[This was shared during a memorial service for Gertie this week. She was the mother of a high school classmate I have known since we were in the fourth grade. Gertie was also my Cub Scout den mother.]
Psalm 116:12-16
2 Timothy 4:6-8
John 11:21-27
On Thursday, Eric said something about his mother that stuck with me. “Her life was remarkable for being so unremarkable.”
By that he meant that Gertie’s long life, though not always easy, wasn’t marked by much in the way of tragedy. Born and raised in Jackson County, she and her husband Frank came to Columbus in search of greater opportunity for themselves and, eventually, for their sons, Jan and Eric, on the west side. They raised their children. Gertie doted on her grandchildren and loved her great-grandchildren. I understand what Eric meant by saying Gertie’s life was remarkable for being unremarkable.
But I can tell you this afternoon that from the perspective of heaven, Gertie’s was also a remarkable life! In Psalm 116, which we considered a few moments ago, we’re told: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of his servants.”
Part of the problem with living in this world is that we’ve grown too accustomed to death. We look at the death of someone who has reached nearly ninety-eight years of age and say, “She lived a good life. She was healthy almost near the end.”
And that’s true in this world. But in judging things from the perspective of this world, we display a lower standard for our lives than God has for us.
The book of Genesis tells us that we were “made in the image of God” and in Ecclesiastes, we’re told that God has set eternity in human hearts.
God built us not for death, but for eternity. With Adam’s and Eve’s fall though, we have become inheritors of things like aging and disease and death, along with an inclination to rebel against God just as Adam and Eve did. We’ve become accustomed to death.
But God never has!
That’s why He sent His Son Jesus on the first Christmas to bear our sin and mortality on a cross, then raised Him from the dead so that all who believe in Him can have forgiveness for sin and life with God, life as it was meant to be. As Jesus put it to His friend Martha as she grieved the death of her brother, Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”
God hates death!
And that’s why the psalm tells us that the death of one of His servants is precious to God.
And Gertie was a servant of God. Her servant heart could be seen in the three most important realms of her life: her church (the same church in which Eric and I were confirmed together), her family, and the west side.
My personal recollection of her is that she never, in a phrase I learned from my Jackson County mother-in-law, “put on the dog.” Over the years, my mother has remarked more than once that Gertie was one of the few women in the Westgate Elementary PTA who didn’t spend most of the meeting time bragging on her kids.
Now, I’m sure that Jan and Eric did many things that she could have bragged about. But bragging isn’t what servants of God do.
They let their serving and their lives of steady commitment to God and to the important things in life do their talking for them. Like the apostle Paul in the New Testament, a servant’s attitude is “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness,” because it’s in the recognition of our weaknesses and vulnerability that we become more dependent on God and His power will shine through lives of service and love and good humor.
I know that in making these observations about Gertie, I’m preaching to the choir, so to speak. The people here at the apartment complex knew what kind of person she was.
Her family also know what kinds of people you have been for her: warm, caring, considerate friends with servant hearts.
The community you share, in fact, may be remarkable because it’s so unremarkable. No great drama. Just aging children of God living in the kind of fellowship, community, and mutual encouragement and support for which God made each and every one of us.
You have been Gertie’s cheerleaders and God wants us all to be cheerleaders to each other. You’ve exhibited the confidence in God’s grace and goodness that makes it possible to live life as the apostle Paul said believers should live. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” he writes. “Rather, in humility value others above yourselves…” Your love for Gertie has been a witness to her family!
A few moments ago, I said that we’ve grown too accustomed to death. That’s true in one way. But in another way, it’s not. If we were as accustomed to death as we often seem to be, family and friends wouldn’t grieve over the loss of a mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, great-grandmother, friend. You will miss this woman who has been such a remarkable (and long-time) presence in your lives. It would be unnatural for you not to grieve!
