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Shaped
for Serving God by Reverend Murray Spackman, Vicar. Sunday 7th November, 2004 Eph.2:4-10. Mtt.20:24-34 On 16th August , 1977 Elvis
Presley, at the age of
42. died of obesity and drug dependency.
In spite of his enormous success- Elvis was, according to friends,
an unfulfilled and unhappy man. When
his wife, Priscilla, was interviewed, she said: “Elvis never came to
terms with who he was meant to be or what his purpose in
life was. He thought he was
here for a reason, maybe to preach, maybe to serve, maybe to save, maybe
to care for people. That agonizing
desire was always with him and he knew he wasn’t fulfilling it.
So he’d go on stage and he wouldn’t have to think about it.”
How tragic to go through life and not know what you were here for. Well, today we’re continuing our 40 Days of Purpose, and we’re in the process of discovering why we ARE here! – that God has a Purpose for your life, and you don’t have to go through life lost, uninformed, or wondering. For those who may be visitors or guests here today, so far we have looked at the first three Purposes which God has for our lives: What are they? WORSHIP- You discovered Three of God’s Purposes for our lives. First- is WORSHIP – that you were planned for God’s Pleasure. Then FELLOWSHIP – You were Formed for God’s Family. Thirdly, -DISCIPLESHIP – You were Created to become like Christ, and Today were going to look at God’s fourth purpose for your life,- and its written there on the top of your outline…you were Shaped to Serve God. Elvis felt like he was here to do something, - but he just couldn’t quite figure it out! The Bible says,in Eph. 2:20, “We
are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works,
which God prepared in advance for us to do”.
God made you to make a difference – to DO good works, - and what
matters is not how long you live, but how you live.
The Bible says we’re created to serve, we’re saved
to serve, we’re gifted to serve, and we’re shaped
to serve.
Now whenever God gives us an assignment to do something, He always equips
us first. And in the next verse Job says, “Your
hands shaped me and made me.” (Job 10:8).
God uses five things to shape you – to equip you personally for
Service. – your Spiritual
gifts, your Heart interests, your personal Abilities, Personality,
and even the Experiences you’ve been through.
That spells ‘SHAPE’. Through
those five things God has uniquely made you and shapes you, for a
purpose. And that purpose is
identified clearly in the next verse. –where
its says - 1Pet. 4:10,
“Each of us should use whatever gift he’s received to Serve
others! Your
talents are not for your own benefit.
Do you remember the first line in the Purpose
Driven Life book? “It’s
not about you.” He gave you
gifts and talents and abilities and background and experiences and all
these things for the benefit of other people, to be used for
serving others.
So write this down, “My fourth purpose in life is to serve God by serving others.”
That’s why you’re alive. The
only way you can serve God is by serving others, in the same way that the only way we can love God is
through loving others. Now
the Bible has a word for this, it’s called “ministry”.
And my prayer is that God is going to be saying something to you in
your heart today about your ministry.
Any time you use your talent to help somebody else, you are
ministering. And this
is God’s fourth purpose for your life. Now the good news is that God not only created
us for service, He also gave us a model. in the form of His Son, the perfect man, Jesus
Christ, and He said, “This is what I want you to do with your life”. This last week you have been learning about Discipleship –
that You were created to become
like Christ,- and what
did Christ do , while He was here on earth?
He served, didn’t He? .
Notice the next verse.: Matt. 20:28, “Jesus
said, ‘Your attitude must be like My own, for I did not
come to be served, but to serve’.”
- and that means serving with the attitude which
Jesus had.
Now what does it take to learn to serve like Jesus?
Well it takes three things. Number
one,
(write this down.) Serving
like Jesus means firstly,being AVAILABLE.
One
day Jesus was walking down to Jericho and some blind men start yelling at
him. And the Bible says
(Matt. 20:30-32): “Two blind men
shouted ‘Lord, have mercy on us! Jesus stopped and called them. ‘What do you want me to do for you?’.”
And what did Jesus do? --
Jesus stopped! If you want to be used by God, if you want to serve
God, you must be willing to be interrupted. I find this a hard lesson to
learn, because generally, when Im doing something I don’t like to be
interrupted. But most of Jesus’ ministry and most of Jesus’ miracles
were interruptions, weren’t they? I
had never realized this before, but all the people Jesus healed – the
blind man, the lame man, the sick people, the paralyzed man, the dead
child – all of them were interruptions.
