I. To take the "lowest room" towards God is: (1) To be content simply to take God at His word, without asking any questions or raising any doubts, but to accept at His hand all that God graciously vouchsafes to give you the pardon and the peace; to be a receptacle of love, a vessel into which, of His free mercy, He has poured and is pouring now, and will go on to pour for ever, the abundance of His grace. (2) Next, it is to be just what God makes you to rest where He places you to do what He tells you only because He is everything and you nothing conscious of a weakness which can only stand by leaning, and an ignorance which needs constant teaching to be always emptying, because God is always filling.
II. How are we to take the lowest room towards man? It is quite useless to attempt to be humble with a fellow-creature, unless you are really humble with God. Do not put yourself up into the chair of judgment upon any man; but rather see yourself as you are; everybody is inferior in something far worse than that man in some things. So your words will not grow censorious; and if you sit low enough, you will be sure to speak charitably. Sympathy is power, but there is no sympathy where there is self. Self must be destroyed to make sympathy. Do not mistake patronising for love. When you comfort sorrow, look well to it that you touch another's grief with a reverential hand. And sin whatever you do, never treat sin with roughness or contempt. The Pure and Holy One never did that. He dealt with the worst sinner delicately. If you ask, "How am I to go lower?" among the thousand rules I select one exalt Christ. If Christ do but occupy His right place in your heart, you will be sure in the presence of that majesty and of that beauty to go and sit down in the lowest room.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,1867, p. 37.
References: Luke 14:10. T. Birkett Dover, A Lent Manual,p. 11; Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 251; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 270; G. H. Wilkinson, Church of England Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 310.