But there is good news! God did send Jesus into the world to ensure that death need not be the end of our life stories. Jesus says: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” For all who turn from sin and trust in Christ, that is a promise to latch onto today and for all eternity. We may endure all kinds of griefs and deaths in this world, but God has crashed into this world and destroyed the hold of griefs and death over us. He has set us free to be servants of God, who even as we face our own deaths, can say with the apostle Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
The good fight to which Christ calls us, the good fight I believe that Gertie fought each day, was the fight to hold onto Christ. To trust in Jesus, to believe in Him.
To those willing to trust in Him, Jesus gives the power to believe, the power to hold on, the ability to be servants of God who don’t need to “put on the dog” because God has already proven their value on Christ’s cross, and the privilege of living with God forever.
Hold onto Christ today and always.
He will be your comfort, your strength.
He will dry your tears.
And one day, Jesus Christ will give you happy reunions with Gertie and with all the saints who have trusted in Him. God bless you. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Showing posts with label Philippians 2:3-4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philippians 2:3-4. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Radical Makeover
[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio during both this morning's traditional and contemporary worship celebrations.]
Mark 8:27-38
Imagine a scene with me. You're in your doctor's office for a consultation. You’ve had some tests and now you're back to see the doc to learn the results. She enters the office and says, "It’'s serious and the prognosis is not good." Your heart sinks.
Then, she says, "But I have a treatment that's going to make everything OK...I'm going to give you a facelift."
You know that can't be right: When you're up against a major illness, a superficial remedy won't do. In the face of radical maladies, only radical therapies stand a chance.
We human beings are confronted with a major malady.
It's called death and it's the result of sin.
You and I were created in the image of God, the pinnacle of God's creation. But sin has distorted our natures. In fact, one Biblical word for sin is taken from the experience a person has looking at their reflection in a pool of water, then having that reflection distorted when a stone is thrown into the water. The image gets distorted.
Because the human race is the pinnacle of the creation, the Bible says that all creation groans under the weight of our sin, the distortion of God's image in each of us.
The Bible uses the word, sin, in two different ways.
One way the Bible talks about sin is as a condition of our birth, original sin. This is what David is talking about in Psalm 51:5: "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." If you had human parents, you were born sinful, too. Sin is a debt we owe to God. You and I are born with a debt so crippling we could never possibly pay it off.
But if that sounds bad, it gets worse. Being born in sin means that we have an inborn inclination to add to our debts by committing sins. This is what the Lutheran confessions call concupiscence. This is the other way the Bible speaks of sin: a particular violation of the will of God as expressed in the Ten Commandments: murder, taking God's Name in vain, failing to help our neighbor in need.
Because of the condition of original sin, our sinfulness is stubbornly evidenced in all our thinking, speaking, and living. Because we are born sinners, we sin naturally.
In Romans 7:15, the apostle Paul writes: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do [obey God’s commands] I do not do, but what I hate I do."
We are born in sin and we find ourselves incapable of refraining from sin.
And the Bible doesn’t soft pedal what that means: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).
"Wait," we might say. "I'm not perfect. But I've never committed any of the really big sins. I've never murdered. I've never committed adultery. I've never stolen."
James 2:10 says: "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it."
So, in sin, we have a major illness and the prognosis is death. Superficial therapies won’t do. That's what Jesus is talking about in today's Gospel lesson.
Turn to Mark 8:27-38 (page 705), please. Near the beginning of a conversation with the disciples, Jesus asks them, "Who do you say I am?” In Mark 8:29, Peter says, "You are the Messiah [or, the Christ]."
The title, Christ (from Christos as it appears in the New Testament, which was written in Greek) or Messiah (from the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written), means Anointed One. The kings of God's people were always anointed with oil on being enthroned. The Old Testament had repeatedly foretold of an ultimate Messiah who would bring God’s rule to earth.
Through the centuries, certain popular expectations developed about the coming Christ or Messiah. The people of first-century Judea, the place to which Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, came to live, die, and rise, thought that the Messiah would make what would amount to cosmetic changes, the moral equivalent of a facelift as a cure for cancer.
