Greatness
This will be a special weekend at LAC because some of our church family who live with a variety of disabilities will be involved in our services. Accordingly, we will be moving forward in our study of Matthew's Gospel to the text in which Jesus insists that children are valued and honored by God..
"Wait a minute!" you might think. "What does the valuing of children have to do with our emphasis on disability?" My response is that this question reveals how much society has changed since Jesus' days. In the 1st century, children were the definition of "the least of these." In our Western society, youth is valued over age and experience. Indeed, the value of children was embedded in our global consciousness at least as early as 1959:
The child shall enjoy special protection and shall be given opportunities and facilities by law and by other means to enable him to develop physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity.
From the United Nations Declaration on Children's Rights, 1959
We tend to take words like those for granted nowadays. It's difficult for us to understand how any civilized society could doubt that children matter. But, in the days of Jesus, there was evidence that children were sometimes dispensable objects. Roman law gave no protection to a child. If a Roman father wanted to, he could kill his offspring without any fear of prosecution. And as for the Greeks, a first-century Greek workman in Egypt concluded a letter to his pregnant wife when he was away from home "If it is a girl, throw it away."
Those were the days that Jesus was living in. As he did throughout his life, Jesus taught that people, all people at any age or in any situation, are made in God's image and are eternally loved by their Creator. If we are wise, we won't take any of the "least of these" for granted, either.
There is evidence that in some segments of our world, our disabled are among those we tend most often to ignore or devalue. United Nations declarations and national laws sometimes produce little effect in combatting our tendency to look at people in ways very differently from the way Jesus did. I think that the reason is that declarations often are not alive to the real reason why all people matter.
I hope that you will notice that in Matthew 18, Jesus isn't voicing merely humanistic platitudes about caring for the "least of these" in society. He provides us with underlying moral reasons for the value of all people. We will look at his teaching today. My prayer is that our eyes will becomes more like Jesus' because of our worship together.
To His Glory,
Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor
