"Where does it say that?"

In Luke 14:7, Jesus teaches a lesson in humility. I opened up my search engine and typed in, “lessons in humility”. I thought that maybe I would find a modern example of humility so that I could compare it to this chapter of the bible. To my surprise, there is no example, using those key words, that does not involve the name of Jesus or the bible as a whole, at least on the first several pages of links and web pages.

I don’t know about you, but that is scary and inspiring at the same time. We live in a world that has gone from humble to “hell, no!” in my lifetime. Conventional wisdom is, if you are humble in this world, you are a sucker that will be walked on. Parents used to teach their child to be humble and unselfish and now kids are taught to get theirs before someone else gets theirs. When I played organized sports as a child, it was always understood that the home run hitter ran humbly around the bases, the running back scored the winning touchdown with the attitude that he had done so before and would do it again in the future and the player who made the basket would have been run off the court if he made a throat slash sign or pumped his fist to signify his own greatness.

In this chapter, Jesus tells His followers (you and me) that we are to be humble and He uses the example of going to a wedding and choosing to sit at the head of the table without being assigned to sit there. He tells us that it would be embarrassing to be asked to move so that a more important person could have that seat of honor while you are relegated to a position further down the table. In this example, Christ tells us that it would be better to take the lower position at the table when we arrive and be invited by the host to sit in a more honored seat closer to the head of the table. Humility and self depreciation are not tools that this world admires but Jesus tells us in this example that the proud will be humbled and the humbled will be honored in the end.

With this in mind, there are going to be some surprised people on judgement day.