Every one of us has, in our base nature, the desire to be served rather than to serve. By nature, I would rather have someone bring coffee to me than to voluntarily get up from my comfortable sofa and serve coffee to someone else. By nature I would rather have a maid pick up my dirty clothes than go around and pick up after others.
When you are a baby, your parents wait on you hand and foot. They tend to your every need. Your every cry is treated with an immediate response. Your every whim is instantly attended. Your every wish is their command. But parents are a lot smarter than we give them credit. So while babies are cute to look at and precious to hold and the object of much cuddle and goo-goo, smart parents will not allow their children remain babies forever. Eighteen year olds do not wear diapers. Sixteen year olds do not still nurse. Fourteen year olds do not still sleep in cribs. Babies grow up. So do Christians.
Yet we go to our graves thinking, as we did when we were babies, that we are the center of the universe. I once saw a T-shirt that read, "Yes, the world really DOES revolve around me."
Reality check: the world does not revolve around you - it revolves around the living God. Christ did not come to be served but to serve and offer His life a ransom for many. Part of growing up is moving from spiritual couch potato to servant.
"Let this same mind be in you," says Paul, "which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to hold on to with white knuckles."
The Greek language has two words that describe the stuff of which we are made. Christ was, according to Paul's Greek, in the morphe of God. The morphe is the essence of a thing that does not change. A flower is always a flower. It is no less a flower when it's an embryo than it is when it's a young shoot. In the New Testament Greek way of looking at something, when the sperm and the egg meet, the product is no less a baby than it is until it is born. It is always a human being. The flower is a flower in the ground, it's a flower when it blooms; it's a flower when it wilts. It only ceases to be a flower when it dies.
Greek has another word for essence, the word schema, from where we get our word schematic. A schema is the outward appearance of something. So while the outward appearance, the schema of a flower changes, the inward morphe of a flower remains the same. Christ always was and always will be God. He was God inside the Pearly Gates; He was God on the garbage dump of Golgotha; He was God when left His rank at the gates of heaven; He was God when He rode the bus like the rest of us.
Robert E. Lee once traveled by train from Richmond to Washington. At one of the stops an old, grizzled, dirty lady boards the train. She walks up and down the aisle of the car, looking for an empty seat, and not finding any. She lays her bag on the floor and is prepared to make the trip standing up when General Lee gets up out of his seat and gives it to the lady. About 90% of the other passengers hop up and offer their seat to Mr. Lee. But General Lee says, "Why should you grant me the same courtesy you should have offered to this lady?" Robert E. Lee made that entire journey standing up.
"Let this same mind be in you," Paul says, "that was in Christ Jesus, who emptied Himself, taking on the form - the morphe, the inward essence - of a slave." When Jesus came to earth, He emptied Himself of the right to throw His weight around, and chose to demonstrate it by being a servant. When Jesus came to earth, Jesus emptied Himself of His God-ness, with all its rights, authority, splendor and ceremonial pomp and circumstance. When Jesus left the gates of heaven, He emptied His pockets of His Visa Gold card with the name "God" imprinted on the plastic.
Not only did Jesus NOT demand respect, honor and VIP treatment, He came to demonstrate His God-ness by being a servant, becoming the lowliest form of person in the world at that time. He became a shoeshine boy. He became a housecleaner. He became the kid at the circus who follows the animals with the scooper. He became a Garbage Man.
When Jesus came upon the earth, the class system was even more pronounced then than it is in the 21st century. Rich and poor. Black and white. Have and have-not. Your life had meaning, or it was worth nothing.
When Jesus came upon the earth, the lowest form of humanity was the house servant. Part of his job was to wait at the door. When guests came, the servant would get on his knees, remove the sandals of the guests, take a wet cloth, and wash the feet of the guests. On the last night He had with His friends, Jesus stripped Himself down to the waist, knelt down, and did the same thing for the disciples. His words to them: "This is the kind of attitude you are to have towards others. The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, to become the servant of all."
New Testament Greek has two words for servant. One is a diakonos, a deacon. A deacon is one whose job it is to serve. We have in this church a group of people called Deacons. Someone might ask, "What does a Deacon do?" The person answering could say, "Well, they help serve communion, make sure the paraments are changed, help with baptisms, and stuff life that." That answer would only be half-right. A Deacon is, first and foremost, a servant.
It's one thing to put aside a couple of hours a week for church work. It's another to be servants of one another. And it is another thing entirely to be, as Paul calls himself, a slave of God. He uses the word doulos, meaning slave. When I discovered that the Greek word for slave was doulos, it made me feel better about my childhood because Dad was always saying, "Son, you're awful do-less."
