The Power of Vision, Part V

Servant Ministry. A sermon preached September 19, 2004

by The Rev. David Harper

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Servant Ministry

The Lessons: Romans 15:14-17; John 12:20-26

Christ, Word of God and glory of the Father, come and dwell among us now. Come and cause that word to dwell richly within our hearts, to give us the knowledge that you want to transform our lives. Lord give us the power to live the new life. Lord strengthen me now as I bring your word. Help me to preach it with truth, to preach it with love, to preach under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. And open our hearts, Lord Jesus, to receive your word today. In your name we pray. Amen.

About a month ago Neal Brown and I went over to McLean Bible Church to attend a leadership simulcast conference that was put on by Willow Creek Church. There were numbers of sites around the country where pastors like Neal and I were gathering. At McLean Bible Church, there were close to a thousand of us.

It was a wonderful and rich two-and-a-half days. The teaching was really profound, and the interactions were great. I’d never been to McLean Bible Church’s new campus before. Pulling into this vast parking area was like going into a shopping mall! I was so impressed by the sheer size of this place.

Others were arriving at the same time, and as we were pulling into the parking lot volunteers were directing the traffic so we would know where to park. When I walked into the building I was even more impressed. There was an army of volunteers that McLean had put on for us, so that we would know where to go. Ushers were handing materials out to us that we needed. What impressed me about the volunteers was the attitude that they had. I didn’t see one who looked bored, distracted or disengaged. They smiled, they spoke to us. One remembered my name on the second day that I showed up. They went out of their way, not just simply to do a job, but to let us know that they were there to serve, love, care and provide. They wanted our time in their church to be a blessing. I will probably remember for a long time the teachings we got through Bill Hybels, T. D. Jakes and other magnificent men and women. I would suspect, though, that the most enduring memory for me will be the impact of those volunteers—the impact of the servant ministry that they exemplified in that place.

I’m preaching a series about the vision of our church, which is built around our calling statement: “To make visible the power of God’s love so that all will come to know Christ.” Today I want to talk about servant ministry, but I want to underscore the word “servant” here. I want to talk about ministry, but I particularly want to talk about the kind of ministry that makes visible the power of God’s love, because it’s servant ministry that really defines the kind of ministry that Christ wants us to be about.

What is servant ministry? I want to say three things about that, and particularly about servant ministers.

First, Servant ministers have surrendered their egos. They are humble.

I would say that humility ranks low on the scale of what most people value. Most of us don’t aspire to be humble. We think that humility, which is the characteristic of a servant, and of servant ministry, is something that’s essentially weak. It’s not particularly macho, if you’re a guy. If you are humble, it means that you are inviting people to walk all over you. You’re not really strong, you’re not ambitious, you’re not upwardly mobile, you’re not aggressive. We equate humility with people who are a little bit wimpish, not completely together, and lacking confidence. The reason why such people are humble, we think, is that they don’t know any better. They haven’t really grown up yet into what somebody should be like.

I was at the National Prayer Breakfast not too many years ago, and one of the speakers that year was Alan Simpson, retired Republican senator from Wyoming. I loved something that he said: “Those who take the high road of humility in Washington find they’re not disturbed by heavy traffic.” That remark makes me think of the department store dressing room, where you go to try on the clothes that you are thinking of purchasing. On the mirror it says “Objects in mirror may appear bigger than they actually are.”

Humility doesn’t come very naturally. Frankly, we want to appear bigger than we actually are. That’s just the prevailing mindset of the world culture. It’s simply the way things are. Jesus’ disciples were caught in that as well. They were jostling for position. They hoped that Jesus would become the political leader that they wanted. They hoped that he’d finally get it, get his act together and do the sorts of things that they thought the Messiah should be about. They wanted him to do that, not so much for his benefit, but for theirs. They thought—James and John especially—that when Jesus finally got it together, they would have places of great political prestige and power beside him. They wanted to be the kinds of people who were around a powerful person, so that people would seek them out and cozy up to them—because being close to people in power is how you get on in life. That’s the antithesis of humility, but it’s how the world works.

