The Scoreboard We All Deny Keeping

Somebody tells you good news, and before you have finished congratulating them, your mind has started calculating. You are working out where the news puts them and where it leaves you. We arrive at Thanksgiving dinner with our children’s accomplishments loaded and ready; we keep a running tally of how many times we have done the dishes lately. We can hear about somebody’s promotion and feel a piece move three squares up the leaderboard that we pretend we don’t care about or even use.

The twelve men who lived closest to Jesus kept the same leaderboard, and Luke tells us precisely when they got it out.

“An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest.” (Luke 9:46)

In almost any other setting, that would be an ordinary sentence about ambitious men. However, two verses earlier, Jesus had said this:

“Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.” (Luke 9:44)

He is bracing them for His own murder, and within two verses they are sorting out the heavenly seating chart. Rather than softening the collision of these two conversations, Luke explains what led to this disastrous turn of conversation.

“But they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, so that they might not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about this saying.” (Luke 9:45)

Two separate things went wrong there. Something was hidden from the disciples, which they could not control, and they were too afraid to ask about it, even though they could have asked. Nobody would put the frightening question into words, so the room went silent, and the silence got filled with the one subject that always volunteers itself when we have nothing true to say. They talked about rank.

We have not outgrown that argument either. We have only gotten more sophisticated about how we conduct it.

One Sickness With Two Symptoms

Every inner circle has a center and an edge, and belonging to an inner circle makes you anxious about both parts at once. Am I close enough to the middle? Is the edge holding, or is somebody getting in who has not earned it?

Luke hands us both anxieties inside five verses. Verses 46 through 48 are about the center: who is greatest, who sits nearest the King. Verses 49 and 50 are about the edge: who is in, who is out, who is permitted to use the name of Jesus. Jesus treats the one sickness the same way both times. Rather than rearranging the circle to seat everyone correctly, He opens it downward and then outward.

Downward comes first.

“But Jesus, knowing the reasoning of their hearts, took a child and put him by his side and said to them, ‘Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. For he who is least among you all is the one who is great.'” (Luke 9:47–48)

We see a child and think of sweetness, which was not the instinct of the ancient world, where a child had no labor value, no legal standing, and no claim to count for much yet. He was negligible, in the way a grape that rolls out of the bag at the grocery store is negligible. You paid for it, you lost it, and not one of us is getting down on that floor to look for it. That is the person Jesus stands up in front of men who are arguing about greatness, and He says that receiving this child in His name is receiving Christ, and that receiving Christ is receiving the Father who sent Him.

Next, Jesus removes the scoreboard of life altogether. “He who is least among you all is the one who is great.” That word “least” gets read as a feeling, as though Jesus were asking us to hold a low opinion of ourselves, while least is a position rather than a mood. You take that position by attaching yourself to people who carry no status and can do nothing whatsoever for yours.

Notice as well which word Jesus declines to use. The Twelve were arguing about who was greater, and greater is a word that only functions when you are measuring yourself against somebody else. Jesus answers with great, a word with no rungs on it. They wanted a better ranking system, and He gave them no ranking system at all.

The second symptom surfaces about four seconds later.

“John answered, ‘Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you.'” (Luke 9:49–50)

Listen to the pronoun. John does not report a man who refuses to follow Jesus; he reports a man who does not follow us. In a single word, John installs himself as the measure of somebody else’s legitimacy. The irony weighs heavily on the page because this outsider was doing in the name of Jesus the very thing the Twelve had failed to do nine verses earlier. When a desperate father brought them his son, they could not cast the demon out. They were shutting down a man for succeeding at what they had fumbled, and Jesus overrules them with a standing policy rather than a one-time exception.

