Strength is For Service Not for Status
01-15-2012
Pastor Dan Little
Adfontes.djl@gmail.com
The Landmark Church, Binghamton, NY 13901
Jesus showed the disciples what it meant to live as a servant. For three years He modeled the servant life before them, and then toward the end of His earthly ministry he gave them a real-time demonstration of service by washing their feet. After they had looked on in horror at what their miracle-working Master was doing, He said to them “Do you see what I am doing? I am showing you what it means to be a servant.” And then came these words: John 13:17 If you know these things, BLESSED ARE YOU IF YOU DO THEM.
Of course Jesus’ ultimate servant-act was to give up His own life in order to save ours. He died on the cross while breathing out forgiveness to His torturers. Even before going to the cross Jesus told His disciples that to follow Him that each would have to take up his own cross each day. Disciples are not greater than their Master; we are to live as Jesus lived.
This morning I want to add another layer to the theme that we must go beyond studying, blogging, teaching, and learning the Word of God to where actually enter deep into the blessing of doing the Word of God.
SCRIPTURE READING
Romans 15:1-6 (The Message Bible)
15:1 Those of us who are strong and able in the faith need to step in and lend a hand to those who falter, and not just do what is most convenient for us. Strength is for service, not status. 2 Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, "How can I help?"
3 That’s exactly what Jesus did. He didn’t make it easy for himself by avoiding people’s troubles, but waded right in and helped out. "I took on the troubles of the troubled," is the way Scripture puts it. 4 Even if it was written in Scripture long ago, you can be sure it’s written for us. God wants the combination of his steady, constant calling and warm, personal counsel in Scripture to come to characterize us, keeping us alert for whatever he will do next. 5 May our dependably steady and warmly personal God develop maturity in you so that you get along with each other as well as Jesus gets along with us all. 6 Then we’ll be a choir — not our voices only, but our very lives singing in harmony in a stunning anthem to the God and Father of our Master Jesus! (MsgB)
This is The Word of the Lord
It is a sign of Spiritual health and maturity when a believer begins to look around his local church and ask “How can I help?”
This is a quite different question than the one asked by people switching from one church to another. Maybe it’s just my experience, but I have noticed that many of them arrive asking, “What can I do to fix this church—rearrange it to fit my own preferences?”
But it is this “How can I help?” servant attitude that is causing the churches in Northern India among the Dalits (untouchables) to grow and prosper these days. People are entering into the kingdom by the thousands, and almost the first words they speak after baptism are ”How can I serve?”
These words come out of a heart overflowing with gratitude to Jesus for redeeming their lives from slavery, idolatry, hopelessness and death. They feel Jesus’ presence. He answers their prayers and saves their friends, and they are on fire to see others added to the church—the future Bride of Christ.
Western Missionaries who become acquainted with what God is doing in such places as described above come back saying that material poverty has made these people fabulously rich in faith and relationships. They have a vibrant love for Christ, a new appreciation for their own lives, for each other, for the community at large, as well as a new appreciation for all that God has created.
When it comes to the larger communities in which they live they have a kind of hunger and urgency to see their whole tribe or village come to know Jesus.
Here in the West (speaking in broad generalities—a dangerous thing to do, I know), it tends to be the other way around. We have all kinds of material wealth but experience a poverty of faith and relationships, and have a kind of blunted hunger to see people come to know Jesus.
For my birthday I received a new addition to my collection of gadgets; a Nook Pad. It’s a great gadget, but here is the problem with all my gadgets. I can be in touch with the world and never have to lift my head to look anyone in the eye and say a real and meaningful “Hello, how are you?”
I have seen kids and young adults sit in this congregation and use the entire time texting to I don’t know who, but very possibly the person sitting right next to them. I have seen adults set entire meetings and only look up from their gadget only when forced to do so by a direct question. As they say in China, Som-Ting-Wong!
We have faxing and the internet, and we have email, and i-phones, and I pads, and texting, and all kinds of social media such as face book, so that almost instantly I can tell the world things they don’t need to know about me or my life, or I can read things about 500 hundred other people’s lives all of whom are called friends., all this without ever saying an eyeball to eyeball hello.
And yet, deep personal relationships with God, with our own heart, with others and with all creation through the Holy Spirit is the very fabric of the Christian life.
There is a growing awareness here in the West (and this is a good thing) that we have sold our birthright in Christ for a bowl of porridge. We have preferred material wealth which has left us to experience a steadily increasing relational-poverty.
But God is moving to change that and I will tell you how.
Here in American (and maybe Western Culture in general), we are now under the judgment of God. It is like a slow moving low pressure weather front. The edge of it arrives, it become increasingly heavy, and sometimes ends up being a category 4 hurricane. We now under the thin arriving edge of God’s judgment, but it will become increasingly heavy in the next few years.
For some it will be judgment unto redemption.
For others it will be judgment unto destruction.
Here is what I mean by that.
• Redemptive judgment is where God presses down upon our lives to bring great discomfort, discomfort that produces in us changed minds and hearts. Jonah defied the know will of God and ended up in the belly of the fish. Under the pressure of God’s discipline Jonah repented. That was redemptive judgment. Jonah was saved, Nineveh was saved, and God’s name was glorified.
• Destructive judgment is where we have insisted on our own ways for so long that after weeks, months and years of refusing to be changed, God stops pressing down and just gives us over to our own will and way. He gives us what we want.
Redemptive judgment or destructive judgment, repentance is the remedy in either case.
But here is the problem; when God turns us over to our own ways we become harder and harder in those ways and repentance becomes less and less likely. So how does this scenario end? Proverbs put like this; Proverbs 29:1 He who is often reproved, yet stiffens his neck, will suddenly be broken beyond healing. ESV
Everyone, good Christian people included, is already feeling this judgment. Here’s the thing—if we stay soft and tender and humble and prayerfully dependent before God, then for us this difficult season will be one of redemptive judgment.
As for the nation at large, I think we are looking right into the teeth of the Romans 1L28 scenario: Romans 1:28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
As a culture we have a very strong desire to not “…retain God in our knowledge.”
Look at what we have done with the knowledge of God in the area of children in the womb, in the area of sex and pornography.
Look at what we are doing with marriage.
We can’t get rid of the knowledge of God fast enough in our institutions of higher learning.
We want Him out of our government, out of our courts and laws, out of society.
And why does it seem clear to me that we are now now under the judgment of God? Here is why? Because clearly God is giving us our way on this slow and grinding path to self-destruction—giving us over to reprobate (depraved and corrupt) minds.
But this judgment is not just for those who practice a very outward form of rebellion toward God. It is also for believers as we practice more subtle forms of rebellion.
The more we who are believers resist the sense of God stirring us up to put our hands to the work of Kingdom preferring our own comfort instead, the harder it becomes to feel the stirring of God.
We become nearly unable to feel or respond. That is the judgment of God.
C.S. in his book The Screwtape Letters, writes brilliantly about the danger of practiced passive resistance saying;
“Active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often [a man] feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
A. W. Tozer in his 1955 collection of writing called The Root of the Righteous writes pointedly to the kind of Christianity that is peculiar to North American Christians, saying that only proof of our commitment to Christ is our commitment to actually doing His Word.
“Any faith that does not command [the actions of the] one who holds it is not a real faith; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living.
Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord, but watch carefully that we never get caught really depending on Him.
Jesus said, John 4:34 Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work. KJV
“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22).
I pray that every believer—all of us would, in this season of judgment, be quick to soften our hearts and turn our minds toward doing the will of God—presenting our bodies (our strength) as a living sacrifice in God’s service, turning away from the idolatry of materialism.
