¹⁶ Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation.

Swinging back to the thought of verse 3 (“…I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think…”), Paul echoes a recurring theme in the New Testament, that of humility. Consider the following:

Take My [Jesus’] yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matt 11:29)

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:3–8)

My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism. For if a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes, and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes, and say, “You sit here in a good place,” and you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit down by my footstool,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil motives? … Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called? (James 2:1-4, 7)

This must be one of those “besetting sins” that we have such difficulty in extinguishing in our lives, a comparative attitude. We tend to measure ourselves against others and treat them differently depending on whether we see them as higher up or lower down on the scale of comparison – and it does not matter what the scale is (social status, financial, marital, education, age, etc.). We are all to have the same mind about this, that we are called to treat each other as fellow-Christians, “saints” (vs. 13), siblings in the family of God. In particular, we need to work at associating with people lower on whatever scale we use.

Lord, I confess my arrogant thoughts that I am more important than others. I commit to spending quality time with those I see as more “lowly” than me.