Sermon Tone Analysis
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Exegetical Idea
Tension: Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
Resolution: The one who humbles himself as a child.
Exegetical Idea: The one who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the one who humbles himself as a child.
Theological Idea: The greatest in the kingdom are those who continue to humble themselves.
Homiletical Idea: The greatest in the kingdom are the humblest.
Introduction: Hierarchies
The psychologist and philosopher Jordan Peterson says that all of life is built on hierarchies.
And a hierarchy is basically just this pyramid.
That virtually every domain of your life is part of a hierarchy.
Our economy is built on hierarchies.
Our workplaces are hierarchies.
Our neighborhoods, our churches, everything is hierarchical.
Now, that seems unfair, but the reality is that in every domain of life, there are people who are better at things than others, or who are highest on the hierarchy.
So let me put it this way.
THose who are viewed higher, at least in our area, are poeple who have a longer history.
We value people who have longstanding relationships, we value people who have healthy families, we value poeple who like what we like.
And these hierarchies are everywhere.
Now, in the first century wrold, the hierarchies were highly based on shame and honor.
Exegetical
Hierarchy: So,
Who is the Greatest?: Now, you have to recognize that the first century church was a church that was in a shame-honor culture.
Because it was a shame honor culture, when the disciples were asking “who is the greatest” they were saying who is the worhthy of the most honor.
Now, honor and shame in this world was very community based.
So someone who was honorable was someone who was viewed as having a great reputation, as someone who was esteemed as being important.
The most honorable person in a community was the kind of person who would get to make decisions, they were the person with the most influence, they were the person whose voice was the most important.
And the disciples are saying, “Who is the greatest, who should get the most honor?”
We mgiht it put it this way.
Cultural examples of honor: Now, in this day and age, they probably would have seen that honor could come from a couple different places.
So honor might be a result of having a big family.
It might be the result of having a lot of land or a lot of property.
There was a certain level of honor that was associated with age.
However, for Romans, the man who was able to amass the most power was deemed as being the most honorable.
The person that had the best family connections.
The person who had the best oratory.
Now, here is the deal.
Jesus had just told the disciples to pay the temple tax to not give offense.
So the disciples were probably wondering, whose rules do we play by? Do we play by the Jews’ rules or by the Romans’ rules?
They were wondering, where do we get honor?
Where do we get face?
Where do we get importance?
Who gets to make decisions in the church.
What kind of person do we want to put in our leadership positions?
What kind of person do we want to make elders or deacons?
What kind of persons do we pay attention to?
Christ is the prime example of humility: Now underneath this, we know how Christ has led.
Christ in fact, later will tell James and John and their mother in … Christ himself says, “Hey what I am doing is a very humbling thing.
Jesus says, I do not insist on my own way, I insist on my Father’s way.
I am not saying anything he has not told me to say.
Therefore, I will do as my Father has led me to do and go into the places that he has sent me and do what he has given me to do.
Christ has given himself up and sets everything that he has.
In fact, this is one of the things that is consistently proclaimed about Christ: his humility.
For example:
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So Jesus says, I have humbled myself and given everything I have to serve my people.
And can we say, that this is just so gracious of Christ.
Because he has been with the disciples for long enough that they should be picking it up.
They should begin to see Christ’s self-effacement, his humility, his kindness, his gentleness.
But Christ is so gracious, and he knows that because he will humble himself, this will create a deep and profound understanding in the disciples that they can only begin to grasp this now.
A Child: So, Jesus takes this child.
Now, it is important that it is a child for two reasons.
First, in this day and age, the child, especially a peasant child from Capernaum, had virtually no honor.
I mean, he ddidn’t have a lot of connections.
He didn’t hgave a lot of strenght.
He didn’t have a lot of wealth.
He wasn’t the father of a big family.
Instead, a child was basically the lowest rung on the social ladder.
Secondly, the child has basically no way to acquire honor.
So not only is he totally without honor, he can’t really fix himself.
He needs to look for honor from somewhere else.
So, the child is totally dependent on others.
So Jesus takes this child and says, “look at this child, there is nothign that this child has that we should esteem him, and nothing that this child can do to make us honor him.”
In the kingdom of heaven, the person who is like that is the person who is the greatest.
But notice how Christ says this first.
Conversion: Turn and Become Like Children to enter the kingdom: Now, notice that Christ doesn’t start out by answering “who is the greatest.”
Christ starts out by answering, who can enter into the kingdom of heaven.
How can they come inside of the kingdom?
What does it take to become disciple, a follower of Jesus?
What does it take to become a Christian?
Well Jesus explains that there are two steps.
He says, first, they must turn.
They must stop looking for ultimate honor and significance from anything.
In other words, Jesus says, “You need to stop looking for signigifance because of your family, or your hard work, or your spirituality.”
Jesus says, “you need to stop thinking that God should be impressed with you.”
Jesus says, you need to stop putting yourself ahead of others for any reason whatsoever.
Then you must “be like a child.”
You need to put yourself at the bottom rung of the ladder.
You need to see yourself as the servant of all and the master of none.
And you need to recognize that any signifigance, any honor, any hope that you have of being approved from God, has to come from outside you.
you need to humble yourself in the sight of God and see that to have anything at all from the hand of God requires that you receive it by grace.
So here is Jesus’ point: the person who humbles himself, who throws hismelf on the grace of God totally is the person who will enter the kingdom of heaven.
Faith begins with humility: Here is the point of what we are saying.
Faith begins with humility.
It begins with us saying, “God you are God, we are not.
We have looked for honor from a thousand different places, and we have not found it.”
To put your faith in Jesus Christ, you have to recognize that you do not have honor in yourself, and the only significance that you have in found in him.
Faith is humbling because it starts with recognizing that we lack something that only God can give.
Faith is humbling because it says, “If I could have saved myself, Jesus would not have had to die on the cross.”
Listen, here is the awfully awesome truth of the gospel.
That however bad you think you are, you have not even begun to scratch the surface.
But here is the good news.
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