None of that erases the line that determines who Christians must reject. There is a line in the sand. John’s only mistake was drawing it in the wrong place. His question was whether the man was one of us. The question Jesus asks is whether the man is with Him. Someone who teaches that Jesus was a fine moral teacher and nothing more, or that decent people find their own way to God, is preaching a different gospel, and Paul is willing to call that anathema (Galatians 1:8–9). Warning people about that man is love for the people he would deceive. Different evangelism tactics, different music, a different Bible translation, a different dress code: none of those is a different gospel. Christ calls us to be immovable about Him and His gospel while simultaneously being generous about who is allowed to serve Him.

The Seat Nobody Was Fighting For Went to a Child

Jesus does something fascinating with His hands in this text. Luke records it, but it’s easy to read straight past.  Jesus didn’t stand a child in the middle of the room as a visual aid; He “took a child and put him by his side.”

The child ends up at Jesus’ side, which is the exact place the disciples were fighting over.

They were competing for proximity to Jesus, and while they competed, Jesus reached past all twelve of them and seated the one person present who could not have asked for the place, could not have earned it, and almost certainly had no idea what had just happened to him. The “greatness” argument was never answered. However, Jesus settled the argument by giving an assignment. The seat nearest Jesus went to somebody who couldn’t get himself there.

Once you see it happen in that room, you start seeing it everywhere, because that is the shape of everything God has ever done.

The Road the King Actually Walked

Two verses after John gets corrected, Luke writes an all-important sentence in His gospel account.

“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” (Luke 9:51)

The argument about who gets to walk closest to the King is happening on the threshold of the road where the King walks lowest. Luke set those two things beside each other on purpose. While twelve men were calculating altitude, the only truly great One in the room was measuring His descent.

Jesus came down from glory, where He had been eternally adored by beings who cover their faces, and He did not consider that equality a thing to be clutched. He came down to a feeding trough in a town nobody wrote songs about. He came down to a carpenter’s bench, to sawdust and splinters and years of ordinary Tuesdays, to a life so unremarkable that His neighbors could not later account for Him. He came down to a basin and a towel, kneeling in front of men who were still arguing about rank, washing the feet of the one who would betray Him before the night ended. He came down to a cross between two criminals, numbered with transgressors, hung up where the foot traffic could read the charge against Him. He came down into a borrowed grave, because He had not accumulated so much as a hole in the ground of His own.

Every single step took Jesus further down. Don’t get it wrong; Jesus was not falling. He was purposefully descending at a pace He chose, toward a bottom He had known about since before the foundations of the earth were laid.

Jesus’ very life and death show that the way up is down. It sounds like something printed on a coffee mug, but it happens to be the actual road that the actual King actually walked, and He walked it all the way to the end. When Jesus says that the least among you is the great one, He is not floating a paradox for us to admire from a distance. He is describing Himself, and He is describing the route He is on while He says it. He is inviting twelve men who cannot stop measuring each other to come and walk the path of condescension with Him.

The Glory of Being Carried In

At this point, the whole passage turns and looks at us, because if you belong to Jesus Christ, you were never one of the disciples in this story. You were the child, the negligible one.

“Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” (Ephesians 2:12–13)

Separated. Alienated. Strangers. No hope. Without God in the world. That is the résumé you brought to the transaction. You were the negligible one, the grape on the floor of the grocery store that nobody was coming back for. You were also the outsider, the man John wanted to shut down, standing outside a circle you had no standing to enter and no argument to make at the door.

What did Jesus do about it? He could have reorganized the inner circle and found you a seat toward the back where you would not be noticed. Instead, He came out of the circle. He came down to the exact place where you were, in the state you were actually in, and He brought you in by His own blood, and then He set you down in a place you could never have reached and certainly did not deserve.

That is why there is no leaderboard in the kingdom of God. A leaderboard would require that somebody, somewhere, got in on merit, and not a single person did. You cannot climb further into Christ than the cross has already carried you. You cannot earn a single drop of the grace you are standing in right now, and you cannot lose it by failing to impress anyone, because it was never a wage, nor will it ever become one. Grace that could be increased by your performance could be decreased by your performance. You can’t earn or lose that grace. It is finished. Jesus said so.