A lot of us say
“I’d like God to use me more. I’d like His power in my life., ..but it seldom seems to
happen ? Perhaps the reason
is that wre not willing for God to interrupt us in our schedule. Well
there are three common
barriers that keep us
from being available to God.? Number
one:is
self-centeredness.
The Bible says, “Forget yourself long enough to lend a helping hand.” (Phil.
2:4) Whenever you see a need right in front of you and it’s really
obvious that somebody needs your help, right there and then God is giving
you the opportunity to practice serving - to learn to be available, to be
like more Jesus Christ. Real
servants have only one agenda – and that is to serve God through serving
others. Let’s remember that as Christ-followers
- we are all in the Service industry. – serving
others. A
second barrier to being used by God…is perfectionism. -
wanting every thing to be perfect.
When I’m not so busy, when things settle down, then I’ll
serve.” Let’s read Eccl.
11:4: “If you wait for perfect
conditions, you’ll never get anything done.”
Real servants do the best they can, give what they can, with what
they have, for Jesus Christ today.
They don’t wait until some perfect time
- for that time never comes. We
all have weaknesses. We
all have faults. We
all have failures. But
guess what? God uses us all. Why?
Because there aren’t any perfect people. God uses ordinary
people. We have seen that in
the 40 Days of Purpose as nearly 25 or so ordinary people opened up their
homes as hosts. And 250 or
more people are being blessed. Why?
Because normal, ordinary, average people said, “My house isn’t
perfect, and I’m not perfect. I don’t perfectly know the Bible, but I could do
this!” And you could!
And you did. And God is blessing it.
So God says, “Don’t wait for perfect conditions.”
Go ahead and start serving.
Number
three:is
materialism.
Materialism is the third barrier that keeps us from being
available to serve. Jesus said, “No
servant can serve two masters. You
cannot serve both God and money.” (Lk. 16:13).
Now would you notice the word “cannot”? He didn’t say, “You shouldn’t serve
both God and money.” He
said, “You cannot serve both God and money.” You’ve
got to decide, really, whether you want to be rich or whether you want to
be blessed. You have to ask
yourself - “What’s number one priority in my life?”
If God wants to give you wealth, that’s great - but it is not the
number one goal of your life. You
cant take your wealth with you to heaven, but you will take
your character
So in our main topic headings
- Serving like Jesus means (1)
BEING AVAILABLE. (2)
Serving like Jesus means BEING GRATEFUL The Bible tells us a story
in John Chapter 11 of Jesus serving in an incredible way.
His friend Lazarus had died, and Jesus went there,- some people
thought, for the funeral, but Jesus had a different idea in mind.
He went there to serve, - to raise Lazarus from the dead.
The Bible tells us in John 11:41-42, “Jesus
looked up and said, ‘Father, I thank You that You heard me.
I know that You always hear Me, but I said this for the benefit of
the people standing here.’” “I want them
to know that I am grateful that you heard Me”.
Jesus had an attitude of gratefulness in
everything that He did. That
was the attitude that pervaded His ministry.
His Ministry and miracles always happened in this attitude of
gratefulness. So why should
we serve God, not with a sense of duty, but with a sense of delight and
gratefulness? Well its
because He’s given us new life through Jesus Christ!
And if He never did anything else for us, that alone is good enough
reason to serve Him and to be
grateful for the rest of our lives. In
2 Tim. 1:9: Paul says “It
is He who saved us and chose us for His holy work, not because we deserved
it, but because that was His plan.” He saved us, and out of the
gratefulness of that, of what He has done for us, we serve Him. Now, as we might expect, there are some barriers
that get in the way of our being Grateful. One of these barriers is when
we are comparing and criticizing. ( fill in the blanks!)
Those are barriers that
gets in the way of being grateful. Give two children a bag of lollies each
and the first thing they will do is compare what they have with what the
other has,and then criticize the giver!
And adults do that in life, too.
But why should we do that? We’re all on the same team.
We have the same goal! God
has given each of us different abilities, different tasks -
and it’s pretty ridiculous
really to compare or criticize one another for what God has given.
