Upside-Down Kingdom Logic

Shift Your Focus… Here is yet another example of the upside logic of the Kingdom of God. We get that a lot from Jesus: To live, you’ve got to die; to get, you’ve got to give; to receive honor, you must be willing to be humble; to be rich, you’ve got to give it all away; to be first, you’ve got to be okay with last place; to be great, you’ve got to be the servant of all.

Though from the world’s point of view this is totally upside down, its’ totally normal from heaven’s perspective.  When you really think about these kinds of counterintuitive statements, you realize that they were values that Jesus deeply held and, in fact, were values that were lived out in his actions every single day of his life.

Furthermore, as you both study the life of Jesus in the Gospels as well as the theology of New Testament letters, you come to the conclusion that these were not simply values that Jesus suddenly embraced when he became man just to impress people and win the adoration of the multitudes. These values show us the fundamental essence of God’s being. As Jesus lived out humility, generosity, servanthood, and sacrifice, you were seeing who God is in living color.

And when we invite Jesus to become the Lord and Savior of our lives and embrace the values of God’s Kingdom as our own, these, then, become the fundamental attributes of who we are and the defining characteristics of how we go about the business of the Kingdom. Or so it should.

If we have had an authentic salvation experience, then humility will be evident to others who are watching our lives. Generosity will characterize our practices with money and possessions. We will eschew pushing and clawing our way to the top and become comfortable with the descent into greatness. And in a way that authenticates the totality of our claim to Christian faith, we willingly to lay down our lives for others—not only in dying, but in that which is much harder to pull off: in sacrificial living.

That is the kind of greatness that endures—greatness in the eyes of God.

“The voice of humility is God’s music, and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric.”  ~Francis Quarles

Prayer… Lord, you were the servant of all.  You came not to be served, but to serve and to give your life away in order to ransom mankind.  Help me to take on that selfless, Kingdom-focused mindset. May I be so deeply and profoundly touched by you that, like you, this becomes the essence of my fundamental being.