BE HUMBLE, NOT ENTITLED! Mercy in an Age of Entitlement

By Andrea Guachalla

There is one thing I’ve learned in the time I’ve been working as an educator: mercy is always welcomed whereas justice is rejected. You show a little bit of mercy to one student when you consider the situation merits it, and you will get a mob of angry students demanding to get the same treatment right away.

We live in strange times. 

In the good old days I remember the teachers and professors had the final say on anything, even if sometimes they were unfair, and no student would dare defy them out of fear of coming across as disrespectful.

Now we’ve arrived at a very different scenario where students believe they have the final say on any issue that relates to them, even if sometimes they are being completely unreasonable. And not only that, today’s youth has become so entitled, that educators have very few options in regards to enforcing rules in the classroom. You either 1) have no rules, give in to the mob and respond to any demand positively, or you 2) enforce rules so strictly, and show mercy to no one ever, so that no student dares ask for anything aside from what has already been established.

The thing is, none of these seems to be the right way to go: if one goes for the first option you lose authority completely, and the other option allows no compassionate or empathetic interaction with students, which doesn’t seem to be right. 

There must be a third option that I will have to explore and perhaps write about when I arrive at a conclusion, but for now I  can’t stop being appalled by how entitled my generation and younger ones have become. That’s why I will attempt to explain where all this came from, why is it that this kind of attitude stands in direct opposition to what God has called us to be, and how we should act as Christians. 

Where did this entitlement come from?

Before I begin with this, here is a disclaimer: entitlement is not something new. It has existed for as long as human beings have, I acknowledge that. But it is remarkable that respect for people in a position of authority has been getting lost more overtime, until we got to this point.

There are many reasons entitlement is so widespread in our time, in this article I will address two of them, starting with the chief among them: PRIDE. Quoting C. S. Lewis, he says pride comes from the very pit of hell, and leads you to underestimate others while you overestimate yourself. I would say pride, which is a sin, is the first reason people feel they have the right to ask for things they don’t deserve. And we can all fall for this. Yes, even if we are Christians. But I find that though everyone is in danger of being prideful and entitled, there are several things that have been exacerbating the problem.

One of the main contributors is the lack of parental discipline during childhood and adolescence. Many parents nowadays believe it’s abusive or mean to discipline a child, and so decide to let them run wild and spoil them as they grow up, some other parents are absent altogether, which is worse. By focusing on the short term effects of this they are unable to see the massive damage they are causing their children that will be in full display when they get older. Children need to be taught what is good and wrong, not be allowed to be sinful and disrespect authority. 

Something I’ve noticed is that many parents believe they need to give their children everything they didn’t have while they themselves were growing up, focusing on materialistic goods: gifts, huge birthday parties, endless food supplies, fancy outings, etc. The thing is that children learn to take all these things for granted instead of being grateful because they never had to work hard to “deserve them” or went through seasons of lack. 

I can hardly imagine anything worse than a parent who doesn’t discipline their children, and spoils them with all types of presents when they are not even grateful for them. Who hasn’t seen a child forcing their parents to buy them ice cream or a toy from the supermarket by screaming and crying? I’ve seen children hit their parents, and receive no punishment for that.

Now, I’m not saying parents should discipline their children violently or starve them so they learn to appreciate food, but the Word of God itself says that a good father will discipline their children out of love for them (Proverbs 13:24). The Word doesn’t only instruct us to discipline our children, but also commands us to “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

I’m also not advocating for parents to never, ever give their children presents or travel with them on vacations, but I do think a child needs to understand the value of money, and work, and how much effort it takes to buy or pay for stuff. The Word of God does command us to be grateful for everything (Philippians 4:6, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18), but how are be gonna learn to be grateful if we take everything for granted? How will we learn to value hard work if we never need to work because our parents keep paying for our bills even when we are well into our adult years?

The fact that so many people are lazy and entitled is because they received all kinds of goods from their parents, but never received what they truly needed: discipline, instruction, and guidance. So many people feel entitled to demand things from others because they never went through seasons of hunger and lack, and having to work really, really hard to accomplish things. Many of my peers are not willing to work unless the job position carries a certain degree of recognition, even if they are struggling to pay the bills. Many students are unwilling and whiny when they get a failing grade, because they are not willing to put in the effort to learn the subject.

Now, before I go on, I know that some parents who know me and are reading this will probably think I don’t know what I’m talking about because I have no children, and they will be tempted to disregard what I’m saying here. 

It is true that I have no children, and have very limited experience raising them. But please note this: I am a daughter, and I have lots of experience being one. The type of instruction and discipline I received as a child was definitely nowhere near perfect, but hear me out when I say this: even with all the lacks (especially coming from my father), and difficulties I faced as a child I am still infinitely grateful to my mother because she never spoiled me, and she allowed me to work from a very early age. I look back and there is nothing I would change.

I see so many of my peers ruined by the habits they formed in their early childhood and adolescence, that I cannot help but stop what I’m doing sometimes and thank God for the fact that I had to learn to appreciate the little things (like food and times of peace) and value hard work over comfort.

Nowadays, many of us take all sorts of things for granted, and never thank the Lord for the things we don’t deserve: our families (yes, even if don’t get along with our parents or siblings), our jobs (yes, even if we consider we have the worst job in the world), our churches (yes, even if there are problems to deal with within it), food supplies (yes, even if we can’t afford everything we’d like to).

The examples of things for which we are not grateful are literally countless.

I won’t go into these, but I want to mention some other things that are exacerbating the feeling of entitlement in today’s age: the availability of anything you can think of on the internet, the little effort we need to put in in getting things that decades ago required so much work, social media, ideological trends such as feminism, marxism, critical race theory, and many others. Hopefully I will be able to expand on some of these in the near future, but for now let me end by saying this: 

God has called us to BE HUMBLE, NOT ENTITLED

A couple of weeks ago my pastor preached on Philippians 2:5-8. If you are familiar with this letter you know this passage talks about Christ and how he didn’t count His deity as something to be grasped. He willingly submitted to His Father’s plan of redemption.

Now, we must note this: if there is one single person on planet earth who ever had the right to be entitled it was Him, Jesus Christ, the very Son of God. He deserved a golden throne on earth, the praise of every single person including kings and rulers, He deserved all kinds of goods and luxuries, and yet he never demanded to be treated that way or be given more than what he had. On the contrary, He made himself a servant to man. Yes, He, the one who had the right to be entitled came to serve.

To understand the extent to which he humbled himself, we must remember He didn’t come to serve good people who were righteous and just. He literally came to die for, and thus offer a way of salvation to, the very people who shouted “crucify Him!” and accomplished to kill Him with no charges. He came to die for His enemies. Who ever heard Him demand to be treated better on the basis that He was the Son of God? He served unrighteous men until He exhaled His last breath, and He did it humbly.

If we could trace back what is wrong with the world to one single thing it would be this: we don’t know Christ, and we don’t know how below Him we are. We dare be entitled, and lazy, and comfort-seekers because we don’t know the Son of God. We don’t know the extent of the humiliation He went through. We believe we truly deserve more than what we have, and so we cannot understand what mercy is. If we ever came to know our sinful condition, we would be aware that we not only deserve nothing, but we actually deserve death, and eternal condemnation.

We live in strange and dark times, where entitlement is encouraged and sin is celebrated. But we have hope in Christ. We have hope in that we can always approach God in prayer and beg Him for salvation with a humble heart.