Sermons
Servanthood, Pt. 2
July 10, 2022
Ministry:
- Sunday Morning
Speaker:
- Nathan Schneider
Series:
- Guest Speaker
Introduction
It’s my privilege to bring God’s Word to you this morning, and this morning’s message is part 2 to a message I preached several months ago on the topic of servanthood in the body of Christ. I admitted when I preached that sermon that I was overly ambitious to think I could cover eight points in one sermon and I was correct. I only made it through 5 points, so I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to revisit this topic and pick up where I left off.
But before I do that, I want to start by orienting us once again around the concept of servanthood in the church today.
On November 11, 1947 Winston Churchill delivered a speech to the British House of Commons. In this speech, Churchill was discussing the nature of Western democracy and how the British Parliament was not set up so that those in Parliament should rule, but rather so that the people should rule through Parliament.
And it was in this speech that Churchill made one of his more famous quotations. He said, “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”
What Churchill was doing in his inimitable way was capturing the beauty and the ugliness of democracy. On the one hand, democracy upholds freedom and liberty in society. It gives every person a voice in the political process. On the other hand, since democracy ultimately relies on people—fallen, faulty, sometimes corrupt people—it can never be a perfect system of government.
Now, we could apply that same reasoning to our present system of economics. We could say, borrowing from Churchill, “Capitalism is the worst form of economics…except all those other forms that have been tried.” Think about it. On the one hand, Capitalism and free-market economics is responsible for lifting almost a billion people out of poverty just in the last 20 years. Like democracy, capitalism is built on liberty and personal economic freedom. It promotes freedom and labor. It fosters hard work. It promotes private sector innovation. It offers the hope of real reward for those who are willing to take on risk. And in that sense, I think it’s true that capitalism is far superior to any other economic system man has tried.
I’m grateful to live in a country and in a society in which I have personal freedom over what I do with the money that I earn. I’m free to spend it on meeting the needs of my family. I’m free to spend it on things that may bring me temporal happiness. I’m free to bless others with the sharing of blessings I’ve received above and beyond what I need. That’s the positive side of capitalism. I can only share with others what I have in my possession, and if my money is taken from me by the governmental, I have less with which I can be generous. As Churchill said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
But there is a dark side to capitalism as well. While it may promote hard work and innovation, it also encourages greed and selfishness. In fact, in a certain sense, the entire system relies on these things.
What’s more, the system encourages spending over saving. Think about it. How many times have you heard reports of economic health put in terms of how much money people have been able to put into their savings accounts? That’s not what makes this system work. Capitalism works when people earn money and then pour that money back into the system. The hope for wage growth is the hope that as people earn more money, they will in turn spend more money. That’s why you hear economic health put in terms of revenue and cash flow.
In fact, our current economic situation is due in part to the fact that many people did not spend their money as freely over the last two years, and because rather than spending their stimulus money like the government hoped they would, instead they stashed it away.
What capitalism has created is a society in which there are proprietors and there are consumers. The proprietors are in a constant effort to market their products to consumers using virtually any strategy necessary. And ultimately this marketing feeds into people’s wants and desires by manipulating people into seeing these wants and desires as basic needs.
Now here’s where this issue intersects with the church. The church has picked up on this capitalist idea of marketing and consumerism. Church leaders desire a larger congregation, a wider influence, a bigger production…so they market their churches in such a way that church-goers become consumers. In a certain sense, the church at large in the United States has become just another purveyor of goods and services, and many Christians have embraced the fallacy that they should approach the church just like they approach any other business—like a consumer.
That mentality has been the dominant way in which people select a church and then evaluate a church. Church-goers tend to form an opinion of a church based on what that church does to satisfy their own desires and their own perceived needs. Play the music that I want. Talk about the topics and the things that I find interesting. Don’t make feel uncomfortable. And certainly don’t ask anything of me, or I’m out of here.
Here’s the deal: the church is not a business, and Christians are not consumers. The church is a collection of former consumers who have been saved from their sin and have been called to a life of selfless service for God and to others.