To them, the problems they faced had nothing to do with themselves or their own deficiencies. (This is a common theme in human history. The late Karl Menninger once quoted a folk song that said, "Everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault.")
Jesus' fellow Judeans wanted a king who would toss the Romans out of their land. They wanted an end to oppressive government regulations. They wanted the rich to pay their fair share in taxes and they wanted to the Romans to ease up on the poor. They wanted a king who would do their bidding. Their idea of what God should do in their lives was very different from what God had in mind.
That's why Peter's declaration of faith in Jesus as the Messiah was dangerous. Jesus had to instruct the disciples on what it means to confess Jesus as the Christ. He didn't want to feed their false expectations. Jesus had come to do more than offer facelifts on dying people!
Look at Mark 8:31: "He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again."
The therapy for our sin, Jesus is saying, begins with Him.
He, Who never once sinned, would undergo the death we deserve for our sin so that the debt can be paid for all who repent and believe in Jesus.
But when Peter heard Jesus predict that He would suffer, be rejected, and be killed, he couldn’t take it. It certainly did sound like a very compelling campaign platform!
Look at Mark 8:32: "Peter took him [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him." The word rebuke, epitimao in the Greek in which Mark originally wrote, means to warn, upbraid, condemn, set straight.
Imagine this: Peter has just declared Jesus to be God's Anointed King and now he has the audacity to tell Jesus how to do His job!
Verse 33: "But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’"
When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, you'll remember, he tried to lure Jesus away from suffering, rejection, and the cross. He did so because if Jesus was faithful in taking these agonies onto Himself, He would pay our debt in full and thereby empower all who turn from sin and trust in Him as their God to be raised just as God the Father raised Jesus on the first Easter.
Jesus knew that He needed to fulfill His purpose for coming to earth, whatever pain He caused Himself. He couldn't let Satan stand in His way.
Now Jesus applies the name of Satan to Peter!
Peter may have thought that He was doing a nice thing, like the church member who says, "Pastor, I know that the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to eternity with God, but you make people feel uncomfortable when you tell the truth like that."
"Niceness" of the kind Peter exhibits here leads people away from God.
"Niceness" like this suits Satan's purposes just fine. Jesus, in essence, is telling Peter,
In fact one of the great afflictions of the Christian churches in North America and Europe today is that too often, we've become the Church of Nice rather than the Church of Christ.
Jesus was telling Peter, in essence: "I am the great Physician and My suffering, rejection by others, and death on a cross are the first part of the cure. So, Peter, get out of My way!"
Then, Jesus gives the second part of His radical therapy for our sin and death.
Look at verses 34 and 35: "...he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it."
Here we see that to believe that Jesus is the Christ--the King, the Lord of all--is more than just saying the right words on Sunday mornings.
To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, first of all, to surrender ourselves, even to the point of discomfort and death, to God's only aim for our lives, our sole aim in life.
God's sole aim for our lives is articulated in 2 Corinthians 3:18, which says: "But we all [all of us who trust in Christ as God and Savior], with uncovered face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."
If sin has distorted the image of God within us, it's God's aim to infuse us with the image of God the Son so that we can begin to experience human life as God intended for it to be lived.
God aims to make us over into the very image of Jesus!
As we trust in Jesus each day, the Holy Spirit works a miracle: We who have been distorted by sin are made over in the image of Christ!
It doesn't happen fully within our time on this earth.
And on the way to our resurrection from the dead, we won't avoid suffering, rejection, or death any more than Jesus did.
But we will become more and more like Jesus.
1 John 3:2 says, "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."
So, to believe in Jesus means, first of all, to surrender to Him even to the point of discomfort and death.
To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, secondly, to embrace the life style of Jesus.
When, through Jesus' death and resurrection, you understand that you are number one in God's eyes, you’re freed from “looking out for number one."
Philippians 2:3-4 says: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."
John Stott tells the story of a college classroom in India. The professor, a Hindu, realized that one of his students was a Christian. "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ," the professor told the student, "India would be at your feet tomorrow." That professor could as easily say that to any Christian in this country: "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, America would be at your feet."