A person with nothing left to prove is the most useful person in a room. The man who has been carried in has no reason to guard the door, no reason to audit the seating, no reason to measure himself against the believer three pews over or the congregation three miles down the road. This is why the apostle Paul, sitting in a prison cell while rivals preached Christ specifically to needle him, could write a sentence like this one:

“What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.” (Philippians 1:18)

Paul was free to celebrate Christ being proclaimed even by opponents with bad motives. Why? Because Paul’s glory and name were not the point. His ministry was not the point, and his circle was not the point. That meant that he could watch men he had every reason to resent advance the only cause he cared about—the cause of Christ—and he could be glad. Paul didn’t have superhuman temperament. That is simply what the gospel does to an ordinary man who has stopped needing to be somebody high on the leaderboard.

I learned that lesson the slow way. Years ago I flew out to visit the young woman who is now my wife while she was in college. My luggage included a set of firm opinions about her school that I had assembled without ever having met a single student who attended it. She took me to chapel. I sat down in a room full of people I had written off, braced to be uncomfortable, and I watched a couple thousand college students worship Jesus Christ with everything in them, while it dawned on me that it seemed many of those students loved Jesus more than I did. The people who shaped my convictions were not wrong about everything, and I remain grateful to them for teaching me to weigh my life by the Word of God. However, I was wrong about people. I had taken a conviction about style and converted it into a verdict about somebody’s soul, which is precisely what John did when he said that the man out there does not follow with us—he was defending the leaderboard that Jesus took a wrecking ball to.

Loving the Least in a Small Town

None of this “open the circle to the least and the stranger” stays theoretical for long in a town this size, where there is nowhere to be anonymous, and everybody has a general idea of everybody else’s situation. Here are three places to love the nobodies and strangers.

First, in a rural county, you do not have to go looking for the overlooked person, because you have been driving past him for years. He is the widower who talks too long at the hardware store, the family whose situation everyone discusses and nobody enters, the kid whose dad is not around and whose grandmother is doing her best. Receiving a person is different from pitying him. Receiving is a hospitality word, a word Luke uses elsewhere for taking a traveler into your house, and it means making somebody’s needs your problem for a while at a cost you actually feel. Pity keeps the distance and hands something across the gap, while receiving closes the distance and absorbs the bill. In practice, that looks like a standing place at your table that does not expire after the first invitation, the ride to an appointment an hour away, a Saturday spent on somebody else’s roof, a load of hay you were not asked for, and a name you are willing to have attached to yours in front of people who will notice the association.

Second, the congregation down the road is not your competition. In a county with a handful of small churches drawing from the same few hundred families, tribalism costs almost nothing to start but a great deal to maintain, and our children are taking notes the entire time. What your kids hear you say over Sunday dinner about the congregation across town is where they will learn who is permitted to serve Jesus. Say the other thing out loud at your own table instead. Name a church that is reaching people you have not reached, and thank God in front of your family that Christ is being preached there. Hold the line where Jesus put it, on who He is, and be generous everywhere else.

Third, take the job that nobody will thank you for. The nursery, the children’s ministry sign-up sheet that sits there half empty, the mowing, the meal delivered to a family that no one organized a schedule for. People appreciate a good dish at a potluck more than they appreciate the person who spent an hour on the floor with four-year-olds, and that arithmetic is exactly backward from the way heaven runs the books. The work that no one sees is the work being done in front of Jesus, the only audience who has ever mattered.

On Wednesday, at the gas station or the mailbox or the end of somebody’s driveway, there will be a person you have seen four hundred times and never asked a real question. Go ask one. It won’t move you up, and that is the entire point, because you cannot step out of the ranking system while you are still guarding your place in it. You will not lose an inch of your standing by stooping, since your standing was never yours to begin with. You were carried in and set down by a King who came all the way down to get you.

2026.08.09 / The Nobodies in the Inner Circle / Pastor Daniel Steeves