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Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the FOMO message series teaching from the New Testament book of Matthew discussing our tendencies to try to elevate our own well-being by chasing less-than-ideal rewards under our own power, instead of trusting that God's love is sufficient.

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Let's pray together. Father, thank you for each person who's gathered here, in Butler, Strip District, and online. God, I pray that you would speak to each of us, that my words would reflect your word in content, and in tone, and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. 

I want to begin with a few things that some famous people have said. This is from the mythical man, Michael Scott. He says, "Do I need to be liked? Absolutely not. I like to be liked. I enjoy being liked. I have to be liked, but it's not like this compulsive need to be liked, like my need to be praised." As only Michael Scott can do in an awkward, dead panning kind of way, he says something that has a universal ring of truth to it. Where you say, "You know, if I'm honest, I have a desire to be praised." Maybe I'm not as out there as Michael Scott, but I understand the desire. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey gave a commencement address at Harvard. This is what she said. She said, "No matter what challenges or setbacks or disappointments you may encounter along the way, you will find true success and happiness if you have only one goal." 

So, this is Oprah about to drop a pearl on the graduating class of Harvard about how you can be happy and successful. Here's what she says. "There is really only one and that is this; to fulfill the highest, most truthful expression of yourself as a human being." Okay? So, Oprah says you want to be happy, find the truest, happier fullest expression of yourself as a human being, and then maximize your humanity by using your energy to lift yourself up, your family, and the people around you. Then she goes out and she says this. "Your generation, I know, has developed a finely honed radar for BS, the spin, the phoniness, and the artificial nastiness that saturates so much of our national debate. I know you all understand better than most that real progress requires an authentic way of being, honesty, and above all empathy. The single most important lesson I've learned in 25 years of talking every single day to people was that there's a common denominator in our human experience." 

Then here's what she says. "We want to be validated, and we want to be understood." Now, despite the fact that Oprah contradicts herself in her earlier part of her speech by saying, "Find the truest expression of yourself," and then later she says, "What we all want is to be validated and empathize," what she says is here's what I know you all want and that is you want people to get you, to understand you, to appreciate you. It's very similar to what Michael Scott said. Now, it would be easy right now to be like, "Huh. Michael Scott, Oprah." Okay? But do you realize that what you just heard read from Matthew 18, the disciples actually wanted the same thing? Did you see this? Did you hear this? 

Matthew 18, verse one, the disciples say this, "Who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" Do you know what they wanted? They wanted to be made much of in God's kingdom. They wanted Jesus to say, "One day, you guys will be the big deal." That's what they wanted. In other words, what they wanted, what we want today, isn't all that different. There's something inside of us that wants to be praised, wants to be understood, wants to be appreciated, and wants to be validated. 

We started a series a couple of weeks ago that we've called FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. What we're doing in these weeks is we're basically looking at some of the fears that we have and juxtaposing them with the notion of the kingdom of God in the Bible. So, we're using some of the passages where the kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven is talked about, and here the kingdom is center because what's happening is the disciples are saying, "Who will be the greatest in the kingdom?" and it reveals a fear that we have that we won't be made enough of, that we won't be a big enough deal. 

So, we're going to examine this, and we'll do this today by first looking at what I'm just going to simply call the presumptuous question that the disciples ask in verse one, and then a telling response that Jesus gives in verses two through five. So first, the presumptuous question. This is verse one. Again, you've heard it read, I just read it. "At this time, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" Now our natural way of thinking about the disciples is that we tend to think this was like the supergroup that Jesus chose to be his closest associates, that he looked over the landscape and said, "Who are the brightest and the best? Who are the real winners here? That's who I'm going to choose." 

But nothing could be further from the truth because the disciples were not the winners of the day. They were the people that many people today would say, "These aren't the high-end people." In fact, in that day, what happened was if you were well connected, if you were morally upstanding, if you were smart, you would get selected by a known rabbi to study under the rabbi. If you were on that high end, that's where your life trajectory would go, and you would be in a life of service to kind of the temple and things like that. If you didn't make the cut, then you'd go into a trade. The people who went into the trade would have different pecking orders within the trades and toward the low end of the pecking order was the fishermen. In other words, Jesus chose for his closest associates a tax collector, somebody who was despised by people as being immoral, and fisherman, and people who were not the brightest and the best. 

