Today’s Overview:!
None of us want to be known as selfish, and yet we’ve all looked at the last piece of pizza and tried to grab it first. We’ve all nabbed those extra clothes from the sale rack just so no one else could get to them. We’ve all called shot-gun, wrestled for the remote, or raced to the good bathroom after a road trip. We’ve all been selfish. Why? No one likes to be around people who are always putting themselves first, but we all keep finding ourselves there wondering where that intense sense of self- centeredness comes from. For the next few weeks we’re going to talk about the source of and appropriate response to these feelings in our new series called “Mine.”
The caste system in a typical middle school is complex and intricate. Many restless nights have been spent by middle schoolers determining and scheming how they can climb the social ladder, move to a better social group, preserve their spot at the table, or simply just become more popular. This obsession with social hierarchy is not that different from the society seen in 1st century Jerusalem. In Matthew 20 we find Jesus’ disciples, who had been social outsiders all their life, wondering if they were going to be the “greatest” in the new kingdom. Flying in the face of all the common competitive and selfish ways to gain fame, Jesus simply says this: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” While this seems outrageous to put into practice in today’s middle school, the truth is that the people who understand this principle are probably the ones we all want to be around anyway.
Matt 20:26-28: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave- just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”