No Christian wants to have others at their feet, of course. Like our Lord, we come to serve, not to be served.
But our joy as Christians is only made complete when we share Christ with others and they too, come to believe in Jesus as the Christ.
Sin and death threaten to separate us from God for eternity. God's cure is radical, but sure. It begins with the Christ, God the Son, suffering, dying, and rising for us. And it's fulfilled when, after confessing Jesus with our lips, we confess Him with our lives, taking up our crosses and following Him: submitting ourselves to the death of our old sinful selves, committing ourselves to letting God make us over in the image of Jesus Himself, and embracing the very life of self-sacrifice and unstinting love that Jesus lived.
May God give us the power to have a faith that's more than words, a faith that shows in our whole lives.
May we submit to the radical cure that gives us life with God forever!
Amen
Mark 8:27-38
Imagine a scene with me. You're in your doctor's office for a consultation. You’ve had some tests and now you're back to see the doc to learn the results. She enters the office and says, "It’'s serious and the prognosis is not good." Your heart sinks.
Then, she says, "But I have a treatment that's going to make everything OK...I'm going to give you a facelift."
You know that can't be right: When you're up against a major illness, a superficial remedy won't do. In the face of radical maladies, only radical therapies stand a chance.
We human beings are confronted with a major malady.
It's called death and it's the result of sin.
You and I were created in the image of God, the pinnacle of God's creation. But sin has distorted our natures. In fact, one Biblical word for sin is taken from the experience a person has looking at their reflection in a pool of water, then having that reflection distorted when a stone is thrown into the water. The image gets distorted.
Because the human race is the pinnacle of the creation, the Bible says that all creation groans under the weight of our sin, the distortion of God's image in each of us.
The Bible uses the word, sin, in two different ways.
One way the Bible talks about sin is as a condition of our birth, original sin. This is what David is talking about in Psalm 51:5: "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." If you had human parents, you were born sinful, too. Sin is a debt we owe to God. You and I are born with a debt so crippling we could never possibly pay it off.
But if that sounds bad, it gets worse. Being born in sin means that we have an inborn inclination to add to our debts by committing sins. This is what the Lutheran confessions call concupiscence. This is the other way the Bible speaks of sin: a particular violation of the will of God as expressed in the Ten Commandments: murder, taking God's Name in vain, failing to help our neighbor in need.
Because of the condition of original sin, our sinfulness is stubbornly evidenced in all our thinking, speaking, and living. Because we are born sinners, we sin naturally.
In Romans 7:15, the apostle Paul writes: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do [obey God’s commands] I do not do, but what I hate I do."
We are born in sin and we find ourselves incapable of refraining from sin.
And the Bible doesn’t soft pedal what that means: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).
"Wait," we might say. "I'm not perfect. But I've never committed any of the really big sins. I've never murdered. I've never committed adultery. I've never stolen."
James 2:10 says: "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it."
So, in sin, we have a major illness and the prognosis is death. Superficial therapies won’t do. That's what Jesus is talking about in today's Gospel lesson.
Turn to Mark 8:27-38 (page 705), please. Near the beginning of a conversation with the disciples, Jesus asks them, "Who do you say I am?” In Mark 8:29, Peter says, "You are the Messiah [or, the Christ]."
The title, Christ (from Christos as it appears in the New Testament, which was written in Greek) or Messiah (from the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written), means Anointed One. The kings of God's people were always anointed with oil on being enthroned. The Old Testament had repeatedly foretold of an ultimate Messiah who would bring God’s rule to earth.
Through the centuries, certain popular expectations developed about the coming Christ or Messiah. The people of first-century Judea, the place to which Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, came to live, die, and rise, thought that the Messiah would make what would amount to cosmetic changes, the moral equivalent of a facelift as a cure for cancer.
To them, the problems they faced had nothing to do with themselves or their own deficiencies. (This is a common theme in human history. The late Karl Menninger once quoted a folk song that said, "Everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault.")
