Christian Inequality

I mentioned last week in one of my devotionals that gym class was my favorite elective in elementary school. Can you guess what my favorite subject was/is? Well, based on the title of this devotional, if you guess math, you are correct! I have always loved math because I enjoy solving problems with numbers and am fascinated by the patterns you can develop to make quick math in your head a lot easier. For example, as we talked about in small groups yesterday (and as is depicted in an awesome video), 6 feet apart = 1 Jacob. This is one of the things I like most about math. If we can conceptualize lengths and heights of things we know, we can estimate lengths and heights of things we don’t know without using Google or a calculator! Okay…nerd time is over now.

Whether you like math or not, you probably remember learning about inequalities. Think back to those homework sheets you had to do where they gave you a bunch of numbers and you had to pick the correct inequality sign…< or >. It seems simple now, but it’s a fundamental representation of how we know what numbers are bigger (or smaller) than others. Even John the Baptist knew about inequalities.

In John 3:22-30, John the Baptist was asked to testify about Jesus by his disciples. Everyone thought John the Baptist was Jesus because he testified about Jesus before Jesus came, but John knew that wasn’t the case. When Jesus did come, the disciples basically said to John, “Who are you then?” John proclaims that he was only sent to preach about the coming of Jesus and would receive joy in his heart when he heard Jesus’ voice. In verse 30 he says about Jesus, “He must become greater, I must become less.”

The most important inequality we can learn doesn’t involve numbers. In the song “Only Jesus” by Casting Crowns, there’s a lyric that says, “I don’t care if they remember me, only Jesus.” We love to promote ourselves, but we aren’t on the same level as Jesus, and we never will be. We should all live so that others see glimpses of Jesus in us because…Jesus>Us.

-Jacob

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