Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: How to Be Great (Matthew 18:1-9)
Date: January 21, 2024
How do you move something heavy? Well, nowadays, if it’s big enough, you get a big piece of machinery and use that. For smaller things that don’t merit heavy equipment, you call some friends to help. A couple of years ago we got a new TV stand from Sam’s. Seeing it in the context of the enormous store did not give me a proper appreciation for how big it really was. After we bought it, I drove the family home so I could drive back to Sam’s with all of the seats down in the van and pick it up. I should have known what I was really in for when they loaded it into the van directly off of the forklift they were using to carry it…so that they didn’t have to carry it. It fit…barely. Once I got it home, and went around to the back and started pulling at the box to get a sense of what I was in for. I couldn’t budge it. So, I got on the phone and called TJ and Kevin who, much to their credit but as no surprise at all, came right over to help. The three of us did a further assessment of the box. Then they each got on the phone to call for more backup. I think we finally managed to get it into the house with four of us working together with lots of grunting and sweating. I don’t think it has moved much from the place we set it down since that day.
But what if you have to move something really heavy and you’re all by yourself. Well, then you start to make use of some simple tools; the kind of tools that humans have been using since long before there were power tools of any kind. There are six of these that have been around for thousands of years, allowing us to do and build all kinds of amazing things over the centuries of human history. These six are the wheel and axle, the inclined plane, the pulley, the screw, the wedge (which is just a variation on the inclined plane), and the lever.
Now, that last tool, the lever, is pretty powerful. And its power lies in simplicity. A lever is just a straight piece of something used to move something else. The lever itself needs to be of a strong enough material that it won’t break when pressed. You also need a fulcrum to put underneath the lever to create a lift point. But that’s about it. You can move just about anything like that. The heavier the object you are moving, the longer the lever needs to be, but the basic physical principle scales infinitely. Famous Greek mathematician Archimedes once boasted that with a long enough lever he could move the world. This simple tool actually gave us a word: leverage. Leverage is a word we use to describe how much of an ability we have to accomplish something. If we have a little bit of leverage, we can accomplish a little bit of something. If we have a lot of leverage, we can accomplish a lot.
In the world we live in, everybody has some leverage. Now, some people have more leverage than others for a variety of reasons, but everybody has at least a little bit of it. We all have the power and ability to make things happen in our own lives, in the lives of the people around us, and possibly even in the world beyond that. Well, as a general rule, the world around us operates on the principle that if you have leverage of some kind, you should use that leverage to your own benefit. If this happens to cause harm to someone else, while that’s not necessarily a good thing, it’s also not a thing about which you should exercise much concern because at least you got where you were trying to go. If they want to avoid that kind of pain in the future, they need to work to get more leverage in their own life. This is how the world works. It was indeed the only way anyone knew the world could work until someone came along and invited us to consider another option.
This person was Jesus of Nazareth. When Jesus came, He offered the world another way. He invited us to follow Him in using our leverage not primarily for our own benefit, but for the benefit of the people around us. He called us to this new way of living because it is how life works in the kingdom of God. Jesus assured us that using our leverage for the benefit of the people around us would make our lives better and make us better at life than taking the path offered by the world. He backed this up by using all of His leverage (which was pretty substantial since He was God) for our benefit by giving up His life on the cross. And, He seems to have been right. Over the course of the last couple thousand years of human history, all of the dramatic social and cultural improvements we have experienced as a people have come from places and times when a group of Jesus followers got together and used their leverage for the sake of the people around them.
And yet this is still something that doesn’t come naturally to us. At the end of the day, one of our most potent temptations is to put ourselves first. Well, as a church filled with people who are interested in doing life the way Jesus commanded in order to experience the benefits that come from it, that means this is something we need to talk about from time to time. This is going to be one of those times. For the next few weeks, in a brand-new series called, Leverage, we are going to be talking about this kingdom ethic of using the benefits, resources, and advantages we have for the sake of others instead of only ourselves. If you are someone who thinks this is something worthwhile—perhaps because you’ve been on the receiving end of it and want to be able to extend it to others; or perhaps because you’ve been on the giving end, experienced what a blessing it is to do, and want to experience more of that—this series is something you are not going to want to miss.
Now, Jesus called us to use our leverage for the benefit of others in a variety of ways throughout the Gospels, and these mostly take the form of the various and scattered “one another” statements Jesus makes. There was one time, though, where Jesus gave a whole bunch of attention to the matter of leverage in one place. This is found in Matthew’s Gospel in a conversation Jesus had with His disciples. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way with me this morning to Matthew 18. Over the course of the next four weeks, we are going to walk through what Jesus says here to help us understand not only why it matters so much to leverage our strengths for the sake of the people around us, but what it looks like when we put this into practice.
