James Nisbet Commentary - Luke 14:10 - 14:11

Online Resource Library

Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | Download

James Nisbet Commentary - Luke 14:10 - 14:11


(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)

This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

HUMILITY AND ITS REWARD

‘But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth him=shall be exalted.’

Luk_14:10-11

So that is the result of being humble, is it? ‘Go up higher; have worship.’ Shall we not all do well to be humble at this rate? It will be easy enough to sit down meekly in the lower room if our position of inferiority has only got to last until some one arrives to bid us move up to a more deserving situation. Is it, then, but a preliminary condition, this Christian humility, which we must pass through in order to leave it behind? Is it merely the proper mode by which to make our approach to a higher dignity, by which to appeal to those who can authoritatively recognise and approve and promote us? If so, we shall sit on there in the chosen place where humility so aptly reveals itself, always expecting our probation to end, always listening for the good word that will release us from our self-imposed restraint. ‘Friend, go up higher.’ How we shall leap to hear the salutation! How gaily we shall be off to receive our due reward!

I. God means man to attain fullness of life.—Christ comes that man may have life, and have it ever more and more abundantly. He looks for no meagre abnegations that lead to nothing; He abhors all forms of mere negation and nihilism, of absorption into the unconscious; He has nothing to do with flight, or refusal, or retreat, or abandonment of the world in despair, or of death into nothingness. In Christ, on the contrary, the personal, individual man is to put out all his powers; he is to arrive at his full manhood; he is to be quickened into richer and richer development. Consciousness is to become more and more tingling with life, more and more keen on victorious adventures. It is to be ever moving on from glory to glory; it is to attain its end in gladness. Therefore the Gospel of Christ cannot stop short in the negations, in the deaths, in the forsakings, in the self-sacrifices; it must go on to contemplate and to display the excellent achievements that will follow. Christian asceticism is only the recoil by which the spirit may leap farther forward on its journey towards the glorious close; and Christianity, therefore, is pledged to uphold the vision of a humanity that ever advances in splendour of effort, in fulfilment of desire, in consummation of joy. It must utter the prevailing cry which for ever evokes from man a yet fairer service, a yet nobler attainment. ‘Friend, go up higher. Thou shalt henceforth have worship. He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’

II. All the emptying of self is an admittance of God into action within the self.—According to the measure with which man distrusts himself, denies himself, negates himself, God in Christ enters, fills, takes possession, uses, feeds. Christ takes up the room left vacant; Christ pours in His own life abundantly; Christ makes all His own. As the man dies to himself, he becomes alive in Christ; he expands, he is transfigured, he is glorified. And the greater the glory, the less is it his own. The more glory there is in him, the more he recognises its true source outside himself. His own transfiguration then intensifies his humility; its very glory fills him with shame. That is the whole secret of Christian growth; it grows by growth in humility. Far from the rewards corrupting its humility, they provoke it; for the reward, the result, is what God Himself works in the soul; it is the signal proof that He is there; and, therefore, the more visible and unmistakable the reward, the greater the evidence that it is God alone Who achieves all that is achieved. And as the assurance grows that it is Christ Who does it, the greater becomes the abasement, the sense of unworthiness in the soul that is so blessed.

III. Two things follow from this which we may just notice.

(a) First, that humility is quite real. We are not asked by Christianity to take a false measure of ourselves, to pretend to be less deserving than we are. We have not to take a lower estimate of our powers and gifts than is true. On the contrary, humility is the only temper which takes the absolutely true and exact measure of the facts. We are, as a fact, nothing at all except what we become through being in Christ. We have nothing of our own, nothing except sin. It is sin, because it is our own; that is what makes it sin. Our true life is never our own. We cannot live in ourselves; we have no origination, no initiation in ourselves. All that we are or can be comes into us out of God, and carries us out of its own energy back into God. Humility is simply the precise and sincere recognition of this, the true inner law of our life. Humility, then, is our one true relation to the reality of things.

(b) And, secondly, we note that humility and its rewards are not so much to be thought of as consecutive, but as contemporaneous. We do not really first lose our life in order that we may gain it; but by losing it—in the act of losing it—we gain it. They are simply the obverse and reverse of the same act. We go on losing it, and so go on gaining it. The first condition is no mere preliminary; it never ceases to be the one condition on which the result takes place. The impulse, the instinct to seek the lower place, is itself the secret of a responsive discovery by which we find ourselves translated to a higher room.

Rev. Canon Scott Holland.

Illustration

‘The Christian life is a life of energy, of aspiration, of exaltation, of heroic ambition. Always it is mounting on eagles’ wings, always it is inheriting new powers. Meekness is not weakness, but the secret of all our strength; for if we only distrust and deny ourselves and trust entirely in, the force of God acting in us, there is nothing that we cannot aspire to do; there is no glory that may not be achieved, no adventure too hazardous to risk, no hope too splendidly daring. “I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me.” That is St. Paul’s confident assertion. Because he can do nothing, because he is crucified, because he is dead to himself, because he confesses himself to be the chief of sinners, because he is weak, and worthless, and empty and vain, therefore for that very reason there is nothing that he cannot do. Therefore he labours more abundantly than they all, yet not he but the grace of God in him. Our worthlessness is the measure of our worth, If once we knew our own unworthiness, then in would pour the full tide of God’s energy to fill our emptiness, to recoup our failure. “With God all things are possible.” Now, with God and in God we may dream the great dreams; we may set out on the heroic hope, we may nourish the vast ambition.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)