So, these people come to Jesus and they say to him, after they've been chosen to be his followers, and they say, "Who's going to be the greatest?" Now I'm going to use a term to refer to this. Their day, our day, that some of the younger, hipper, worldly wise staff members told me is a phrase that has double meaning, but I'm going to use it anyway. If you know the double meaning, good for you. If not, you can look it up later. Now you're all like, "What?" I'm going to call what the disciples did and what you and I tend to do "slotting". Okay? That's the phrase, I guess it's a drinking thing, but I'm going to use it differently today. This isn't about drinking. Okay? 

So, when we slot, what we do is we compare ourselves with other people and we rank ourselves and say, "Well, I rank up here, or up here, or up here on a scale," and what we do is we typically will have three or four scales that we're working at a time that we say these are the scales that matter. So, for the disciples, originally their slotting was, "Am I going to make it into one of the rabbi's groups? No, I'm not. So, I rank low. Am I going to make it in one of the trades? No, I rank low." Then what do they do? They say, "Well, we're going to come up with a whole other system, who's going to be great in the kingdom of heaven, and by being a follower of Jesus, we're going to rank high in that one, and that's going to be where we win the slotting game, where we are at the high end, where Jesus would say, 'Well, who's going to be the grace in the Kingdom?' You guys! Because you followed me." 

That's what they were hoping, probably, that Jesus would say in this moment. Instead, Jesus responds differently. Now, how do you and I slot today? Oh, there's a lot of ways. Sometimes it starts early, high school, middle school, where we start to say, "Well, I'm a really good athlete. I'm smart. I'm too smart for school so I don't have to do school the way other people do school because I'm going to be great without it. I'm cool. Look at how I dress. I have people of the opposite sex who are interested in me." Do you see every one of these becomes a slotting scale where we say, "I rank high because of this," and then we get a little older and it becomes what school do I get into? What job do I have? What kind of house do I have? Was I able to remodel my kitchen and have a better kitchen than the other people in my life? Was I able to drive a nicer car? Was I able to retire? 

Then it moves maybe from some of those things that you might say, "Well, those are shallow. That's not me," and like the disciples, what we do is we move to a whole other scale. Am I moral? Do I care about the issues of the day? Am I somebody who is interested in all of the realities of poverty, of race, and do I get the dynamics of our world? Am I spiritual? Am I moral? We just keep moving our scales until we find a scale that we go, "I get this one. I win this one. I'm a passionate worshiper. I'm a person who cares about doctrine, and cares about truth. This is how I define how I am good." Do you see how that works in our culture? We're just constantly looking for new ways to say, "This gives me the praise or the validation," maybe from nobody except ourselves, where we say, "I've done well at this," and we just keep moving our scales until we say, "I have a scale that works for me." 

Now, one of the problems with this is that if you're successful at one or two scales, there's always some other scales that come into play that you may not feel successful at. Beyond that, if you aren't successful, then you always feel a sense of inadequacy around something. I mean, some of us will try to say, "I'm going to fight the aging battle and I'm going to look good for my age long past when other people my age look good," and you'll win that for a while, but sooner or later you'll lose. So, we'll give ourselves to something or we'll say, "I'm going to make sure that my family has this great experience," and then sooner or later, somebody in our family will get upset with somebody else in our family, and the whole thing just won't feel like we want it to feel. 

So, even when we choose good scales, they don't always work. Here's what I saw this last week that made me even think about this more. I don't know if you know who Alex Rodriguez is. Alex Rodriguez is known as an athlete. He's a baseball player, played for the Yankees, I think the Rangers, the Mariners, was a great baseball player. He probably will be in the hall of fame. He won some world series titles with the Yankees and made lots of money. I think he was the first baseball player to sign a $200 million contract. I mean, that's some money. Okay. So, Alex Rodriguez had fame. He had success. He had money and I'm told that he's dates J-Lo. Some people would say, "That's a good thing. I'm not going to weigh in on that, but some people would say that's good." So, he's got all these scales that he's rising up on and people are saying, "Oh, this guy has it all," and he's now part of a group that's trying to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

