Humility does not involve an assuming submission, but a submission carefully plotted towards mutual good - a well studied submission, a submission involved with truth (Eph 5:21). For pretension is all one can have without truth. The lack of pretension is the presence of truth. Therefore, humility is directly involved with the truth, its position, and its aspects. (John 8:31). Saying humility is not arrogant is like saying light is not darkness, or good is not evil. Arrogance is what humility is not. View these descriptions of humility in their inverted forms and you will have a good description of arrogance.
-----Innocence is more than a state of lacking guilt. It is an intentional harmlessness free of the sinful sway of worldly experience. Trust is an assured reliance on the character of another. It can be a reliance upon the actions of another, or upon another’s reactions to you. Analytically speaking, innocence and trust are themselves natural extensions of humility.
-----Humility leads us like children into the truth. We would be arrogant if we denied a truth we discovered, and we tend towards arrogance by accepting a truth “as we understand it.” Prov 2:1-8 indicates a fully engaged, unwaveringly convicted effort to discover truth as it is, not a casual plucking of it from a tree as we wish to find it. So humility’s aversion to error focused Lydia’s mind upon what she definitely knew to be true, and the love in her speaking that truth was a harmless intention to benefit the teacher, whom she trusted would be joyful to learn the proper spelling of a word. Her unwavering conviction was simply consequential to her humility expressed through innocence and trust. I love the call to approach Jesus as children.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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