The Lust for Respectability

The lust for respectability is a subtle and damnable sin. Jesus said, “How can you believe when you seek honor from one another and not the honor that comes from God.” This sin is particularly aluring in times like ours. Our civil leaders and civil discourse has reached unforseen levels of immaturity and so many rightly want to be mature. But true maturity will always have something light and lowly in it. John said I must decrease so that he might increase. And the one to whom God looks is the humble and contrite man, who takes sin seriously but doesn’t take himself seriously at all.

So here is your exhortation: you must not seek the honor that comes from man. You must not care when crowds squawk at you, be they unbelievers or believers who care far too much about Ahab and Jezebel’s perception. You must not care what the new politically correct say about you or your people. When the Dignified Duchesses of the world, like David’s Michal, inform you that you have debased yourself. Tell them that that you will become even more vile in their eyes, but you will be praised by the faithful. After her encounter with David, we’re told that Michal had no child until the day of her death, likely because she was too distinguished to sleep with her husband. We could say she came from a line of those who were Celibate by Superiority. But, of course, such Prim Princesses consider themselves to be the end of the matter and in so doing become the end of the geneological line.

They signify the covenantal disloyalty that always attends those who lust for respectability. Such people cannot abide Elijah’s high school boy humor as he mocks idols. They are always wanting to take Jesus aside and explain his approach might have been more effective had he left out that bit about his listeners being sons of the devil. And they make sure to put some distance between themselves and Ezekiel when he says that the people of God lust after idols like a whore lusts after her lover whose members are like those of donkeys and whose emissions are like horses. Such talk is unfit for those who would be righteous, in the world’s eyes.

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