Jesus' fellow Judeans wanted a king who would toss the Romans out of their land. They wanted an end to oppressive government regulations. They wanted the rich to pay their fair share in taxes and they wanted to the Romans to ease up on the poor. They wanted a king who would do their bidding. Their idea of what God should do in their lives was very different from what God had in mind.
That's why Peter's declaration of faith in Jesus as the Messiah was dangerous. Jesus had to instruct the disciples on what it means to confess Jesus as the Christ. He didn't want to feed their false expectations. Jesus had come to do more than offer facelifts on dying people!
Look at Mark 8:31: "He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again."
The therapy for our sin, Jesus is saying, begins with Him.
He, Who never once sinned, would undergo the death we deserve for our sin so that the debt can be paid for all who repent and believe in Jesus.
But when Peter heard Jesus predict that He would suffer, be rejected, and be killed, he couldn’t take it. It certainly did sound like a very compelling campaign platform!
Look at Mark 8:32: "Peter took him [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him." The word rebuke, epitimao in the Greek in which Mark originally wrote, means to warn, upbraid, condemn, set straight.
Imagine this: Peter has just declared Jesus to be God's Anointed King and now he has the audacity to tell Jesus how to do His job!
Verse 33: "But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’"
When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, you'll remember, he tried to lure Jesus away from suffering, rejection, and the cross. He did so because if Jesus was faithful in taking these agonies onto Himself, He would pay our debt in full and thereby empower all who turn from sin and trust in Him as their God to be raised just as God the Father raised Jesus on the first Easter.
Jesus knew that He needed to fulfill His purpose for coming to earth, whatever pain He caused Himself. He couldn't let Satan stand in His way.
Now Jesus applies the name of Satan to Peter!
Peter may have thought that He was doing a nice thing, like the church member who says, "Pastor, I know that the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to eternity with God, but you make people feel uncomfortable when you tell the truth like that."
"Niceness" of the kind Peter exhibits here leads people away from God.
"Niceness" like this suits Satan's purposes just fine. Jesus, in essence, is telling Peter,
In fact one of the great afflictions of the Christian churches in North America and Europe today is that too often, we've become the Church of Nice rather than the Church of Christ.
Jesus was telling Peter, in essence: "I am the great Physician and My suffering, rejection by others, and death on a cross are the first part of the cure. So, Peter, get out of My way!"
Then, Jesus gives the second part of His radical therapy for our sin and death.
Look at verses 34 and 35: "...he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it."
Here we see that to believe that Jesus is the Christ--the King, the Lord of all--is more than just saying the right words on Sunday mornings.
To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, first of all, to surrender ourselves, even to the point of discomfort and death, to God's only aim for our lives, our sole aim in life.
God's sole aim for our lives is articulated in 2 Corinthians 3:18, which says: "But we all [all of us who trust in Christ as God and Savior], with uncovered face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."
If sin has distorted the image of God within us, it's God's aim to infuse us with the image of God the Son so that we can begin to experience human life as God intended for it to be lived.
God aims to make us over into the very image of Jesus!
As we trust in Jesus each day, the Holy Spirit works a miracle: We who have been distorted by sin are made over in the image of Christ!
It doesn't happen fully within our time on this earth.
And on the way to our resurrection from the dead, we won't avoid suffering, rejection, or death any more than Jesus did.
But we will become more and more like Jesus.
1 John 3:2 says, "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."
So, to believe in Jesus means, first of all, to surrender to Him even to the point of discomfort and death.
To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, secondly, to embrace the life style of Jesus.
When, through Jesus' death and resurrection, you understand that you are number one in God's eyes, you’re freed from “looking out for number one."
Philippians 2:3-4 says: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."
John Stott tells the story of a college classroom in India. The professor, a Hindu, realized that one of his students was a Christian. "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ," the professor told the student, "India would be at your feet tomorrow." That professor could as easily say that to any Christian in this country: "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, America would be at your feet."