Jesus was aware of their whispered conversation. He saw them positioning themselves for the kind of life of influence that they thought they were going to be inheriting in the near future. This is how he responds: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve...” (Mark 10:43-45).

The way Jesus defines service is by being a servant. Service not only defines what you do: it defines who you are. A lot of people perform acts of service to promote themselves. I’ve seen people over the years getting into positions which appear to be servant ministries, but they hope to get recognition and promotion through that ministry. They are seeking the advantage for moving up into something greater. Service is simply a leg up to the next thing that they want to do.

The kind of ministry that Jesus is talking about, his kind of service, is where you not only perform acts of humble service; you lay down your life! Jesus goes on to add: “And to give his life as a ransom for many.” What defines servant ministry is laying down your life. It costs. For him, it literally meant stretching out his arms on a cross. For us, it means doing costly things that are inconvenient, that may cost us time, that may cost us money, or cause us to lose face.

That’s exactly what Jesus did in John 13, one of the most defining passages in the whole Bible about servant ministry. In verses 4 and 5 it says: “Jesus got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist.” Now all of them, I am sure, were getting very, very nervous at this point. When you walked into somebody’s house, your feet needed washing. They would be dirty after walking the dusty roads, and your feet and lower legs would be covered with a film of dirt. In our walk with Jesus, we get dirt on us too. It’s just the way life is.

Someone would be designated to wash your feet, most likely a servant or a slave. The washing of feet was assigned to the lowest of the low on the social scale, because that service is rather demeaning. It’s not a nice thing to do. We’d rather avoid it. Feet are not particularly attractive parts of our bodies, and washing somebody’s feet doesn’t come naturally. Jesus’ culture understood this, and so they assigned that task to the lowest of the low.

When Jesus is removing his outer garment, and taking a towel, these men are probably looking at each other and thinking “What is going on here?” I imagine them looking around and saying, “Well, maybe the servant didn’t show up.” Peter particularly, as we’ll see in a moment, had even more of a problem than the others. They at least were willing to allow Jesus to do this, but Peter wasn’t so sure. “After that,” continuing the quote: “Jesus poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples feet.” This is literally servant ministry. Servant ministers have surrendered their egos.

If we bring ego into our ministry we may do kind things for people, we may do acts of service—but it will not be servant ministry. It will be your ministry. It will be David’s ministry. It won’t be servant ministry, and it won’t reveal Jesus.

Here’s the second characteristic of a servant minister: Servant ministers know their need: they can receive.

When Jesus came to Peter, Peter was offended: “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Peter was unconvinced by Jesus response, and rebutted: “You shall never wash my feet!” Never. Never. I’m not going to let you do that. You can probably figure out what may have been going on inside his heart for him to say something so strong. But Jesus went on to say, “Well, Peter, if I don’t wash your feet, you can’t be part of me. We can’t have fellowship together.” Knowing our need, and being able to receive, is the way to be in fellowship with Jesus.

There are so many of us who reach a point where, frankly, we think we’ve graduated from the place where we need Jesus to minister to us anymore. We are basically trustworthy, mature believers. Maybe there are a few little wrinkles in our lives that we tell him about, but for the most part we feel we can manage pretty well, thank you very much. We don’t have fundamental needs. We’re not broken people anymore. We are “together” people—and we probably don’t associate that attitude with pride (though it is!). It’s just the way life is because we are mature in the Lord now.

Let me tell you something here. Before Jesus washed their feet he had allowed two women to wash his feet. Jesus modeled what he taught. “...Mary” —this is John 12:3— “took about a pint of pure nard...; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair.” You may recall the other story, where a woman came into a home where Jesus was eating with some influential people. She couldn’t afford the pure nard, which was hugely expensive—Mary was obviously a woman of substance. This other woman had a tarnished reputation. She came into the house where Jesus was and, filled with gratitude for what he had done for her, couldn’t contain herself. She knelt down at his feet, which were extended outwards from where he was reclining, and just sobbed and sobbed her gratitude. The tears were the bowl of water with which she washed his feet. Nobody gave her a towel, so she removed the clasp from her long hair, and used that. The Pharisee, Jesus’ host at the meal, was very offended that Jesus would let someone like this wash his feet. But Jesus knew how to let people minister to him.

