Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” - 1 Peter 5:5 (ESV)
I am in my mid-thirties. Despite what some junior and senior high students in my life tell me, I am not an old man. Yet, neither am I a young man. I am not a child. I am older than Jesus was at the time of his crucifixion. For some reason, that has always been a significant marker for me.
I have been asking God to make me wise since I was a teenager. Because of what James 1:5-8 promises, I am confident that I am wiser now than I would have been had I not asked so consistently for God to supply the lack of wisdom.
Growing Smaller
Here is my point: the wiser I become, the more like a child I perceive myself to be. I perceive a greater dependence on God and a stronger sense of the smallness of my understanding, insight, and discernment. As I consider God’s greatness and my smallness compared to him, I do not become any relatively bigger the older and wiser I grow. Instead, the older and (hopefully) wiser I become, the smaller I perceive myself to be compared to God. I perceive myself to be becoming more dependent, more frail, more insufficient, more ignorant, more foolish, and more in need of his transforming grace in my life. In short, the older I get, the more I feel like a child.
Growing in the grace and knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ feels a bit like what C.S. Lewis did with Aslan in his Chronicles of Narnia. There is a passage in those books in which the narrator describes how the older and bigger the children become, Aslan somehow seems bigger too, more powerful, more dangerous, less tame. One would expect their sense of smallness in proportion to Aslan to diminish as they grow up. But as they mature, Aslan only seems bigger. The children never come to perceive themselves as around the same size as Aslan.
As I reflect on my few years of growth in Christ, Christ only seems to have grown greater in my perspective, more awful (in the sense of inspiring awe), more grand, more weighty. Meanwhile, I sense myself growing smaller in my own perspective as he grows bigger. This makes my pride and selfishness more ridiculous when they appear in my heart and become evident in my interactions.
More than that, I find other people growing smaller too. I have a tendency to be intimidated by those thinkers we call “great.” I respect and wonder at the feats and prowess of people in the world. I sense myself to be small compared to them. And yet, as I grow in Christ, and probably also as I age in years, I find myself less impressed by them. It is almost as though as I come closer to the ages at which people have typically begun to accomplish great things for which we remember them, they have somehow become less impressive. It’s like looking at a pointillist painting; from a distance, the image appears sharp and clear. But up close, it is much blurrier. Even closer, you see that the image is made of little dots and strokes. The closer I inch toward “old," the less different it seems to be from “young.”
In the text from 1 Peter 5:5 above, Peter commands the younger to be subjected to the elders. There is a right kind of headship and authority the older should have over the younger. But Peter admonishes everyone, young and old, to be humble toward one another. This means no haughtiness, no condescension, no disrespect, no arrogance, no pride, no self-exaltation. The young should be humble toward the old. We get that. But the old should be humble toward the young. We get that less.
Starting to Look Back
As I reflect on my experiences with older believers, it strikes me that I am already at an age from which others have looked down on me with cynical and jaded remarks. I am at the beginning of the time in my life span in which I might start to develop the kinds of perspectives and bitterness about which I might complain to those who are younger than I am. I am on the cusp of the age from which others sometimes feel justified to look disdainfully at those coming behind.
And yet, as I grow older and am called a “young man” by fewer and fewer people, there does not yet appear to be any justifiable reason for me to become condescending and dismissive of those younger. I am young enough to know what it is like to be young to some but old enough to know what it is like to be positively elderly to others. Is it safe to say I have already learned the bulk of what I will learn in my lifetime? My worldview is more or less set. The big-ticket items such as God, Christ, sin, salvation, and my eternal destiny are already set.
And yet, I do not sense in myself the sense of distance, of justified aloofness, of intellectual and experiential superiority to those less educated and less-experienced than myself. The more God grows me in Christ, the greater the distance there appears to be between God’s holiness and my work-in-progress-ness; at the same time, and in proportion to God’s increasing greatness in my perspective, everyone else in the world seems to grow more and more the same.
This is such the point that if I look at my own infant child, there suddenly does not seem to be such a great gulf fixed between myself and her. She is ignorant, helpless, dependent, insufficient. Am I not the same? This is not a false humility. I recognize that, compared to my infant child, I know reams more than she does. I can do much more than she can. But compared to God, is the difference that great? The separation between myself and God is much, even infinitely, greater than the separation between myself and my baby. The older I get, the more I see that. I am aging into manhood. But even as I age into manhood, I come to find that manhood is not so different from childhood. It seems to me that, if I do it right, I will find in my manhood how to live like a child before my Heavenly Father: ignorant but constantly learning, helpless but safe, dependent but provided for, insufficient but with all my needs supplied.
In fact, I am realizing more and more that my worst moments, my most ridiculous sin, is when I act at least like a child. I act like I know all, can help myself, am independent, and am self-sufficient. How do I pursue humility as I age? I need to clothe myself with humility toward others. I need to put on humility like a coat that I always wear and never take off.
Thankfully, there are plenty of examples of this in my life. I can think of older believers whose humility, gentleness, and sincerity of faith reflect a maturity that I pray marks me half as much when I am their age. They are not embittered, not haughty, not jaded. They have gone through plenty relative to most of the people alive on this planet, but they have not seen much compared to how much there is to see. And they seem to know it.
We are all children. The oldest among us is young in knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. The most knowledgeable among us know little, and they know it. The most experienced have not experienced much. And the more we age, the more we ought to see this. To grow jaded, cynical, condescending, and bitter as we age should not be normal for Christians. Instead, as we age, we should grow in Christ. And as we grow in Christ, we ought to grow in humility. And as we grow in humility, we will find that we are aging backward in our own minds, reverting to our infancy, when we knew so little but were so eager to grow and learn, except that as adults, we are more aware of it. We are more aware that, as we age, we are really only children.
P.S. - This is a one-off post before I begin to post the summaries of each book of the New Testament. I plan to begin posting those next week. I may intersperse other articles to break up the pattern. I pray that you benefit from them! - Douglas