That all brings us to this morning and the beginning of the chapter. This whole conversation Jesus has with the disciples here is prompted by a question they ask Him. This question comes out of how we normally think about leverage in our own lives. The disciples all wanted to be great, living as they were in the shadow of Jesus’ own greatness, and they actually had the temerity to ask Jesus how they could achieve such a thing. Take a look at this with me starting in Matthew 18:1: “At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘So who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’”
Now, we might be tempted here to lean into a bit of righteous indignation that the disciples would be so base as to ask Jesus something like this, but the truth is that we should be grateful they actually said out loud what so many of us just ponder in our hearts. We all want to be great in whatever kingdom we aim to be inhabiting. That’s natural. It’s natural and, honestly, it’s not a bad thing. Notice that Jesus doesn’t chastise them for asking this question. Neither does He tell them it isn’t something they should want in the first place. Being great is something we should desire. This is because we are made in the image of a God who is great. Striving for the kind of greatness that is the result of His superlatively higher greatness shining through us is a right and proper offering to our God. The trouble comes when we start reaching for such a thing using the means of the world rather than the means of the kingdom.
Correcting this easily embraced error is where Jesus focuses His attention in the first part of His response to them. Verse 2 now: “He called a small child and had him stand among them.” Now, as a quick cultural note here, children did not occupy the same place in the ancient world that they do today. Today we generally think children are a blessing and put them on a pretty high pedestal. In the ancient world children were typically seen as a burden. In a day when the resources needed for survival were often scarce, children—but especially young children—were an extra mouth to feed that couldn’t pull its own weight to aid in that effort. There’s a reason abortion and infanticide were incredibly common practices back then. This trend wasn’t quite so pronounced in the Jewish culture of the day that was Jesus’ primary context, but they were still a far cry from where we are today. For Jesus to have had this small child stand among them to answer a question of greatness would have immediately attracted their attention.
If having the child stand there was shocking, though, what came next really blew their hair back. “‘Truly I tell you,’ he said, ‘unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child—this one is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one child like this in my name welcomes me.’”
So, what’s Jesus saying here? Well, He’s essentially redefining greatness for us. We have always defined greatness by the number of people we have beneath us. The higher that number goes, the greater you are. The CEO of a corporation is greater than the stockroom worker at a local store. The President is greater than a local council member. The pastor of a great big church is greater than the pastor of a small one.
A few weeks or perhaps months later, when Jesus was actually talking about this same idea, He would say to the disciples, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them.” He said “you know” there because they all knew. That was how the world worked. Two thousand years later we haven’t changed much. Greatness is a treasure to be guarded carefully and used to accumulate more greatness. That is not, however, how Jesus said it should work. It’s not how it works in God’s kingdom. If you want to be great in God’s kingdom, you have to put yourself not on top of others, but underneath them. Greatness in God’s kingdom is measured by how many people you have over you and whom you are serving. God’s economy is pretty much precisely the opposite of ours.
And it would be easy here to walk away from this concluding: “Golly, I guess I need to do more for the people around me than I’m doing right now.” But if you do that, you’re going to be missing out on just how serious a matter this really is for living in the kingdom of God, not to mention the thing Jesus is trying to help us understand here. In other words, if you are someone who is at all interested in following Jesus and doing life His way, this is a point to which you need to give a bit more of your time and attention than simply deciding that you need to “do more.” And don’t just take my word on that. Listen to what Jesus says next.
Stay with me in the text at v. 6 now: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to fall away—it would be better for him if a heavy millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea.” Are you paying attention now? Jesus went from seeming to be making a point about how greatness in God’s kingdom is the inverse of greatness in this world to talking about a mob-style hit job. He whips things around on us so fast here that we have to be careful when reading that we don’t get whiplash. And He’s not done either.
“Woe to the world because of offenses. For offenses will invariably come…” In other words, sin is going to happen in a sinful world. And that’s a problem…a big one. “But woe to that person by whom the offense comes.” That is, don’t worry so much about others and their issues. Worry about yourself and your own issues. “If your hand or your foot causes you to fall away, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to fall away, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hellfire.”
What in the world! Right?!? What do these two things have to do with each other? How does redefining greatness relate at all to not causing someone else to sin or falling into sin ourselves? Because Jesus is talking about more than merely doing things for other people here. He’s talking about using our leverage for the sake of those around us. I know it sounds like those are the same thing, but they aren’t. Let me see if I can explain why.
Lots of people do things for others. Several other religions have some version of charity as part of their basic operating framework. People who don’t care even a little bit about God and who have no interest in Jesus or Christianity still go and serve in soup kitchens or homeless shelters. If Jesus was simply calling us to do more of that here, He wouldn’t really be saying anything very different from what people around us do all the time. Now, a pretty strong argument can be made that this general cultural trend only exists because of the utter dominance of the Christian worldview in terms of shaping the western world for at least the last 1,000 years, but we’ll leave that for another time. It’s important to understand Jesus in His own context, but we can’t help but see Him through the lens of our own.