In Mark 9:35, Jesus told his disciples, who had been squabbling over which one of them was the greatest, “If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.”
Every believer in Jesus Christ has been called to a radical life of servanthood—a life where we set aside our own wants and desires that we might serve each other. That’s our calling as Christians.
And if that’s our calling, then we need to know what kind of servants God wants us to be. What are the characteristics that make for effective servanthood in the body of Christ?
And you may recall that last time I preached on this topic, we discussed the first five characteristics of servanthood:
Recap
Gospel-enabled
Now, the first characteristic, and really, the foundation of all the others is this: servanthood must be gospel-enabled. And what this really comes down to is that there’s no service you can give to God or to others that precedes your salvation in Christ. Sinful man cannot serve God, and so in order to be true, effective servants in the kingdom, we have to be enabled by the gospel to serve God. The gospel is the necessary preparation to make you a servant of God.
So if you’re serving in some capacity in the church but you aren’t a Christian yet, then you need to take a step back from that service and be reconciled to God in the gospel. And that reconciliation comes as you place your trust in the Jesus Christ—that his death on the cross and his resurrection from the grave—is the only way of being made right with God, and that his death was the just punishment for your sin, and that God offers true and lasting forgiveness to those who are willing to turn their back on their former life and embrace Christ as the necessary sacrifice for their sin and as their just and loving King.
So if you have not done that yet, then that’s your top priority. Before doing some form of serving in the church, you need to be made right with God.
Christ-like
Now, the second characteristic we talked about was servanthood that is Christ-like, and what this is really talking about it that being a Christian means being a disciple of Jesus Christ. And if we’re supposed to be like Jesus, then we have to understand that Jesus was a servant.
Matthew 20:26–28 says, “Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
Part of the sanctification process is putting off the old man—the old life of greed and selfishness and consumerism—and putting on the new man which is being renewed in the likeness of Jesus Christ. And since Jesus came as a servant, then part of how we grow as Christians is by having the same mindset which was in Christ Jesus—that “though he existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave…” (Phil 2:5–6).
So a believer who wants to be like Jesus Christ is someone who wants to serve like Christ served.
Leader-equipped
The third characteristic of servanthood is that it should be leader-equipped. And what this is talking is that God has given the church certain individuals whose gifting and calling and responsibility involves teaching the church so that every individual believer is equipped for the work of service.
In other words, God has so shaped the church, that it is to be an organism that serves and thus builds itself up. And to make that happen, he gave pastors and teachers to the church. God wants a fully functional “mature” church where each individual member functions as it should by doing the work of the ministry.
What this means is that it’s not just the pastors and elders and ministry leaders who serve in the church. The entire body is called to serve, and these pastors and elders and leaders are given the task of training the body in the Word of God so that the body can build itself up through acts of service.
In other words, a mature, growing, thriving Christian is someone who is faithfully serving for the sake of the whole church under the care and teaching of gifted teachers and leaders.
Spirit-empowered
Now, that brings us to the fourth characteristic, which is that servanthood in the church must be Spirit-empowered. And what this is saying is that since God has called each of us to serve the body, he has properly equipped us for that calling by giving us the necessary spiritual resources to accomplish the task.
1 Peter 4:1 tells us that “as each one has received a gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” God has given at least one spiritual gift to every believer in the church. And you are to use this gift for the good of others in the body.
These gifts are not just natural talents, although they can certainly and often do overlap with the natural skills we possess. But they’re different in that they are empowered by the Holy Spirit and specific for serving the body of Christ.
So if you’re a young believer, one of your priorities should be to pray that God would help you recognize how he has gifted you to Spirit-empowered service in the church, and then begin to serve and experiment by jumping into ministry and see what fits.
And if you’re a mature believer, who knows what gift or gifts God has given to you, then you need try to look for ways you can utilize those gifts for the good of the church.
