WHAT JESUS EXPECTS: He told us to be servants, but it’s hard to know how to move in that direction in such a self-centered culture.
- Luke 22:24-27.
- It is a little difficult for us to understand how to be servants when we’re so used to being the center of attention:
a. Stores cater to us to win our business.
b. Advertisers try to amuse us so we’ll buy their products.
c. Social media allows us customize our experience so we only hear voices that agree with us.
d. Social media allow us a platform where we can speak and have others praise us.
- We’re used to be served more than we’re used to serving.
- Even for their culture, what Jesus is saying was challenging.
- In v. 25 He says that this is not the way they normally saw things working.
- In v. 26 He says things that sound peculiar to our ears. What do we do with them? How do live them out?
- We talked last week about how difficult it can be for us to understand the concept that Jesus is putting out here when He calls us to be servants.
- What I want to do this morning is look at four passages that share some specifics about what a servant heart and a servant attitude looks like.
- These are toe-stomping passages. They challenge us to go beyond what our culture tells us and to try to embrace the call of Jesus. Hopefully they’ll paint a picture that’s clearer.
FOUR TRUTHS TO DEFLATE YOUR SELF-CENTEREDNESS:
1. So much of what you’re proud of was given to you.
- Luke 19:13-20.
- A key part of our self-centeredness is people stuck on how great they are.
- How much time is spent on social media drawing attention to ourselves? “Here’s a picture of me: comment on how pretty I am.” “Here’s what I did today: tell me how terrific I am.” “Here’s what I accomplished: everyone praise how far I’m going.”
- Now, I’m not saying that we should never post a picture or tell what happened in our day or share an accomplishment. There is a place for it in moderation – the sharing of life.
- But it is so easy with social media to have everything be about me: you are the center of the world around which everyone rotates.
- If you don’t believe me, just compare the number of posts where people share something about what they did with posts where people share something about what others did. Are there some of the second category? Yes, but they’ll be dwarfed by the first category.
- The parable of the ten minas has a lot in there that is worthy unpacking, but there are just three words that I want to focus on for this morning.
- Look with me at v. 13, which tells us that the master gave each of his servants a mina, which was a unit of money back then.
- Word #1: Gave.
- The master gave them each a mina. They didn’t go earn it – it was given to them.
- So much of what we have in our lives was given to us by God: our looks, our intelligence, our personality.
- Sure, we have a part in it: we can dress nicely or never take a shower. Still, the original gift is from God.
- Not that you’d ever know that by the way we talk. We act like we earned all that we have. We’re so full of ourselves.
- I’ve used the sermons I preach as an example. Let’s say after a message someone comes up to me and says (this is a stretch, but just go along with me), “That was the best sermon I ever heard.” Now, I could walk away from that thinking, “Wow! I guess I’m awesome. I must be one of the best preachers ever. I’m really something!” Now certainly I have a role to play in the writing of the sermon and hopefully I’m faithful and diligent in doing my part, but if it genuinely was a great sermon I have to remember: God is the one who gave the Bible to pull truth from, God was the one who called me into ministry in the first place, God was the one who gave me the brain to think with, God is the one who convicts hearts and draws people to Himself. Even if that genuinely was the best sermon that person ever heard, my part in it is minor compared to God’s. That’s why the right response to compliment would be something like, “Glory to God that the Spirit spoke to you so clearly.”
- Word #2: Stewardship.
- He entrusted them with something substantial as a stewardship. A stewardship means that it didn’t belong to them. It was given to them to manage but it still belonged to the master.
- So much of what we use in this life falls into that category:
a. The money that we have in our lives. It’s ultimately a stewardship from God.
b. The spiritual gifts that we have in our lives. It’s ultimately a stewardship from God.
c. The time that we have in our lives. It’s ultimately a stewardship from God.
- The master in this story didn’t say, “Here’s some money – you guys go do what you want with it!” He entrusted it them as a stewardship. That means that they knew they were caretakers of what still belonged to the master.
- 1 Corinthians 6:20 reminds us that we were bought with a price. One of the reasons that Jesus uses this “servant” imagery is that we are indebted to Him. He is Lord of our lives, which means that He’s in charge.
- The reason this is important is that it shifts the focus of our life.
- Many of us have bought our cultural idea that we are to try to exalt ourselves, make a name for ourselves, put “me” at the center of attention.
- Biblically, when I understand the servant idea, I see that my life is to be focused on pleasing my master. The bounty that I have been given is not mine to waste in the vain pursuit of personal fame, but I am to live to lift Him up.
- Word #3: Accountability.
- The third word is accountability.
- As we read on down through the parable, we see that the servant who was not faithful with what his master entrusted to him is rebuked and judged.
- It’s important to get what I’m saying this morning because we’re going to be judged concerning it.
- Let’s say you give me your credit card and say, “I have to go to a meeting. If the UPS guy shows up today here at work, there’s a package I’ve been waiting on that’s COD. Will you take care of it?” I say sure, but then when I take lunch I go out and purchase a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff on your card. When you get the bill at the end of the month, you confront me and I say, “Yeah, I bought some stuff. You handed me your card.” You reply, “I did, but it wasn’t so you could go waste it on nothing. I wasn’t your money!”
- Well, in our lives, it isn’t our money. All we have is a trust from God, so we’d best handle it wisely.
2. God is not impressed by your resume.
- Luke 18:9-14.