He let someone else minister to him too. He said to the woman at the well, “Would you please give me something to drink?” The Son of Man and the Son of God was able to let people minister to him: he was able to receive.

One of the most powerful images of servant ministry was something that happened last July in England, that I told you about in the first sermon of this series. At the SOMA Silver Jubilee we had a night where the young people became the prayer ministers, and the rest of us who wanted prayer went forward and received prayer from them. One who went forward was Eddie Marsh, a retired Canadian bishop. He’s been a distinguished leader in the renewal movement in Canada and beyond—a man of great maturity and stature in Christ. He knelt down on the floor in the sports hall at the University of Kent while two young women in their twenties, one African and the other English, laid their hands on his head, and ministered to him. Can you believe that? That reflected an amazing ability on his part to receive, to know his need, and not to care who he received it from. Frankly, those two young women were humble as well, to feel able to lay their hands on a man who was a distinguished leader and old enough to be their grandfather. I can imagine it would have been a challenge for them. They may have felt a little bit intimidated by that, wondering if they would get a word from the Lord, if they would know how to pray, and so feeling pressured. They were exercising servant ministry by not refusing to pray in a situation where they may have felt inadequate.

Who’s washing your feet? When was the last time you let someone do that for you? It’s a good question, because we can’t be servant ministers if we can’t receive. If we try, we will exhibit a messianic complex where we provide ministry to others because they are the needy ones and we are the together ones. It doesn’t work that way. It won’t come through as servant ministry. It will come through with some tinges of pride. There may still be a blessing for those who receive it, but it won’t be anything like the blessing that comes from those who know their need and are themselves able to receive.

Here’s the final characteristic of a servant minister:

Servant ministers know their reward; they are secure.

“Jesus took off his outer garment, tied a towel around his waist and picked up the basin.” But I want you to notice what precedes it. “Jesus knew that the Father had brought all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” “So...” want you to underscore the word “SO.” What precedes that word is key to what follows. It was because he knew that the Father had brought all things under his power, that he’d come from God and was returning to God—because he was absolutely secure about who he was, and whose he was, and where he was going and what his life was about—that “he got up from the meal, and took off his outer clothing.”

Insecure people can never be servant ministers. They are terrified that, if they serve others, they will be diminished. They are too insecure to run that risk. So they’ve always got to remain in control, always in charge, always strong, impregnable, hidden; always the practitioners but never the receivers. But servant ministers know their reward, they are secure. Jesus was secure about who he was, and it was that which enabled him to be a servant minister. In John 12:26 Jesus adds a further dimension of servant ministry: “Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.” If you are a servant minister, you don’t do it to get honored by people. There is always a danger that people might say, “Wow, isn’t David (or Neal or Hayes, or my Home Group pastor, or some other leader in the church) great because of what he did!”

A number of years ago, I was deeply impressed by something I heard Bill Hybels say at a conference at Virginia Beach. He asked us “How do you maintain your integrity as a pastor?” He raised this question because so much of what we do as pastors or leaders is done in public, and we may either get recognition for it, or at least appreciation from people who like what they see. There’s a risk that we are playing to an audience all the time, and not really acting with integrity. Bill said to us, “What I’ve learned to do over a number of years now, is that every single week in my life, I make a point of doing something to bless another person that they will never know came from me, little hidden things, so people will never be able to ascribe to me the honor, the gratitude for doing them. It goes to the Father.”