The key to this point really is that as we serve the church, we’re serving in the strength that God supplies, not serving out of our own strength. We want our service to be done by the empowerment of God’s Spirit.
Character-driven
And finally, the fifth characteristic we looked at was Character-driven servanthood. And what I wanted us to understand here is serving isn’t just an external act. There are important heart dynamics going on while you serve.
Specifically, we have to be careful about our motivation for serving. We don’t want to serve out of guilt, or to be noticed or praised by people. We want our motivation for serving to be love for other people. In the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13, Paul makes it clear that we can perform the greatest acts of service in the church, but if we aren’t motivated by love, it’s not worth anything. Service done out of any motivation other than love is pointless and ineffective, which is why Jesus told his disciples in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.”
Equally important is our attitude in serving. Pride is a killer of servanthood, because it convinces us that we’re superior to certain kinds of service in the church. And grumbling while we serve can make our service ineffective and of no spiritual profit to us. After all, serving others is part of the sanctification process. And when we outwardly serve, but inwardly we’re complaining about it, there may be an outward meeting of a need but inwardly there’s no spiritual growth taking place.
The fundamental attitude we need for serving is humility, which is why Paul called believers to “do nothing from selfish ambition or vain glory, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves, not merely looking out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” (Phil. 2:4).
Love and humility—the character-qualities necessary for effective ministry in the church.
So those are the first five characteristics of servanthood. It’s starts with being gospel-enabled, it aims to be Christ-like, it’s fostered under gifted leaders and teachers, it’s empowered by the Holy Spirit, and it’s driven by godly character.
Continuing On
So with that quick review, let’s look at the remaining three characteristic:
God-worshiping
We use the word “worship” almost exclusively to refer to singing in the church, and that’s an understandable association. Singing is an expression of worship. We’re commanded to sing to one another songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. Corporate singing is the church’s way of speaking our theology out loud together. It’s God’s gift to us so we can connect our head to our heart, our thinking with our emotions.
But we’d be misguided and narrow-minded to limit corporate worship only to singing. There’s so much more that falls under the category of worship than congregational singing. And I’ll even make the assertion that one of the primary expressions of NT worship in the church is not singing but serving.
Now, before we go to the main passage I want to show us, let’s take a look really quickly at some of the words that the OT and NT use for worship.
When we read our English Bibles, we often come across the English word “worship” without realizing that that word is actually being used to translate a number of different Hebrew and Greek terms. There are words for worship in Hebrew and Greek that speak of bend over or even cast oneself to the ground as a way of expressing homage, adoration, and dependence. There are words that speak of worship in terms of fear and reverence for God.
But interestingly, there’s a whole set of words in the OT and NT that speak of worship using the terminology of service. In Exodus 3:12, for instance, the NASB reads, “He said, ‘Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have send you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain.’” Now, that word “worship” is actually the Hebrew word ebed, which means “to serve.”
Turn to Deuteronomy 10 for a moment and look with me at verse 12: “And now, Israel, what does Yahweh your God require of you, but to fear Yahweh your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of Yahweh, which I am commanding you today for your good?” In other words, to “serve” God is a comprehensive way to capture what Israel’s relationship with God was supposed to be like. It involved the sacrificial system, but it involved fearing God, walking in his ways, observing his decrees. It called for a total lifestyle of allegiance to God.
David Peterson, who’s written an excellent book on a theology of worship called Engaging with God, summarized this idea of worship through service this way:
The language of service implies that God is a great King, who requires faithfulness and obedience from those who belong to him. Israel’s service in a cultic way was to be understood as a particular expression of the total allegiance due to the Lord, who had set them free from slavery in Egypt to serve him exclusively. . . . The ministry of priests and Levites in the cult was a specialized form of that service to God. As well as having a Godward dimension, the priestly ministry functioned to assist the nation as a whole in its service to God. The Old Testament indicates in several ways that service to God and service to his people are interrelated” (pp. 69–70).
