Today, do not let the world tell you who you are.
Don’t judge success and failure like everyone else does.
Listen to God. He says “Friend, move up higher.”
Luke 14
Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
I love Scottish Pastor William Still’s Comment on this passage:
So topsy-turvy is this present evil world that the truest people in the best places will seem in the public’s view to be the lowest. Indeed, true character is seen in the willingness to take the low place, for that implies a lower valuation of self in relation to others, plus a humbling and yet ennobling service.
Unbelievers can never tell us who we are or why we are here, because their estimates are so often confused by their own mistaken judgments. Many who are considered failures in other people’s eyes are successful in God’s sight. Similarly, many who are successful in the world’s estimation are failures before God. But if God tells me who I am and why I am here on earth, then even the whole world cannot gainsay it to my confusion.