Category: Serving

Servanthood is a high calling. Jesus said of himself that he had not come to be served but to serve. As we have already seen he expressed this verbally to the disciples when teaching them not to seek high position (Matt 20:28) and it was also a major part of the prophecies about him through Isaiah in the servant passages already referred to (Isaiah 52, 53). But what are the purposes of serving? I suggest there are three. 1. To help others The primary purpose of the church is to be a change agent to advance the kingdom of God. This, of course, may be achieved in many ways, starting with the lives of individuals as they aspire to fulfil the potential that God has vested in them. So serving…

We will continue to learn from Joseph about the qualities of servanthood. 3. Responsible and reliable Joseph was a remarkable man. He had huge promises over his life from his childhood when he was given dreams about the way he would have authority over his brothers and how even his parents would bow down to him. Yet in Gen 39:19-23 he found himself in prison after being falsely accused of propositioning his master's wife. This is hardly the outworking of the dreams he might have anticipated! Despite this, he did not allow circumstances to compromise his value system. He displayed great spiritual maturity despite everything seeming to go wrong. As a result he was entrusted with a high level of responsibility over other prisoners. The qualities of responsibility and reliability…

Servants are no longer the norm in UK households. With the increase in the costs of labour and the development of household equipment such as vacuum cleaners and clothes washing machines the thought of employing someone to clean and care for the house disappeared from most people's experience many decades ago. However, for many reading this blog in, say, India or Africa, servants around the house are very normal. With wages in these countries often being relatively low and the level of poverty quite high, and with no cushion of a welfare state, it becomes a social responsibility to employ people to give them a family income. In many cases such people become almost a part of the employer's family being trusted with caring for the children, security in the home if…

Continuing our study in Philippians 2 what else is attributed to Jesus' attitude? First, total humility. Humility When Paul teaches us that we should have an attitude like Jesus' (Phil 2:5) he quickly shows us that in taking on the form of a bond-servant the path he had to walk was one of total humility ‘counting not equality with God a thing to be grasped'. I wonder if you have ever been in the position where you have been tempted (or even yielded to the temptation) to ‘drop names', thus implying to your hearer that you are someone special since you know such and such a celebrity? In this way we can try to build a reputation on the back of someone else's character and achievements without having to demonstrate…

Self-sacrificial servanthood We have abundant scriptural evidence of Jesus demonstrating that he practiced what he preached. From the prophetic utterances in the famous servant passages through Isaiah (Is 52:13-15 and Is 53:1- 12) to Paul's letter to the Philippians we find the pages of our Bibles peppered with examples of Godly self-sacrificial servanthood, primarily demonstrated by Jesus but also by other men whom God commended, such as young David who was described as a man after God's own heart (Acts 13:22) for his willingness to do God's will. God loves willing servants. The rights of a servant It is instructive to study the second chapter of Paul's letter to the Philippians; it tells us so much about Jesus' servant-attitude. First, what were his rights as a servant? He had none!…

I have written on previous occasions about serving and servanthood. These are topics close to my heart. But it is such an important feature of the role of the church and of individuals, as modelled by Jesus, that I make no apology for writing on this topic once again. Servanthood is not an option At times Jesus must have nearly despaired. He had been seeking to teach and train the twelve for well over two years and yet they still did not seem to get it! In Matthew's gospel (Matt 20:20-28) we read that on one occasion the two Zebedee brothers, James and John, even enlisted their mother as an advocate for them to lobby Jesus to give them places of prominence in his kingdom. Jesus patiently spells out the…