Now with that background, turn with me to Romans 12 and let’s take a look at this familiar passage for a moment. In verse 1, Paul writes, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God”—the mercies of God are the mercies that he has presented over the last eleven chapters; it’s the gospel of God’s justifying grace offered to sinners and appropriated by faith in Jesus Christ—“I urge you…by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.” You notice how the NASB translates that word—latreuein in the Greek: “service of worship.” Literally, we could translate that last phrase, “which is your reasonable service.”
Our reasonable response to the gospel is to “present your bodies as a sacrifice.” That’s OT cultic language. That’s the language of Leviticus and the burnt offering, where the OT worshiper would bring his animal to the priest and sacrifice the entire animal on the altar as a gift to God. And by offering up the whole animal, he was in essence saying, all of me belongs to you. And that offering would go up in smoke and God would smell it and it would be, in the language of Leviticus, “a pleasing aroma to Yahweh.”
That was in the OT. But now, in light of the sacrifice offered by Jesus on the cross, we don’t need to bring an animal to the altar anymore. The price has been paid; Jesus’s blood has been shed on our behalf. Now, we become the offering—a living sacrifice, where our entire life is given over to God in service to him.
Paul continues in verse 2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” In other words, as living sacrifices, we’re called to think differently than we used to. As we worship God with all of our life, we have a new mind, a mind that is being renewed through the gospel and by the true knowledge of God revealed in the word.
So where does Paul first go as an example of how believers should offer themselves in worship as living sacrifices? Look at verse 3: “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” Having a renewed mind starts with right thinking about yourself. And so we stop elevating ourselves in our minds and we start elevating others instead. And when we do that, something amazing happens.
Verse 4: “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love by without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor.”
You see what’s going on? Paul has just connected our exercise of spiritual gifts—done out of love for one another and performed with an attitude of humility—to the renewal of our minds which occurs as we present our bodies as living sacrifices in spiritual worship to God. In other words, our service to each other in the body is the first tangible expression of spiritual worship Paul mentions in light of our salvation in Christ.
That’s pretty amazing. And it’s important because it means we have to shift how we think about worship in the church. We’re used to thinking about worship in strictly vertical terms. We think that worship is something that is between us and God. But the Bible challenges us to expand our thinking by viewing worship in the horizontal—to see worship as something we do as we serve other people in humility because we love them and want what’s best for them.
There’s a lot of worship we can do on our own. We can sing hymns by ourselves in the shower if we want to. But you can’t serve alone. Serving is inherently corporate in nature. And so serving becomes an important way we worship God together as a church body.
Show me a church that loves to worship God and I’ll show you a church engaged in serving and performing the one-anothers of the New Testament.
Eternal-minded servants
Now, we’ve already talked about the kind of motivation we should have as we serve each other in the church. The key motivation should be our love for other people, buttressed by an attitude of humility which elevates others above ourselves.
So in that sense, we don’t serve in order to receive praise or some kind of reward. But at the same time, we have to recognize the fact that the NT does in fact say that there is reward that comes for our service to Christ.
In John 12:26, for instance, Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there my servant will be also; if anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.” There’s honor that comes with service, and it comes from God himself.
Turn to 1 Peter 5 for a moment. In verse 1, Peter exhorts elders to shepherd the flock of God in humility; to not be motivated by money, or because you’ve been pressured into service. He tells them not to lord their authority over the church but instead act as examples to the flock. And he says there’s reward that comes to those who faithfully serve as shepherds of the church: “And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.”
But then he goes on in verse 5 to address younger men in the church. He says, “You younger men, likewise, be subject to your elders; and all of you”—that’s the whole church now—clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” In other words, if there’s one attitude that God honors, its humility. He calls his people to be humble. And if there’s one thing we’ve seen throughout this study, it’s that there’s no better way to express humility than by serving others and considering their needs over your own.
In that way, serving encapsulates the second greatest commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. And Peter’s promise in verse 6 is this: “Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you at the proper time.”