No Christian wants to have others at their feet, of course. Like our Lord, we come to serve, not to be served.
But our joy as Christians is only made complete when we share Christ with others and they too, come to believe in Jesus as the Christ.
Sin and death threaten to separate us from God for eternity. God's cure is radical, but sure. It begins with the Christ, God the Son, suffering, dying, and rising for us. And it's fulfilled when, after confessing Jesus with our lips, we confess Him with our lives, taking up our crosses and following Him: submitting ourselves to the death of our old sinful selves, committing ourselves to letting God make us over in the image of Jesus Himself, and embracing the very life of self-sacrifice and unstinting love that Jesus lived.
May God give us the power to have a faith that's more than words, a faith that shows in our whole lives.
May we submit to the radical cure that gives us life with God forever!
Amen
Friday, March 20, 2009
40-Days to Servanthood: Day 24
A commitment to servanthood will include a commitment to giving.
Pastor Chuck Swindoll, in his helpful book, Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living, says that a servant is “a giver.” Servants give away more than money. A man recently told me, “Money is the easiest thing to give away, Mark.” He’s right. Often, we give money as a guilt-offering or as a way of placating others who need more valuable things than we feel we can afford to give.
Servants are generous in the donation of their time, energy, love, support, prayers, encouragement, and money. They take to heart the words of Paul in Philippians 2:3-4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit...Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
Swindoll recounts an incident that took place in bomb-ravaged London after the Second World War. In a bakery one morning, sweet rolls were being baked and iced. A little boy, dressed in ragged clothes, pressed his nose against the bakery window, looking longingly at those rolls. An American soldier, part of the force still in England, happened by in a jeep. Taken by this sight, he stopped, for a time staring at the boy. The soldier then climbed out of his jeep and walked over to look in the bakery window.
“Would you like one of those rolls, son?” the soldier asked the boy. “Oh, yes!” the little guy replied. The soldier went into the bakery, ordered a dozen of the rolls, and brought them out to the boy. “There you go,” he said and turned to walk toward the jeep. Just as he was climbing in behind the wheel, the soldier felt a tug on his coat. It was the little boy. He peered into the soldier’s face and asked, “Are you God?” Swindoll concludes that we are never more like God than when we give.
I would add that when we give, we also get to see God in those to whom we give. “Whenever you do it to the least of these...” Jesus has said, after all (Matthew 25:31-46).
A commitment to servanthood includes a commitment to giving.
Bible Passage to Ponder: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).
Pastor Chuck Swindoll, in his helpful book, Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living, says that a servant is “a giver.” Servants give away more than money. A man recently told me, “Money is the easiest thing to give away, Mark.” He’s right. Often, we give money as a guilt-offering or as a way of placating others who need more valuable things than we feel we can afford to give.
Servants are generous in the donation of their time, energy, love, support, prayers, encouragement, and money. They take to heart the words of Paul in Philippians 2:3-4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit...Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
Swindoll recounts an incident that took place in bomb-ravaged London after the Second World War. In a bakery one morning, sweet rolls were being baked and iced. A little boy, dressed in ragged clothes, pressed his nose against the bakery window, looking longingly at those rolls. An American soldier, part of the force still in England, happened by in a jeep. Taken by this sight, he stopped, for a time staring at the boy. The soldier then climbed out of his jeep and walked over to look in the bakery window.
“Would you like one of those rolls, son?” the soldier asked the boy. “Oh, yes!” the little guy replied. The soldier went into the bakery, ordered a dozen of the rolls, and brought them out to the boy. “There you go,” he said and turned to walk toward the jeep. Just as he was climbing in behind the wheel, the soldier felt a tug on his coat. It was the little boy. He peered into the soldier’s face and asked, “Are you God?” Swindoll concludes that we are never more like God than when we give.
I would add that when we give, we also get to see God in those to whom we give. “Whenever you do it to the least of these...” Jesus has said, after all (Matthew 25:31-46).
A commitment to servanthood includes a commitment to giving.
Bible Passage to Ponder: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).
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