Comparing and criticizing get in the way of gratefulness. The second barrier that
gets in the way of being grateful is wrong motives. The Bible talks about this in Matt. 6:1. Jesus
said, “When you do good deeds,
don’t try to show off. If
you do, you won’t get a reward from your Father in heaven”. A lot of our service can be done with very mixed motives. We
might serve in order to get
others to like us. We might
serve to be admired. Or maybe
we even serve as sort of a bargaining chip with God. “God, I’ll serve
and You take care of me here.” How
do you know if you have a wrong motivation?
The answer is whether you are serving with a true sense of
Gratitude. When you lose a sense of gratefulness and
gratitude then you can know right away that there’s something wrong with
your motivation.
If
you want to learn to serve like Jesus, you have to learn to a) Be
Available; and b) Be Grateful. And then there’s a third
thing. Serving like Jesus means
c) being faithful.
That means you don’t give up.
You keep on going. You
don’t quit in the middle of your assignment.
At the end of Jesus’ ministry on earth, Jesus said - in John
17:4,-“I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work,” Note
the words - “completing the
work”, “that You gave me to
do.” I want to be able
to say that when I get to heaven – that I completed the work God gave me
to do! I want you to be able to say that too !
Jesus was faithful in fulfilling His service.
He didn’t give up. He
didn’t give in. You may
retire from your job someday, but you never retire from ministry.
You never retire from service. So what motivates us to keep on going?
The Bible says, (1Cor. 4:2)
“The one thing required of servants is that they be faithful.”
What motivates us to stay faithful in serving God over the long
haul? Well, there are a
number of things which keep us going.
Being grateful for all the past that God’s forgiven in our
lives, is one thing. We also know that what we’re doing really
matters. Most of what we do in life doesn’t
matter. But any time you’re
serving in Jesus’ name, no matter how small, it matters.
The Bible says this in 1Cor. 15:58, (let’s read it,)
“Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing
you do for Him is a waste of time or effort.” Notice “nothing”: - that means
it all matters, even the little stuff.
Why? Because in
God’s book, there is no little stuff!
. Jesus said,
“Even if you give a cup of cold water in my name to a child,-- that counts.”
Some years ago two teenage boys tried to come into an evening
church service , only it was packed out, and they couldn’t find
any seats. So they turned
around and decided to leave because they couldn’t find a seat.
But one usher said, “Come on, guys.
I’ll find you a seat.” And
that usher personally escorted them down to the center and set them in the
middle and found them two seats. That
night both of those boys accepted Christ and became Christians.
One of them was Billy Graham who has now led millions of people to
Christ. Do you think that
usher is going to get any credit in heaven?
We have no idea of the significance of small acts.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing something important that is well
known or if you’re doing something important that’s not well
known. It’s all
important. God
brought you here to this church so that you could practice
serving – because in serving God and in serving
others – you are going to find fulfillment in your life.
The best use of your life is to invest it in that which is going to
outlast it. One day you’re going to stand before God and
He’s going to say to you, “What did you do with the life I gave you?
Will you be able to reply – “I did what you made me for – I
fulfilled the purposes you created me for.!”
And God will say (Matt. 25:21). “Well
done good and faithful servant! You
have been faithful with a few things so; I will put you in charge of many
things. Come and share your
master’s happiness.” You know, more than anything else, I want God to be able to
say that about you –“Well done! You
did what I put you here on earth to do!.
You worshiped me, you fellowshipped with other believers, you grew
in character to be like Christ, and you served Me, the way I shaped you.
Well done! Come on in
and enjoy eternity and all the rewards I’ve planned for you.”
I want God to be able to say that about you, because you were
shaped for serving God. Let’s
bow our heads. Would you pray
this? Father I realize that I was shaped to serve
You by serving others. Forgive
me for the times I’ve put a “do not disturb” sign on my life.
Help me to see the interruptions as opportunities to serve.
Help me to make time for what matters most.
You’ve been so good to me. I
want to give something back. I
want to serve You freely and gratefully and faithfully, and I want to
practice before I get to heaven so one day I can hear You say “Well
done, good and faithful servant”. In Your name I pray, Amen. ****************** |