What you need to understand is that humble service to others isn’t a thankless, reward-less effort. But you have to put it in the right perspective. And what Jesus and Peter do is lift our eyes above the horizon of the here and now and call us to view our service in light of the future.
You see, the problem we have is that when we focus solely on the here and now—on this life—it makes it really hard to be motivated to serve. It takes sacrifice to serve others. You have to give up things…your time, your energy, your money, your comforts, your own personal interests…those things get sacrificed when you serve other people. And some of those things…like your time…you can’t get back.
And when our focus is only on the temporal—when we’re thinking only of what we lose now—it makes it really hard to find the desire and the motivation to serve other people.
But if we lift our eyes up and look past the present—if we think of service in light of eternity—it gives us the perspective we need to be okay with giving up those things. We end up realizing that there are eternal consequences to what we do, and there’s something greater to come that eclipses anything we lose here in this life.
Show me a Christian who serves faithfully and I’ll show you someone who has his eyes focused off the temporal and on the eternal. On the flip side, you show me someone who doesn’t serve, doesn’t want to serve, doesn’t have time to serve, and I’ll show you someone who’s focus is only on the now, and has little interest and little cognizance of eternity. That temporal, worldly mindset it what keeps people from sacrificial service. If your mind is invested here, you’re going to invest in the things that matter here, and you’re going to be unwilling to sacrifice those things for the intangible rewards of investing in things that matter for eternity.
Mission-focused
As we consider everything we’ve learned about service, we need to put it all back in perspective. It’s pretty clear that servanthood is inherently countercultural. It goes against the grain of how the world thinks. It’s backwards. It’s upside-down. It doesn’t make sense to the world.
Go to Luke 22 for a moment and consider Jesus’ words beginning in verse 24: “And there arose also a dispute among the disciples as to which one of them was regarded to be greatest.” Here we have the disciples evaluating themselves according to the world’s standard. Each of them wants to be counted as the greatest, and they’re using the world’s standard in order to jockey for the most privileged position.
Then Jesus says in verse 25, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who have authority over them are called ‘Benefactors.’ But it is not this way with you, but the one who is the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the servant.” This marks the upside-down nature of the kingdom of God.
In the world system, being the greatest means being a leader. Being the least means being a servant. But the kingdom ethic is the reserve: to be greatest in Christ’s kingdom is to lower yourself rather than exalt yourself. If you want to be great, then humble yourself and be a servant.
Consider how that kind of mindset can impact the church’s testimony. Think of how the church stands out when it lives against the grain of the culture and the standards of the world. And then consider how powerful a tool humility and servanthood could be in carrying out the mission of the church to make disciples.
If we’re going to effectively reach the world with the gospel, we have to look different from the world. We have to stand out. Consider again John 13:34—“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” We looked at that text already. But look at what Jesus says in the next verse: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Do you see that? When we love one another…when we humbly serve each other and treat each other as more important, and put other people’s needs ahead of our own…it marks us as disciples of Jesus Christ. It makes the gospel real. It shows people that the gospel we preach has real effect.
We want people to come into this place and say, “There’s something different about these people.” It’s not building that sets them apart. It’s not the lights or the music. It’s this: people love the Bible here, and they love each other here. And they live out what they believe and what they preach.
Serving will never be a replacement for the gospel. Faith comes through hearing, and hearing by the word of truth. But hearing is buttressed and supported by lives lived out in humble integrity. We show the gospel to be real when we love each other and care for each other as a church.
You show me a church that wants to reach the lost with the gospel of Jesus Christ and I’ll show you a church that lives that gospel out in loving, humble service to each other.
A true mission-driven church is a church that serves one another.
Conclusion
So what kind of servants does God want us to be? God wants Anchorage Grace Church to be filled with…
- gospel-enabled
- Christ-like
- leader-equipped
- Spirit-empowered
- character-driven
- God-worshipping
- eternal-minded
- mission-oriented
…servants. That’s what God wants. That’s our calling as Christians. That’s the call of servanthood.