Ephesians 4:1-3
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
The world is filled with oceans of good advice, moral exhortations and improving counsel from people who sit in comfortable offices or behind microphones. Such people have an easy command of self-evident Principles for Happy Living. We need to Work Hard, Play Fair, Have Self-Esteem and Be Nice. We need to Leave the World Better Than We Found It and do all the other things our mother told us to do when she kissed us on the forehead and sent us off to kindergarten. Talk is cheap. But there is something intrinsically more solid going on when the wisdom is being spoken, not by somebody chattering on the cheap, but sitting in a cell under arrest for committing no particular crime with no particular certainty that he might not lose his head in a Neronian bureaucratic mix-up. Here is somebody who really has a reason to be resentful, yet who is instead concerned for our good and urgent in his insistence that we must really be loving, not just gab about it. Like his Master, Paul wasn’t kidding about finding joy in the lowest place. He did more than blab about lowliness and meekness as the road to happiness: he lived it. Today, let’s take a practical step toward “living lowly” ourselves. For it really is true that the lowly are blessed. But only the lowly, not those who just talk about it, really find that out.
