Lesson 84: The Demise of the Status Seeker (Luke 14:1-14)

How we prioritize our lives is closely related to how we view ourselves and treat those we share community with. Religious leaders were making it a priority to watch Jesus closely, not to learn from Him, but to try and catch Him in something that would incriminate Him according to their standards. And that was part of the problem at hand: what was immensely important to them was the standard they were setting (though they tried to pass it off as God’s law). These men had come to view themselves as the people everyone else should look to and give special honor to. Jesus expressed his disagreement in this passage in a number of ways. Daniel follows His explanation by illustrating how “the status-seeker pursues goals that exclude them from the kingdom of God.” It’s wrong, he maintains, to be a status seeker because, 1) Status seeking creates an ungodly ethical system, 2) Status seeking leads to an inflated sense of one’s own worth, and 3) Status seeking pursues relationship on the basis of self-interest.

Summary by Seth Kempf, Bethany Community Church Staff