- We want to be impressive to people. We like it when people look at us and say that we’ve made great progress or that we’re really doing well in life or that our work is outstanding. And there’s obviously nothing wrong and much right with doing outstanding work.
- But we can get to where we put a lot of thought into what people think of us. We want people to notice us. We live for the praise that people give us. We want folks to be impressed by our resume.
- A problem that can arise from that is becoming more and more self-centered. We focus undue attention on what everyone thinks of us.
- Then, once we’ve got that happening, when we do start adding impressive things to our resume, we start feeling pretty full of ourselves.
- In Luke 18, verses 10-12 show a Pharisee flaunting his resume. He’s impressed with his righteousness.
- The problem with that, of course, is that none of us can earn our salvation. We all, no matter how impressive our resume (religious or otherwise), are miles short of living out the moral perfection that would merit a right place with God.
- That’s why our only real option for approaching God is an awareness of our sin and an appeal to His mercy.
- That’s what we see with the tax collector (widely despised in those days) in verses 13-14. He acknowledges how far short he is of God’s standard.
- Which leads us to the main point here: you can impress people with your resume, but you can’t impress God.
- That’s what makes this kind of self-centeredness so dangerous: it can get in the way of our standing with God. We start thinking that God should be as impressed with us as everyone else apparently is.
- He’s not. It’s not that He doesn’t love you (He does!). It’s that your moral resume has a lot more negative than positive.
- This is why that word from v. 13 is so important: mercy.
- We approach God not with the spotlight on us, people reaching out just to shake our hand, quietly confident that our resume with lead God to say, “Very nice!”
- We approach God trembling, aware of how far short we fall, knowing that our only hope lies in the mercy that He will extend to us sinners.
3. Serving Jesus isn’t extraordinary – it’s your job.
- Luke 17:7-10.
- Let’s move for a moment from worldly self-centeredness and talk more specifically about religious self-centeredness. Just a moment ago we were talking about a worldly self-centeredness that can leak over into our religious thought. Now let’s talk about self-centeredness that is religious in origin and scope.
- We’ll call it “religious self-centeredness” and it takes the shape of religious pride.
- Some of us get so busy with church work and Kingdom work that come to see ourselves as indispensible to the work that’s going on. Now we would never brag about it in a straightforward way (“I am so important and great!”), but we start to have thoughts:
a. “This place would shut down if it wasn’t for me.”
b. “I’m a pillar of the church.”
c. “I’ve given so much to this church.”
- This is what we’re going to call “humble pride.” That’s when we brag about what a great servant we are. (Get the irony there?) That’s when we say we’re doing things for God, but we get mad if a good amount of the attention doesn’t get deflected over on us.
- With one hand we’re waving off the praise, but with our other hand we’re waving our fingers to encourage more.
- This parable in Luke 17 is important for long-time Christians with a case of “humble pride.”
- It’s a parable that is largely ignored by us. I don’t recall ever hearing a sermon preached on it.
- The point is pretty straightforward: a servant doing servant work shouldn’t expect praise because they’re just doing their job. That’s hard, but that’s what He’s saying.
- Now, He’s not banning us from encouraging each other. I think it’s great when we have the opportunity to tell our brothers and sisters in Christ that we appreciate what they’re doing. But doing that and having that done for us is what we might call a “bonus.” It’s not what we can expect as standard payment for our work.
- Rather than having the “humble pride” that expects people to notice and praise our work, we are to do it as servants and have no expectation that we get any praise. The self-centeredness that “humble pride” brings is one where they are “working for God” but they expect God’s people to notice and praise regularly.
- This a religious self-centeredness that expects the focus of attention to be on us rather than on Jesus. It shouldn’t be. We’re just the servants.
4. Quit acting like you know it all and start asking questions.
- Luke 14:7-11.
- The point I want to make out of these verses requires a little explanation.
- The obvious point of this parable is that we are to take the lesser place rather than being self-centered and prideful and grabbing onto the best seat that we think we can get away with. Jesus notes that we may end up embarrassed as we’re asked to take a lesser place.
- I want to take that truth about our physical position in a room and apply it to our “position” within the relationships around us. Rather than talking about physical position, let’s talk about our attitudinal position.
- The position that so many of us take is “I know it all” and “I am top dog.”
- What do we encourage within media culture? People who spew definitive and authoritative opinions. (Often it’s less about how much you actually know and more just about how confidently you can express your opinion.)
- That’s taking the higher place within the “room”: “Hey, everyone, shut up and listen to me! I know a lot!”
- In contrast to that is the person who presumes that they don’t know everything, that they might be able to learn something from the other person.
- They ask things like, “What do you think?” and “What would you like to do?”
- Many of us need to quit acting like we know it all and start asking questions.
- Our willingness to so eagerly express our opinions is a sign of our self-centeredness. “Well, of course everyone wants to know what I have to say! Who wouldn’t?” Really? Are you that full of yourself that you can’t conceive of people not being interested in hearing what you have to say? Are you that confident that you have nothing to learn from those around you?
- From this parable, one of the applications of “take the lesser place” is to take the lesser place within conversations. Request people’s thoughts. Ask questions. Quit presuming you’re the smartest person in the room.
- Does this mean that we should never offer our thoughts? No, but it shouldn’t be the first thing out of our mouths.
A FINAL "SELF-CENTERED" THOUGHT: When you’re self-centered, there’s no way for Christ to be the center of your life.
- Our lives need to be centered on Christ, not us.
- We are servants, exalting the worthy name of Jesus.
- Live a bigger life – one centered on Jesus.
