The Key to All Christian Service

Anyone who seeks to attain power by some other process without first going through God’s formative process is an illegitimate servant, not a true servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We see in Scripture that men and women of God often went through suffering and hardship before attaining greatness. To me, the most eloquent example is Moses, who spent forty years in the Egyptian court. Then the Lord took him, through a very painful process, into the wilderness, where he spent forty years serving humbly as a goat herder—something utterly humiliating for a Hebrew—alone and in silence in the wilderness. Only after those forty years of preparation did the Lord call him into the third part of his life, the final third: the life of a statesman, a great prophet, a servant of God who would lead all God’s people from Egypt to the Promised Land. But first he had to go through that process.

The same thing happened to the apostle Paul. Saul was a great man, full of vigor, strong, a great scholar who had studied at the feet of Gamaliel, the most highly esteemed rabbinic teacher of his time. And Paul is symbolically knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, conveying the idea that God must first knock us off our horses, too. We must fall flat on our faces, brought down from our pride and personal ambitions, and be humbled.

And after that, in another passage, the apostle recalls that he spent a time, he says, in hiding, a time when no one knew him. We believe and know that this was a time of brokenness for the apostle Paul: God was dealing with him, working on him, forming him. Only after that preparatory time does Paul go to the disciples.

The disciples do not even know what has happened in his life, so they have to be convinced that the former Saul, persecutor of the Church, is now a servant of Jesus Christ. Then they gradually bring him into his new ministry through a prophetic declaration from the Holy Spirit. But first Paul had to be hidden away and worked on.

We see that same treatment in Peter when he denies the Lord and is humbled in his false courage, and then God uses him. We could spend all day here talking about how important that process of suffering is. And that is why the Lord says to her: If you are not willing to go through that baptism of the cross, and your sons are not willing either, do not presume to attain a position of power.

And then the passage says in verse 24 of Matthew 20: “When the other ten disciples heard this, they became angry with the two brothers.” Why did those ten disciples become angry? Because they were ambitious too, because they too were seeking personal glory, because perhaps many of them were serving the Lord for the loaves and fishes, and for a privileged position they thought the Lord would give them once he ascended the throne. What they did not know was that before the Lord reached that position of power, he would go through the cross.

And because they did not understand this, when the Lord spoke to them about a crucifixion, they thought it was merely a metaphor. When the Lord is finally crucified, they are taken by surprise and abandon the ministry because they could not conceive of this great and powerful Jesus being treated like a mere slave and a mere criminal. They were not prepared for that part of the process.

And so they become angry with the two because they think: Hey, they’re trying to “saw the branch out from under us,” as we say in our country. In other words, they’re trying to jump ahead in line and take the place that we, rather, deserve. Carnality was rampant among all those disciples.

After that, the Lord gives them a tremendously powerful picture of what Christian service is and says to them: “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them.” How are things done in the world? As we saw in the parable of the unprofitable servant, masters give orders to their servants and do with them as they please; they lord it over them and wield their power and authority. That is how the world treats servants.

But the Lord makes it clear to them and says: “Yet it shall not be so among you. Whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you shall be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Here, brothers and sisters, we have the key to all Christian service. Things are not done in the Kingdom of God as they are done in the world. In the Kingdom of God, pastors, evangelists, teachers, prophets, and apostles must behave as Christ behaved: humbly, simply, kindly, with a desire to serve those under their spiritual authority.

Any model of ministry you see out there that does not reflect that attitude of extreme humility and service to others does not deserve to be called a Christ-centered ministry. Ministries in the Kingdom of God are marked by an attitude of extreme humility, of serving others, of giving oneself for others, of claiming no glory, and of truly understanding what the word minister means.

Minister does not mean a potentate, someone deserving of all praise and all service and all reverence. Rather, minister means servant; that is what minister means in the original Latin from which it comes. To minister is to serve, to give oneself to others. Let us recover the true meaning of the word minister and include in it the idea of serving others instead of using others to serve ourselves.

May the Lord bless you, and may our lives be possessed by the desire for God to deal with us, take us through the crucible of Christian formation, and then place us in positions of authority that allow us to serve others in the same spirit in which Christ Jesus served. May the Lord bless us, and may this be a blessing to your lives.

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