Appropriate Appropriate Greatness

UV 1229/10,000 Appropriate Appropriate Greatness

And the LORD said unto Joshua, This day will I begin to magnify thee in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee.

Joshua 3 v 7
Each of us is so tiny and puny in ourselves in comparison with the God-created universe. We are even more minuscule in comparison with the creator , God Almighty. Yet Jehovah stooped down from time to time in history in different places to magnify the tiny, to make them look great, powerful and good in the eyes of nations. One such tiny person was Moses who became the instrument of deliverance, the first leader of a freedom struggle orchestrated by God Himself. He never failed Moses or forsook him even when Israel, his own brother Aaron and sister Mariam failed him and belied his expectations. God loved Moses dearly and took personally anything that people spoke to him or about him that belittled him in anyone’s eyes. The Lord had magnified him or made him great.
In Shakespeare’s famous lines about greatness, “ Some are born great, some become great and some have greatness thrust on them, “ he excluded the most significant type of greatness that outlasts and outshines all other types of greatness for “ some are made great by God.” Joshua was another person made great by God. God was with him even as He was with Moses. If Moses was used to part the Red Sea and defeat the designs of Pharaoh and his army, Joshua was used to part the Jordan and defeat all the nations that lay in his path in the conquest and possession of the promised land of Israel. Today, God is with you and me even as He was with Moses and Joshua, even as He was with the prophets and with Jesus and His apostles. When the “Great I Am” is with us, we too will be great for His goodness, His love, His power, mercy and grace fill us, fulfill us, accompanies us, surround us and goes ahead of us. The greatest blessing is not what He gives us or does for us but His very presence in us and with us as an Immanuel. He magnifies each person in a unique way. He magnified King Solomon in a particular way, He magnified Mary in a particular way, He magnified Jesus in a particular way. This is the reason each person’s story or testimony is unique and different. A testimony is a story of magnification. It is not a story about the greatness of these individuals but about what God has done in and through them.



God first does a great work within us before He uses us to do great works outside us. He expands or magnifies our faith, our qualities and our abilities from deep within like the source of an eternal inexhaustible spring. He then makes known to others around us that He has chosen us for a special purpose and causes them to fall in line or respect our leadership. He then looks for opportunities to glorify His name. When praise and worship and thanksgiving in reverence and gratitude meet the greatness and goodness of God, that is glory. The words “ from this day” could mean a particular day when we first committed our lives to Christ for the glory of God or it could be this day and every day of our lives. The Lord desires to make us great in His eyes, in our eyes, in the eyes of the hostile and the friendly. Our response is to rejoice and magnify the Name of the Lord even as Mary rejoiced when she was found with child of holy and immaculate conception who was to be the Saviour of the whole world, a Moses and Joshua in the realm of the spirit, a deliverer and conqueror of the ultimate. She cried out, “ My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” Her own Saviour was ironically being carried in her own womb. As a young student it was my ambition to be great as I pored over the lives of hundreds of great lives. My alter ego at the time was Napoleon. Napoleon grabbed the crown from the Pope and placed it on his own head. But a believer in Christ is given the eternal crown of greatness graciously by the Lord even as he lays down all his own crowns or claims to greatness at the feet of Jesus.


Prateep V Philip