It's an NBA franchise and it looks like he's going to be part of the successful bid. If he's successful, what will happen is in time, it will transition, and he will become the primary owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves. I mean, to own an NBA franchise, you have to be in the true upper echelon of the financial wellbeing of this world. I mean, most of us can't afford NBA tickets, let alone a franchise. So, Alex Rodriguez is going to buy this franchise, and so somebody asked their new star player, Anthony Edwards, who's the first pick in the last year's NBA draft, who's a young NBA player, what he thought of Alex Rodriguez becoming a potential owner of the NBA franchise. Take a look. 

Do you have any thoughts about him? Are you an A-Rod fan at all growing up or anything like that? What do you think about what he might bring to the team? "A fan? What do you mean? Who is he?" The baseball player. Alex Rodriguez. "Yeah, nah. I don't know who that is." Okay. "I know he's going to be the owner, but I don't know nothing about baseball." 

I mean, I just have to say, if you are into slotting, that is a moment of waking up, because Alex Rodriguez won all kinds of slotting battles and here comes Anthony Edwards and he's like, "Who's Alex Rodriguez. I don't care. It means nothing to me." Here's what's true. You can win all the slotting battles that you think are important in life and you may not call them slotting battles. You can be a great husband, a great wife, a great mom, or a great dad. You can do everything right. You can be moral. You can be well off financially. You can do everything and sooner or later, there will be an Anthony Edwards who will come along and say, "What? Who? So what? I don't care." In other words, it won't meet our insatiable need to be praised or to be made much of, as much as we want it to. 

Here's what some of us will try to do. We'll try to transfer this idea of slotting to our kids. And what we'll do is we'll say, "Well, if I can just help my kid, my children, have something that they're successful at, something that they feel good about themselves with." And so, what we'll do is we'll go through their childhood and we'll say in essence, well, I want them to be smart. Oh, they weren't super smart? Well, I want them to be a good athlete. Oh, they're not a good athlete? Well, I want them to be really good at music or at a dance, or I really want them to..." and we just keep moving the scale until we find something that they can be good at and we're like, "This is great. Now I found the thing they can be good at." Do you know what happens? Sooner or later, they find some kids who are better at it than they are. 

Do you know how many parents in this area have given themselves to travel sports? I mean, there are parents who are like, "My five-year old travel soccer team is the best. We are elite. We play against the elite competition all over the country." Then what happens is they get to be seven and there's a team that's better, and we're like, "Well, okay, maybe soccer wasn't your thing. Let's try something else." My point is just this; when we have a slotting mentality for ourselves, we transfer it to our kids, and it is a shaky platform on which to build an identity because it will always crumble. There will always be a moment when you'll say, "What I have built my identity on is not sufficient." 

So, we all want to be made much of, but that leads us to the telling response of Jesus. Here's what we read. Verse two, it says, "He called a little child to him and he placed the child among them." In the original language, the New Testament is written in Greek and translated into English for us. In the Greek language, there are different words for children and the NIV tries to pick this up here with this phrase "little child," because little doesn't connote small in size, but it means young, very young. So, this was not a word that was used for a 10, 11, 12-year-old. This was a word that was used for somebody who was much younger. Think three, four, five years old. 

So, Jesus brings a little child, a three, four, five-year-old, he puts him in his midst, and then he says this. He says, "Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes a lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me." 

So, Jesus brings this little kid. He puts him here and he says, "Do you want to know who's going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? It's the person who's most like the child." Now, why does Jesus do this? I believe the reason Jesus does this is because little kids don't do this. They don't slot. Here's how I know this. If you've been around a three, four, or five-year-old and you put them with the other three, four, five-year-old’s, here's what I can almost guarantee you they don't do. They don't sit down and say, "How much money does your mom or dad make? I have to know before I play with you." They don't say, "Oh, you have really cool designer clothes? Awesome. Let's play." They don't say, "Oh, you were potty-trained at age three or two or five? I can play with you if you're in my same category." They don't do that. They say, "You know what? We're all here." That they don't look and say, "Oh, is your skin color different than mine?" They just simply play. 