Jesus is saying that if we are going to live within the boundaries of the kingdom of God, we don’t simply need to do more for other people, we need to make ourselves less than other people. This isn’t merely for the purpose of self-humiliation, though. We need to make ourselves less so that we can make God more. The language Jesus uses in the first part of His answer of our becoming like a child speaks to the humility and faithfulness we need to bring in our approach to Him. We need to be willing to follow Him with simple obedience (not blind obedience, but simple obedience) like a small child does with her parents.
This is so significant for us to make sure we are doing, that it is worth our removing any obstacles that might get in the way of the effort. That’s the reason for the extreme, bodily mutilation language Jesus uses there toward the end of the passage. If there are things in your life that are preventing you from doing this, there is no effort too extreme to take to get rid of them. If you are standing in the way of someone else doing this for some reason, there are no measures too massive to get yourself out of the way.
Instead, whatever it is we can do to help someone else connect with the greatness of God’s kingdom should be our goal. In doing this, we will be doing the work of Jesus Himself which is how we know we are in His kingdom; which is how we are able to share in His greatness—a greatness that won’t end when this world does, but which will last forever. This is what Jesus was getting at when He said that “whoever welcomes one child like this in my name welcomes me.” Okay, but how do we do that? By leveraging what we have for the sake of those around us. This is the secret to greatness in God’s kingdom. In the economy of God’s kingdom, the greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great. The greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great.
Let’s think through together a couple of things this means for us. Right at the top of this list is the fact that if you are interested in doing life in God’s kingdom, you don’t have to bear the heavy load of image-management any longer. Worrying about what other people might think about you is an adult concern. But wait! Isn’t that something young people deal with all the time? It sure is, but do you know why? Because they’ve been saddled with adult concerns before they should have had to deal with them. A young child doesn’t worry about things like that. At all. Most of us probably have pictures somewhere of our doing something totally ridiculous when we were little. Why did we do that? Because we didn’t care what anybody else thought. We hadn’t learned to care yet. We did what our parents said, trusted they would have our backs when we did, and otherwise enjoyed life.
If we want to be great in God’s kingdom, that’s something we need to relearn. We need to develop the practice of doing what God says, trusting that He’ll have our backs when we do, and otherwise enjoying the life He has given us. And in case there’s any confusion, the thing Jesus said for us to be doing is loving one another. That is, we are to be intentionally dedicated to seeing the people around us become more fully who God made them to be. Or, to put that another way in light of our conversation this morning, we are to be committed to making them great. The greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great.
When we start worrying about image-management, we’re not going to simply and humbly trust in God in order to do what He says. We are going to filter everything through the lens of how this is going to make us look in the eyes of the people around us. When we start doing that, we start looking to leverage what resources we have to make ourselves look better. When this happens, we’re not following Jesus anymore, we’re following the idol of image. That never ends well. We wind up hurting ourselves and others by leading them away from God to be more concerned with managing either their image or even possibly ours. And as Jesus made pretty clear here: That’s not a path we want to take. The greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great.
Life in God’s kingdom is free from all such concerns. He is great there. Any greatness we have is a reflection of His. Because of that, we don’t have to worry about managing our own. At all. We can simply trust Him and do what He says like all good little children do. We can love one another freely and without fear. We can leverage all of our strengths and resources for the benefit of those around us. We can make those around us great. The greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great.
This brings us to the second thing we need to do with what Jesus says here. We need to take an inventory of what God has given us. What resources do you have at your disposal? For some of you, that’s money. God has given you a lot of money. He has entrusted a great deal of His wealth into your hands to manage faithfully on His behalf. Are you doing that wisely and well? Are you doing that effectively for the sake of lifting others up to be more like Him? Managing God’s money well, though, is not just for people who have a lot of it. You may have given yourself a little pass on that bit because you don’t feel like you have a lot of money. But you still have some, and so you need to steward it faithfully. We all need to practice the discipline of sacrificial generosity with intentionality.
For others of you, the major resource God has given you right now is time. You have more time than the average Joe. Are you using that time to its fullest in order to advance the people around you in the direction of God’s kingdom? Are you involved in making Gospel investments in the people around you who aren’t as far along in their journey of faith as you are, helping to disciple them in the direction of becoming more fully who Jesus created and called them to be? Are you taking active steps to make disciples who make disciples? Building the church isn’t just the job of the paid pastors. It’s actually our job to help you do that, a doing that often comes at the expense of time; time God has given you as a resource.
For all of us, there are some talents or abilities God has given us that can be leveraged for the sake of those around us. If you are a follower of Jesus, He has given you a set of spiritual gifts that were designed specifically to be used in the context of the body of Christ in order to build it up until we all reach the measure of fullness of Christ Himself. How are you using these gifts and abilities? How are you making those around you better by them? How are you making them great? The greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great.
If you want to be great, this is how. This is how, because it is how God is great. If you’ll come back next week, as we take the next step on our journey through Matthew 18, we’ll talk more about that.