Throw away your step-stool!

There are three parts to this blog post. I want to remind you of the step-stool analogy I used on Sunday. Then I want to illustrate what I was talking about by means of a video. Then I want to address you directly and press home the beautiful, humbling fruit of predestination.

So, first, here’s an excerpt from Sunday’s sermon:

“What prevents unity within the church? The single biggest reason we don’t experience more unity is our prideful self-centeredness. Humility produces unity, which gives glory to God. But our prideful self-centeredness inhibits unity.

At our house, we have one of those little step-stools you use to get up into the attic crawl-space or hang a picture – just three steps high. The image I have in my mind is this: every one of us is carrying around an invisible little step-stool throughout our day, and we love to climb up a step or two and stand there because we like to be just a little higher than the people around us. This happens all the time. Imagine a meeting at your workplace. You all start out on ground level, with just your hand on your step-stool. But then someone makes a really impressive presentation and you start feeling envious of them, so you make a cutting remark about their presentation – you climb up a step on your step-stool. They come back at you and climb up on their stool and you both keep getting higher and higher.

There are two problems with this tendency to climb up on our step-stools. First, even though we like to climb up and stand on our step-stools, it is really tiring after a while hauling these step-stools all over the place. It would be nice just to throw them away and be rid of them. Second, the other problem is that when we’re on our step-stools, we’re further away from people. We can’t reach them from up on the third step. We’re up there and we see someone crying – we’d like to console that person but that would mean we need to come down off our step-stool and we don’t want to do that, so we stay where we are.

Try building Christian community with a bunch of people standing on step-stools. It is not going to happen. We just can’t reach each other. Nobody wants to come down off their step-stool and serve. There is only one solution if God is going to create the kind of unified church that will bring him glory. The solution is radical: God removes all our step-stools. He humbles us to the ground.

One of the chief ways in which he removes our step stools is through the doctrine of predestination.”

Okay, that’s what I said on Sunday. Now, here is a video illustrating the horrid need to posture over against another person. In this video I can just see these two men climbing up higher and higher on their step-stools.

Now, for the third part of this blog post. Let me ask you how you responded to the video you just watched. The point of the video is not to direct us away from our own tendency to posture and preen, but to illustrate that tendency in ourselves. If your reaction to the video is to be smugly thankful that you’re not like that, you’ve missed the point. We all posture like that – admittedly, not always on live television.

Here’s the beauty of the doctrine of predestination. It undercuts our dreadful, self-centered pride. It reminds us that we can make no claim on God and that everything we have is a gift from him. By humbling us, predestination frees us from our cumbersome step-stools and liberates us for an experience of God and of true community.

I invite you to meditate upon Ephesians 1.3-6 this week and let it humble and liberate you: ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.’

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Oct 28, 12:26 PM