The lesson of the lizard

a lizard can be caught in your hands, yet it lives in kings’ palaces.
-Proverbs 30:28

These are my notes from Haddon Robinson's Commencement Sermon at DTS, Lessons from Argur (Proverbs 30:24-28), on the last of four creatures, the lizard.

• The incongruity of the lizard and the kings' palace.

• These are like young men, hoping to serve is king Solomon's vast bureaucracy. 
• Be like a lizard, don't call attention to yourself.
• When you go to a meal, don't be a glutton.
• Watch your manners, don't be a slob, don't drink too much.
• And you'll go up in the bureaucracy.

• One of the things that is hard to get over is the incongruity of the way God works.
• Everything seems reversed.
• When you work with God, it is like a reverse threaded screw.
• Things are not intuitively like you think they would be.
• The way to lead is to serve.
• The way to live is to die.
• You want to be first?  Be last.
• If you are last, you will be first.
• You want a crown?  Find a cross.
• You want to be mature, learn to suffer.
• Nothing could be more incongruous than a lizard in a kings' palace.
• We are like lizards, ordinary, unremarkable.
• CS Lewis wrote that there are no ordinary Christians, because we all bear the weight of glory.
• The most ordinary Christian you know, with quirks and faults, who doesn't have it all together; that person you want to avoid.  Lewis said that if that person was to return to us in their glorified state, we would be tempted to bow down.
• When God gets finished with us, He will enable us to dwell with The King, in His palace.
• Do you understand how incongruous God's grace is?
• Think of a long-necked crab having a conversation with Albert Einstein.
• Yet, that is no more strange than a lizard in a kings' palace.

• The lizard teaches us the incongruity of grace.