So, I believe what Jesus is doing when he brings this child down, he says, "If you want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like, it is like a child, and if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, if you want to be great in the kingdom of heaven, you need to become like a child. In other words, you need to get to a point in your life where you're not constantly playing the who's going to be the greatest game, the slotting game." When Jesus says that unless you become like a child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven, I believe that this is true in at least two ways. One way I'm going to say is, it's true theologically. What I mean by this is Jesus in his teaching and certainly in the rest of the New Testament, what we see is that the way that we enter into the kingdom of heaven is not by winning any kind of a slotting game, comparison game, a morality game, where we say, "I've become more moral or better or more of a follower of Jesus than other people." 

But it's precisely in acknowledging that we haven't done what we need to do. That we're incapable. This is what Ephesians chapter two verse eight and nine say, that it's by grace through faith that we're saved. It's not by our works so that we can't boast. In other words, we don't come to saving faith in Jesus Christ by saying, "I've done better than other people." We come to saving faith in Jesus Christ by saying, "We all need grace, and this is where I am." But it's also true relationally. What I mean when I say that it's true relationally, is when Jesus says in verse four that if you want to know what a child is like, he defines it because he doesn't just leave us to guess. He says, "A child takes a lowly position." Some translations say a humble position. What this means is that the kingdom of heaven is felt and experienced whenever we are on some kind of a continuum and we intentionally under slot ourselves as a way of giving deference to other people. 

In fact, Jesus goes so far as to say, "Whoever becomes like a little child," and then in verse five he says, "And whoever welcome one of these," which I believe is his way of saying not just the kingdom is about your own disposition, but it's about a willingness to welcome people into your life who can't add anything to your life, who you don't necessarily even look at and say, "Oh, this person helps my standing." 

But you see, when we're slotting, what we do is we only want to be with people who somehow enhance our feeling of being enough or being praised. We don't ask people to praise us, but what we do is we say, I only want to be with people who are enough like me that I somehow feel validated in the way that I live. To welcome people, and I already alluded to this, as a child, means that you don't look at somebody and say, "Where are they on the economic scale? Where are they on the education scale? Do they use the kind of grammar that I use? Do they dress the way that I dress? Do they have my political views? Do they see the world the way I see the world?" What happens when we're welcoming people is we're not drawn into all of these distinctions and certainly, as I said earlier, kids don't look and say, "Oh, you're a different color than me. Therefore, I should be in a different place than you." There's a welcoming of anybody. 

We live in a culture right now that's stoking so many of the divisions that exist, but those things are learned, and Jesus is saying, "You want to enter the kingdom of heaven? Relationally then what that will be is that you will change and become like a little child." In fact, he uses the word change. And the word change, again, the original language is used in several other places. One of them is it's used in Matthew 5:39 to turn the other cheek. So, the idea is you're completely turning away from one thing to the other. It's used in Revelation 11:6, "For blood being turned to water." In other words, there's a complete change of substance. So what Jesus is doing in essence is he's saying, "I know that you all have this desire to be made much off, in one way or another, and you'll keep moving the scales to find a scale you think you can win on." 

Then he says, "But unless you change and become like a little child who says, "I don't need the scales," then you won't enter the kingdom of heaven." So how do we change and become like a little child? I believe that the answer to that is that we learn to source our significance, not in whatever slotting scale that we're looking to, but instead we learn to source our significance in how Christ values us. Now, our tendency might be to say, "Well, I just need to stop slotting myself. I need to repent." That's true, but I don't think it goes deep enough. Because that's one tendency. The other tendency is to psychologize this, and what I mean by that is to say just celebrate how loved you are by God, how much God loves you. 

When you realize that, when you savor that, then that will be enough. By the way, that was a little bit of Oprah without the God piece. Just find your own value and celebrate that, offer that to the world. But again, it doesn't go deep enough. What we need is actually both, and here's why. Because whatever's at the top of your current slotting scale, or scales, is likely the thing that you're worshiping. In other words, if you say, "What I need right now is I need to be seen as," even if it's just for you, "hard-working, smart, a good parent. I need to be seen as successful. I need to be seen as fun. I need all my events in life to go well." 

