Act Like You’ve Been There Before

Humility is not a concept often used or demonstrated these days. We live in a culture that is full of showboating, you know, that excessive and often annoying behavior done after someone has “done something good” that is intended to bring attention to the person doing the showboating. The term “showboating” is derived from the theatrical performances produced on riverboats on the Mississippi River in the late 19th century. These riverboats became known as showboats and the verb “to showboat” comes from that origin.  

Just turn on the television and watch any sporting event. You will not have to watch too long before you see a player make a good play and after the play is over that player “showboats,” as if to say, look at me, look what I’ve done!

Sometimes showboating even becomes a craze. From 1988 to 1991 fullback Elbert “Ickey” Woods played for the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals. When he scored a touchdown, he performed a celebration that became famously known as the “Ickey Shuffle.” Woods would shuffle his feet to the right while holding the football out to the right, do the same moves to the left, then do three hops to the right, all before spiking the ball into the ground. This showboating led the NFL to create a rule against “Excessive Celebration” which is enforced as a penalty against that team. While Ickey Woods has not played professional football for more than twenty years, his famous end zone dance lives on. Click here to watch a one-minute video highlighting the NFL’s most famous dancer.

Jesus describes an incident of showboating in Luke 18:9-14. In this parable, two men, a Pharisee and a tax collector, went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee thanked God that he was not a sinner like the other people, especially that lowly tax collector. Maybe even this religious leader did his own version of the “Ickey Shuffle” as he exalted himself (arrogance, spiritual pride). The tax collector, on the other hand, would not even look up toward heaven as he beat his breast and cried out, “God have mercy on me, a sinner” (v.13).

What Jesus said next caught everyone off guard. He said that the tax collector is the one made right before God, not the Pharisee. He concludes this parable by saying, “I tell you this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (v. 14).

We find this warning in James 4:13-16 – “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”

And Solomon, in pushing back against boasting, said this – “Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips” (Proverbs 27:2).

Celebrate your accomplishments in a way that brings honor and glory to God and not in a way that says, “look at me.” And as many football coaches have told their team, “When you get to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”

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