They called me in to speak for their class prayer this afternoon. My personal prayer life has been going a little down for the past few weeks as I’m getting very busy with academic work and research. When the students came and called me, I was quite clueless of what to speak to them about. I opened my Bible, read Luke 9: 46-49 and rushed for the prayer.

 

As I picked up one of the students to read the portion from the Bible it read,

 

46 An argument started among the disciples as to which of them would be the greatest. 47 Jesus, knowing their thoughts, took a little child and had him stand beside him. 48 Then he said to them, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest.”

 

For a second I stood still before the class and then began to talk.

 

I wonder where all of this actually began; this whole concept of trying to become the greatest among the crowd. Each one of us as individuals want to distinguish ourselves from the others through the degrees we earn, the job profiles we have and the great things we achieve in the course of lives on Earth. But where did this thirst in man to become great originate??

 

The Bible records that Adam and Eve were the first human beings created on Earth. They were in the garden of Eden and were enjoying in the presence of God all their days. And then came the serpent that tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge and she ate it. She offered it to Adam as well. After taking a bite of it, the two of them became wise and realized that they were naked and hid themselves from God.

 

Eve ate the fruit after yielding to the offer of Satan, of becoming ‘like God’, once she had eaten the fruit. So the entire yearning in the human mind was to become like God and not accept the sovereignty of God over human life.

 

Ages have passed by since the entire episode of the garden of Eden. Man invented the wheel, discovered fire, started trading, invented money, brought about the industrial revolution, flew in the sky, landed on the moon and what not. In one recent portion from a paper I read that a particular person had also bought a patch of land on the Moon for surviving once the Earth disappears..!!

 

Man now runs to and fro to gain knowledge at all levels. Students need knowledge to fetch them a decent job, employees need constantly upgraded knowledge to remain competent, managers need knowledge to manage institutions, leaders need knowledge to run nations. Even after gaining all the knowledge in the world, man remains unhappy and keeps slogging hard to gain more of knowledge. And the birth of all knowledge was the fault of one woman deciding to disobey the will of the Almighty God!

 

So now where is all of this going to end? Does this end with our deaths? Does it end with Christ’s second coming? I guess none of us would ever be able to answer this.

 

The greatest challenge I believe that man faces is to now make himself like a child inspite of all the knowledge he possesses! Jesus asks us to become the least and then we can be called the greatest!! How impractical!!

 

Try focusing on the characteristics of a child. Apart from being innocent, a child is completely dependent on its parents. I’m sure we all remember those days when we wanted mummy and daddy to come to school with us..or those lovely times of childhood when mummy and daddy were the only people we wanted in life to make us feel happy!!

 

As adults now its time that we ‘tamed’ our hearts to become like the heart of a child. We need to tame our hearts to depend so much on God Almighty that whatever the circumstance arises, we should have the blind faith in Him that He would make things work for us. It gets very difficult to allow Him to work when our plans are different from His. That’s when our knowledge begins to work in our minds. A lot of things seem impossible and absurd. But if we need to become the greatest in His kingdom when He comes to take us back home, then we have to allow him to work and mould us the way He wants us to be.

 

Maybe then according to the standards of this knowledgeable world, we would be the least, but be assured of the fact that we would be greatest of all in His kingdom!!