The Ten Commandments give us ten things that are impossible to keep on a consistent basis because of our human nature. In the same way, the scriptures also set a very high standard for servanthood. Why? Because we by nature would rather be served than serve.
Allow me to share a painful observation. It doesn't take a genius to see that mainline churches are going downhill. My denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, loses about 3,000 members a year. There are always many reasons for the decline, and I don't mean to minimize these factors. Yet one significant reason any organization goes down the tubes is because it lowers the bar for those providing servant leadership. Many churches and civic organizations have gotten to the point where they drag people off the street to fill leadership positions: people with little training, even smaller knowledge, and with no clue of the servant nature of their office. I've seen men and women thrown into church leadership positions with all the scriptural knowledge of a scarecrow. Some have all the training of a village idiot and all the servant mindset of Tammy Faye Baker turned loose in the Mall of America with a new credit card. Instead of servant work, it becomes busy work.
Servant leaders are not called to fill a slot or to run around validating their existence by the amount of busy work they do, but to fill their lives with service. Servant leaders are not so much to sit on the platform but to crouch by the door. Servant leaders are not so much to be seen but to be in the wings.
"Let this same mind be in you," Paul says, "that was also in Christ Jesus, who became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." Have this mind in you. Know it. Study it. Analyze it. Meditate upon it. Have head knowledge. This is theology 101. But Theology 101 is only the first part. To complete the degree you have to take Obedience 101.
Four key words of this passage give us a clue how to think and how to act as servants.
The first word is GRASP, hold onto. Christ did not hold onto His status as King. He let go. He dropped into the abyss. He became human. He then allowed Himself to be crucified, let go, and dropped even further, I believe, into the very pits of hell itself.
I love "Jacob's Ladder." What do we always think of when we sing Jacob's Ladder? We think of going higher. Higher. "Every rung goes higher, higher." But for the Christian, we begin our sainthood in Christ at the top. We don't attain sainthood by climbing the ladder of success. We grow into sainthood by letting go.
The second word is SERVE. We have to make a daily practice in the crevices of our mind and heart to become serve-ers and not serve-ees. How can I become a servant to my family? How can I best serve my community? My church? My God? Someone once asked the founder of the Navigators, a Christian organization that emphasizes discipleship, how a person knew that he/she had a servant's heart. "It is how you act," he said, "when someone treats you like a servant."
The third word is OBEDIENT. That's the real rub. I can know all these things, but am I, purely and simply, going to DO them?
Jesus tells a wonderful parable of the two sons. Dad goes to one son and tells him to go out and mow the lower 40. Junior smiles and says, "Sure Dad, anything for you." He then pleasantly meanders into the living room, turns on the tube, and watches the Eagles and the Patriots play in the Super Bowl. The father goes to the other son and tells him to go out and mow the upper 40. This kid scowls and grunts and complains how unfair life is. THEN, he goes out and mows the upper 40. Which one, Jesus asks, did the will of his father? The one who actually mowed the 40.
It is one thing to know these things and to say that we will do them. It's possible to be outwardly obedient while inwardly griping and disobedient. But we have to have this same mind as was in Christ Jesus, and to do these same things, as did Christ Jesus.
That's because the last word is EMPTY. This is the most difficult. Becoming a saint is not getting more saintly every day: it's letting go of the anti-saint stuff in our lives. What matters most to you in life? Your house? Your job? Your education? Your boat? I encourage you to take some private moments this week and do the following: take a piece of paper, write down the things in life that mean the most to you, and offer them to God. Give them up. Empty yourself of the ultimate attaining and keeping of them. Should God choose to let you keep them, then so much the better. But if these things stand in your way of following Christ, then are they really worth it?
Twin brothers grew up on a farm, both very intelligent, both very industrious. Both went to college. One chose to major in agriculture, to better learn the business, and to return home to run the family farm. The other decided to major in law and become an attorney. After graduation, both were successful. The farmer stayed in the background while the lawyer went into the litigation business; he became very successful at tearing people to shreds in the courtroom.
One day the lawyer brother comes back to see his farmer brother. "Listen," he says, "it's not too late for you to go to law school. We can become partners, you can make a ton of money, and get the best seats in theaters and restaurants." The farmer takes his attorney brother out to a wheat field. "You see that wheat standing there?" the farmer tells his brother, "What stands up straight and tall and so readily seen are the wheat stalks with empty heads. But you know where the real grain is? It is in the heads that are bowed low to the ground."
May God help keep us all close to where the real service is: that which is bowed low to the ground.
© Rev. Duane Brown, 2005 e-mail Rev. Brown