09 Serving God is Our Highest Liberty.
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Though not pretty work, seeking to grow in humility is the most fruitful work one can begin.
Today I want to talk about serving. Woo! Yay! I get it. Not the most exciting topic, and one I’m sure you hear quite frequently. If you attended church this weekend I’m sure you heard about serving. We talk about it all. the. time. But what we don’t talk about, however, is the positional value of serving God and how it helps us grow and live in humility.
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Firstly, let's talk about the positional value of serving God. You’ve seen the title: ‘Serving God is Our Highest Liberty’.
What do I mean by that? I mean that God shows us His favor by putting us in positions to serve. Serving Him is our greatest freedom and ought to be our greatest joy.
James 4:10 says that if we humble ourselves before the Lord He will exalt us. And that verse is true. God will exalt you if you humble yourself. But for some reason we’ve manipulated that verse to mean that God will exalt us with a promotion or with a bigger house or with more followers or a nicer car, and that is not what that verse explicitly means. Sure, God could do that, but exaltation with God more so means being placed in a position to profess His name. To serve Him. So the more opportunities you are given to serve, the greater favor you have with God.
To explain that a little further, remember who you are and who God is.
You are nothing, and God is all. And if God is everything, and He works all things for His glory, that ought to be the focus of our lives: bringing Him glory. Not ourselves, but Him. And if the chief aim of our life is to bring God glory through our words and actions, we need to position ourselves in order to do so.
And God says that we bring Him the most glory through positions of servanthood.
The life Jesus lived shows us the importance of servanthood. All our leader did was serve.
Matthew 20:28 says "Even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
And Jesus says that we ought to do the same. He says in Luke 22:26 to ‘let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves’. Leaders serve. Simple as that. The greatest leaders are the greatest servants.
Again in Luke 9 the disciples are arguing who among them is the greatest (because of course they were), and Jesus in verse 48 says,
‘For it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest’.
Speaking of humility, there it is. The lowest are the highest in God's eyes. And there is so much joy in being the least. There is. We miss that. Guys, serving should bring us great joy. Serving our friends, serving our church, serving our community, serving our spouse, serving our family, it should all bring us great joy. So often we view it as a task or a chore and reluctantly do it, and I’ve been in that boat so much. But when we act in that way we are just serving ourselves.
Just like how God wired us to worship, and we either choose to worship the world or God, God also wired us to serve. Every day we choose to either serve ourselves or serve God. That’s the choice. And sadly most of the world chooses to serve themselves, and to that I can testify, because I go to UNC. Our school and our society teaches people to live for themselves. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We can serve God and others, and it starts with humility.
With serving, there is humility before it, during it, and after it.
Firstly, there is humility before serving God. Charles Spurgeon says when a man lacks this he proposes to himself his own honor and his own esteem in serving God.
Spurgeon is saying that no matter what we are doing it is necessary for us to bend exceedingly low before we enter upon the work, and that if we don’t, the glory of self lies as the foundation of it, not the glory of Christ. You know you are humble before service when the foundation for your life and your act is Christ. We also humble ourselves before service by descending each day, like we talked about last week.
That’s humility before serving. Then there is humility during serving.
See the thing is you can perform a selfless act in a selfish way. You can wash the dishes for your wife but do it with a selfish attitude expecting something in return. You can take out the trash or clean your living room in a way that makes you proud because it shows how selfless you are, when really you are full of yourself.
I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. We’ve all done selfless acts with selfish motives. We’ve all sought to serve ourselves through serving others.
This is why we need humility during serving.
But how do we do this? How do we live in humility during service? We deflect the glory and uphold the One who deserves it.
Psalm 115:1 is a great example of this:
‘Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness’.
The writer here deflects glory, by saying ‘Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory…’, and then he upholds God, the One who deserves it, by reminding himself and praising God’s ‘steadfast love and faithfulness’.
When you do as the Psalmist did here, when you live out this verse during service, you are living in humility. You are placing the crown of glory on the head of the One who deserves it, and that's God.
Spurgeon gives a great example of what serving without humility looks like: He said King Henry 4th of England had a son, and his son, although in line for the throne, was anxious to become king. So one night, while his father was asleep, he went into his room and put the crown on his head. He wasn’t the one who had the right to wear the crown, nor was he worthy of it.
When we serve without humility, we have done the same. We anger God when we think of crowning ourselves instead of crowning Him, when we choose to worship and serve our own image rather than the Lord God.
‘Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to you give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness’.
We must be humble during service.
Lastly, we need to be humble after service.
A servant should never honor himself. Simple as that. Don’t go about serving so that you can post about it on social media or tell all your friends about it, that is not being humble after service. Let God honor you. Because He will. That’s His promise.
‘Humble yourself, and He will exalt you’.
One thing I’d challenge you to do this week is to serve someone else and not tell anyone. Don’t even tell your spouse or your best friend. Serve someone else, thus serving God, and don’t tell anyone. Buy a homeless man a meal. Be very generous with a tip at a restaurant. Pay for someone else’s meal in line at a fast food place. Let it be between you and God. And see how He honors that. Because He will. That’s humility. That’s crowning the One, the only One, who is worthy of the crown of glory.
Now from this we ought to know the importance of humility for serving, but I want you to recognize the mutual relationship the two have.
If we are truly humble, we will be led to serve. Just like Jesus. If you have the Holy Spirit inside of you, and you are growing in humility, you will be led to serve. And I hope, at week 9 of this series, you’d be at that point.
Humility leads to service. And service also leads to humility. Serving puts you in your rightful place and God in His. He is on the throne and you are not. He deserves all the glory and you do not. When we serve, we lower ourselves, and thus, in God’s eyes, start to lead a higher life. Remember, a higher, more holy life is down, further down! And there is no better way to descend further down than through service. That is why, again, serving God is our highest liberty.
The quicker you can learn and embrace that, the more God will use you as a vessel to proclaim His name and bring Him glory.
It is ALL for Him. Every gift you have been given is for the service of others, as said in 1 Peter 4:10.
It is all for God and all for serving Him.
Don’t forget my service challenge this week!
Let’s grow in serving and thus grow in humility together!
I love you all.
God bless.