That’s what Jesus taught: “Don’t parade your works before people because otherwise they’ll be very happy with you and that’s where your reward will stop. Do things quietly, in a humble, quiet, servant way, and your Father, who sees in secret what you are doing, will reward you.” That’s what Jesus is saying in this passage, “My Father will honor the one who serves me.” Servant ministers know that honor comes from him. It doesn’t really matter whether we get it, or don’t get it, from people.

I’d like you to take another look at that text. “Whoever serves me must follow me...” The implication is that there are people who are serving the Lord who are not actually following him. Do you understand that? That’s the great danger of ministry—that once we begin to get into places where we are serving, and where we have authority over other people, we don’t follow Jesus any more.  We are enjoying the service too much. It’s only as we, in our service, go on following Jesus, that he will enable us to retain the heart of a servant. He says in Matthew 24, “Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom the master has put in charge of the servants...? It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions.” The Father sees what we do in secret and what we do in public. It doesn’t really matter. The Father will give us more and more authority as we live out our lives as servant ministers.

So then, how does servant ministry “make visible the power of God’s love so all will come to know Christ?” That’s the purpose of this series. If it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be one of our mission statements, should it? I want to say two things.

Firstly, it turns the world’s values on their head.

McLean Bible isn’t the only church that does servant ministry. We do it pretty well here as well. My family has been a beneficiary of servant ministry from so many of you. I’ll never forget the time, a few years ago, when the basement in our house flooded. We’d never needed a sump pump before this time, because some of our trees apparently soaked up all the water that might have come into the house. We had to remove the trees, with no idea that the water would now find it’s way into the house. After they were removed, we had this incredible rainstorm, and water poured into our basement. People came over to our house with wet vacs and towels and the like. It was late at night when this happened, but they came anyway. I remember our present senior warden, David, coming over to our house during another crisis. A fire had broken out in our bedroom on a Sunday morning, while I was here at church. Margie called the church asking for help. David went straight over there. That is servant ministry.

I’ve heard so many stories from the congregation of people who’ve been the beneficiaries of quiet things: meals being brought around, phone calls being made, and kind things being done. It turns the world’s values on their head when we do things like that, because that’s not how the world behaves. We twice performed Amahl and the Night Visitors here over recent years. A woman came with her two young children. At the time she was studying at Virginia Theological Seminary as a special student. She worked for the State Department and saw the notice about Amahl that our member Dan Hutchens—who had a leading role in Amahl—had displayed outside his office there.

This woman saw the notice, and she came. She was so impressed by what she encountered here, not least the servant ministry she experienced, that she wrote about it to her professor at the seminary. He forwarded it to me, and that’s how I know about it. This is part of what she said: “When we got to the church, and I was rummaging through my purse, trying to find my wallet in order to purchase tickets, trying to quiet my two children who were in a new place, a woman parishioner approached me with some free tickets, and asked if she could give me some. When I protested, she insisted saying, ‘How many would you like?’ Another parishioner showed my six-year-old where the bathroom was and my three-year-old where the drinking fountain was.”

Church, that’s servant ministry—taking a little three-year-old, showing her where the fountain is, and then lifting her up so she could drink. Those little quiet, hidden things, that will never make the newspaper headlines, are what honor the Father. That’s the kind of ministry that the Father loves.

Secondly, it reveals a new way of living.

People don’t expect to see servant ministry. They expect people to be rather proud and “together.” We still pay servants to wash feet—perform the menial tasks. We make sure there are people lower down in the pecking order that do those things for us. Servant ministers never graduate. It absolutely blows people away when they see this—it reveals a totally new way of living. And it makes Jesus real to people, because it challenges their own values. It makes them look at themselves and say: My goodness, these people look pretty together to me. I know some of them. I know where they work. I know where they live. They’re capable people, so why do they do things like this? It raises questions that point people to Jesus.

I want to encourage you to be a servant minister to our children. Be a Sunday School teacher. Be a servant minister by serving in the Altar Guild, or being a Home Group Pastor, or a 40-Days-of-Community small group leader, or whatever opportunity there is that God opens up. Look for places to become a servant minister, because it makes visible the power of God’s love so that all will know Christ.