HE MUST BECOME GREATER

“The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”
—Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership
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A couple of weeks ago, an international cadet at the US Air Force Academy dropped by my home for dinner. (The second-highest ranking cadet at the Academy—no mean feat for a non-American student—this cadet is a natural leader whose Christian faith shines bright and clear among his fellow cadets.) Our meandering dinner chitchat landed on the response of John the Baptist to Jesus’s rising public prominence, ostensibly at John’s expense:
 
“No one can receive anything unless God gives it from heaven. You yourselves know how plainly I told you, ‘I am not the Messiah. I am only here to prepare the way for him.’  It is the bridegroom who marries the bride, and the bridegroom’s friend is simply glad to stand with him and hear his vows. Therefore, I am filled with joy at his success. He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less” (John 3:27-30, NLT).
 
Jesus must increase and he, John, decrease. The friend of the bridegroom may enjoy the limelight for a while; Jesus would later refer to John as a lamp that burned and gave light, which the people got to enjoy (John 5:35). But John also knew to step back when the time came; he willingly receded into the background and resisted competing with Jesus for attention, for our God does not share His glory with another (Isaiah 42:8). John’s evident sense of his God-given assignment and of its proper conclusion, I think, is the only reason why John could truly say that his joy at hearing the bridegroom’s voice was not only full but, indeed, complete.
 
If John’s story had stopped there, it would have been the perfect ending! But as we know, John later harbored doubts and even sent his disciples to inquire of Jesus as to whether He was the Messiah (Matthew 11:2-3). Indeed, did John at all foresee that the “decrease” of which he spoke in John 3:30 would come to mean languishing in prison until being executed on a whim with his head delivered on a platter (Matthew 14:1-12)?
 
For some of God’s servants, the completion of their assigned ministry doesn’t necessarily end with them riding off peacefully into the sunset. John may have envisaged that his exit from public ministry involved retiring in obscurity to some backwoods in the Judean wilderness. Yet there was no such luxury for John. The obvious answer is this: John’s “decrease” wasn’t an end to his God-given ministry as such, but it was very much part of his calling! Putting it that way may sound odd, especially since nothing seemingly “positive” about it is mentioned in Scripture. There is no mention, for instance, that John’s fellow prisoners came to faith in Christ thanks to John’s witness (not that that could not have happened). Basically, there was nothing concrete to justify the abrupt and unceremonious end to John’s life on earth. It all just seems so unfair! Amazingly, it was also at this conceivably lowest point of John’s time that Jesus chose to praise him (Matthew 11:11).
 
With Easter just around the corner, Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice at Calvary for us all is foremost in my thoughts. The Son of God’s very purpose—as “a man of sorrows well acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3)—was to steadily work his way, in complete humility and unquestioned submission to His Father’s will, to a gruesome death by crucifixion atop a hill outside the city walls of Jerusalem. Indeed, as Oswald Chambers wrote in his celebrated devotional My Utmost for His Highest, “The Cross did not happen to Jesus: He came on purpose for it.”
 
I’ve been following the harrowing story of a Nigerian pastor and ISI returnee. Many members of his congregation were victims of the Christmas 2023 massacre caused by suspected Fulani Muslim militants. He and his family continue to endure death threats. Forced out of their homes and villages, he and his parishioners struggle daily to meet basic needs—food, clothing, and shelter.
 
This pastor and his congregants know a thing or two about the path of downward mobility ending on the cross. I don’t particularly like the idea of suffering…let alone actually going through with it! Yet God commends those who suffer for doing good and who endure it, because it is to this that we have been called by God—and there’s no better example here than the Lord Jesus Himself, who suffered for your sake and mine (1 Peter 2:20-21). The author of Hebrews adds that Jesus’ time on earth was marked by sorrow, pain, and tears as He offered up priestly prayers to God, but it was also through such suffering that Jesus learned trust and obedience and thereby fulfilled His destiny as the source of eternal salvation to all who believe in Him (Hebrews 5:7-10).
 
Friends, let us persevere on our way of downward mobility—not just any path, but the one Jesus took for our sakes. Let’s resolutely keep our eyes on Jesus, for in Him only there’s life to the full! ​