Whatever that is, that's what you're worshiping and so what it requires is actually two things: to repent of the idolatry in which you're saying, "This is what I need," where we say, "You know what? I acknowledge, God, that I've elevated something to say this is too important," but simultaneously to understand and see the love that God has for us so that we can source our significance in God, not in all the things of this earth. 

Thomas Chalmers, who was a Puritan writer, wrote a book called The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Here's what he said in it, and this is why I say we can't just simply say stop it. We have to have a new affection. He says, "It's seldom that any of our bad habits or flaws are made to disappear by a mere process of natural distinction. At least, it is very seldom that this is done through the instrumentality of reasoning." In other words, you're not just going to tell yourself, "Oh, I'm making too much of this," because you're drawn to it. You want to be much in an area. 

So, he says, "It's seldom that this is done by the mere instrumentality of reasoning or by the mere force of mental determination, but what cannot be thus destroyed may be dispossessed and one taste may be made to give way to another and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind. The heart's desire for having some object or other, this is unconquerable. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one." In other words, what you won't do, or I won't do is simply say, "You know what? I've been way too into success, way too into fitness, way too into morality. Now I'm going to ..." and we'll just keep having new scales. 

But a new affection, when we understand the value and love that God has for us, will allow us to have real freedom. In fact, sometimes people will ask the question. Basically, "Why should I want to be a person of faith? What does it do for me?" Here's what I would say beyond eternity, beyond anything else. One of the things that it does is it creates an incredible freedom, because without this new affection of God's love for us through Jesus Christ, what will happen is we'll simply go through life always having a new scale. And if you win a few scales, you'll say, "Look at me," but then sooner or later, you'll run into your own version of Anthony Edwards, who will say, "Who? What? So what? Who cares?" Or you'll go through life frustrated that you didn't, and you'll just keep finding new scales. 

But where your freedom is, where my freedom is, is in saying, "There's a God who loves me and he loves me in spite of my imperfections and my shortcomings." In fact, it is Jesus' way to say it's when you acknowledge him that we receive grace. Here's what this means. It means that if you are able to live with that new affection, that you'll be able to say, "You know what? It's not that it's unimportant to me, but it's no longer essential to me what my teacher, my parents, my ex says about me. What's more important to me is what God has said about me. It's no longer important to me whether or not the parent group that I run in all looks at me and says, "You're doing everything right with your kids." Or they kind of scoff at me. It doesn't matter if my kids succeed at sports or succeed at something that we value or don't succeed. Not that I don't want them to, but all of a sudden, I'm saying, "What matters is not how I rank on a scale." 

It won't matter how spiritual or moral you look at yourself and say, "Will I be the greatest in the kingdom of God?" Because Jesus even attacked that very idea in his response. What he did is he said, "It isn't what you think it is. There isn't the scale that you climb. Become like a child, acknowledge your need, and then you will experience freedom." It takes the expulsive power of a new affection, of saying, "I see, and I savor what Jesus Christ has done to free me from playing the slotting game on a regular basis." What will happen for most of us is we'll have moments of clarity where we see that we're playing a slotting game, and all of a sudden, we'll say, "This is kind of goofy," and our natural default will be to start a new scale. 

But our freedom is in saying, "Jesus Christ loves me whether I rank high or low in any scale that I'm on," and of saying, "I don't need the idolatry or the worship of whatever I think is on top of that scale. But instead, I have the worship of the true God that is part of my life." 

Father, we thank you that your word directs us how to be free from an incessant need to try to make much of ourselves. God, I pray that for each one of us who's gathered in Butler, the Strip, online, or in Wexford, that you would help each one of us to see the freedom of what it means to relinquish playing this game and instead be a person who has our significance sourced in our relationship with you. God, I pray for those who are gathered and maybe have always thought of religion as just another scale in which to succeed at, that even this message would open our eyes to see that a relationship with you is complete freedom from the scale game, and that we can come into a faith relationship with you even today, by just acknowledging our sinfulness and our need for a savior, Jesus Christ. 

God, for those who know your son is their savior, but still find themselves constantly trying to slot themselves on some scale, I pray that there would be real freedom from saying, "God, my significance is sourced in what you've already declared about me." We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.