Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: The first sentence gives one of the important concepts of Christianity. When Christ was born, God entered the world that He had made, but the world did not know hiHere again, we see that there are differences of opinion on what a Greek term means. The traditional meaning of the Greek word prautes was “the quality of not being overly impressed by a sense of one’s own importance.” The best English synonym might be humility. But the lexical range of the term includes concepts like “gentleness,” “considerateness,” and “courtesy.” The King James Version translates “meekness” here, while almost all modern translations use “gentleness.” modern photo of Jesus with two ethnic little girls We are going with the KJV, because meekness would seem to connote a gentleness that comes from not being impressed by one’s own importance. It is a gentleness that stems from a lack of pridefulness. The connection of harshness and pride is not hard to see. When do we act obstreperous? When we feel offended, and more precisely when we feel that our status has been called into question. Somebody might disagree with us about something, calling into question the rightness of our thought. Someone might give us a position that we think is lower than we deserve. A judge might favor another person in a competition, when we think we are the best. The list of potential entitlements we create for ourselves is endless. And when our pride is thus offended, we get angry. We want to tell the offender, “You are messing around with the wrong person.” We want what we think is justice, when in reality, we only want others to recognize how superior we are. So the less false pride we feel — the less superiority we arrogate to ourselves — the more gentle we become. If we embrace humility, a major temptation to anger and hostility leaves us. We can remain gentle, even in the face of hostile criticism. And this is what Paul is getting at, when he tells us that meekness (or gentleness) is a fruit of the Spirit. We are proud by nature, and the temptation will not leave us alone. When we live in the flesh, we try to satisfy our nature rather than trying to conform to God’s will. Pride is part of our nature, but through the Spirit, we can come ever closer to the humility that God demands of us. m. It did not recognize him and it did not partake of him. By becoming human, God humbled himself to be one of the creatures he had made. But humanity did not know him and did not receive him. When John tells us that the world did not receive Christ, there are several simultaneous meanings. The most apparent is in the old-fashioned meaning of “receive,” harkening back to the time when people more commonly used the term “receive visitors.” When there were no telephones, people would call on each other in person. The friendly thing to do would be to invite them in for conversation and perhaps some refreshment, i.e., receive them. The alternative was to have the butler or maid tell the visitors that the person was “not at home.” But this is a philosophical passage, and John means also that people did not invite Jesus into their hearts and minds. They did not receive him, in the sense that a radio might not receive a signal. And then, there is that wonderful promise. Those humble or smart enough to receive Christ got something more precious than anything else in existence: the right to become the children of God.