Who’s Serving Who? – Exhibiting Jesus

If you ever want to be more like Jesus, then serve His flock. When you think of all the lessons Jesus taught us about being a servant leader, what example in the Bible comes to mind? That’s right, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples.

    “So when He had washed their feet, taken His garments, and sat down again, He said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.’” (John 13:12-17)

You probably think I’m going to concentrate on Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet. I want to concentrate on the last line of today’s passage. “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”

How many of you know of the things Jesus spoke in our passage? All of you? Good! How many of you do them? Still wondering why your Christian walk is not so blessed? You’re missing the joy God intends for us by not obeying and serving Him. If it were not for remembering my old self I would almost marvel at the amount of Christians I know who do not serve in church and still wonder as to why they feel something missing in their Christian walk. James explains it clearly:

    “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.” (James 1:22-25)

In fact, if you are unwilling to be obedient to God’s call on your life, I’m not talking an occasional disobedience but a steady pattern of not answering God’s call to serve, then you have good reason to doubt your salvation. Don’t get mad at me, those our Jesus’ words:

    “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” (Matthew 7:21-23)

If you are strictly a consumer Christian, then you are on a decaying path if you’ve not already arrived at such a state. Your whole purpose in going to church is to be fed. You want to be served instead of serving. This past Wednesday I taught 18 adults a Bible study on service and I asked them at the beginning if they knew what “servant-leader” meant. To my astonishment no one did. At first blush the term almost seems as an oxymoron, but that is because the world teaches us that leaders are served instead of being servants.

However the greatest act of service, nay worship, by the Christian is to be obedient to the call of God. We are called to walk in Christ’s commandments; it proves our love for Jesus:

    “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, that as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in it.” (2 John 1:6)

Maybe that’s it; you don’t see Jesus’ call for you to serve as a commandment. Time to change your point of view; our point of view will always change our attitude, which determines our altitude. If you want to soar on the wings of eagles, then understand that God’s call for you to serve in His church is a commandment, not a consultation to see if your calendar is free.

Let me ask it this way: why should God bless you if all you’re going to do is consume that blessing? Oh but Bro Dave I do share…uh, uh, uh…I’m not talking about monetary blessing, although we could probably challenge the level of your financial sharing just by looking at your checkbook. Nevertheless, I am talking about the rich, abundant life in Christ where He shares His love, wisdom, and truth through the reading and preaching of and obedience to His Word. What do you do with His Word?

Beloved, if we want to be like Christ, then we must be like Christ. We must serve His church; there is no greater way to expose our love for Jesus then when we serve His church. More on that next time we meet.

I pray you have a blessed weekend and please remember to go to church on Sunday.

In Christ
Dave
Ps. 37:4

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    Copyright © 2012 David Jeffers

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