Experiencing God - Church and Service 19

Christian servants must focus on their mission, not on what others are doing
Rick Warren - Purpose Driven Life

As God`s people, we all know that service is tied in directly with the teachings of our Christian faith, yet, it is all too easy to develop a wrong understanding of service.  Community can sometimes be a challenging place to be because it is made of people with different gifts, strengths, personalities, and views.  So even in the area of our ministry or service, we can often run into conflicts as to how things should be done. Over the years, I've encountered a few instances where some have moved away from Christian service because of conflicting views with those they were working with.

I really like what Rick Warren has to say about Christian service in his book “The Purpose Driven Life”.  He says: “Christian servants must focus on their mission, not on what others are doing.  In good Christian service, we don’t criticize, we don’t compare, we don’t compete with other Christians.  Rick Warren says that competition among God’s servants is illogical for many reasons.  We’re all on the same team.  Our goal is to make God look good, not ourselves.  The mission cannot be accomplished unless we all work together in faith.

In the book of Genesis chapter 18 we have a perfect example of service and hospitality.  Abraham has visitors, from the Lord.  And in the tradition of the his people, he and his family offer hospitality and service to their visitors.  Abraham invites them in, gives water to wash and cool their feet from the desert sand, and then offers them nourishment. 

Abraham and his family go out of their way to prepare fresh bread, and kill the calf for them to eat.  Abraham did not do it all himself.  He worked with his wife Sarah and his servants for the preparation, each doing their own tasks for the guests.  As a result, they all found favor with God.  What if Sarah said to Abraham: “Make your own bread.  I’m busy right now.”  I don’t think that would have worked very well.  It worked because each sees what needs to be done and contribute to its accomplishment.

The gospel story In Luke chapter 10 is also about service and hospitality.  Jesus and the twelve apostles make a visit to the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  How would you like to have thirteen unexpected guests for supper?  I think I would be a little frazzled at the thought of this myself.  But we must remember, these people are all good friends.  They share the same faith. They are involved in the same mission.  Jesus and the apostles would have stopped at this home many times in the past, and they knew they would be welcomed there.  They were a family.  They would have shared many occasions together, both pleasant and unpleasant, so they were all very comfortable with each other.  And the householders, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, as they have done many times before, set out to make their guests comfortable and to feel at home.  They each set out to do the service they felt was necessary at the moment.

The difficulty that came up had nothing to do with the work that Martha was doing in the kitchen.  The difficulty that came up was that she got distracted by her younger sister who she thought was not being very helpful, was not fulfilling her role.  So she started to complain. 

When Martha complained to Jesus that Mary was not doing her share, she lost her Christian servant’s heart. Her focus was no longer on the service to be done, the mission to be accomplished, but on what others were doing.

For some reason when we hear this gospel, most of us picture this scene as Martha in a hot kitchen by herself, doing all this work, while everyone else, including Mary, were sitting in the living room chatting and having fun.  This certainly does not fit in with Jesus’ model of servant leadership that he speaks about previously in the gospel.  What if we picture the scene with a kitchen buzzing with apostles or neighbors who are all sharing in the tasks of preparing the meal.  And then Martha sees Mary not fitting into what she feels is her defined role.

Rick Warren addressed this issue.  It’s not the job of a Christian servant to evaluate the Master’s other servants.  Martha forgot that what Jesus needed at that particular moment was Mary’s attentiveness, her caring presence, her listening heart.

 

Jesus’s words to Martha were not meant to chastise her for her lack of performance.  What she was doing was critically important, necessary and good.  His words were to remind Martha that service comes in many forms, and at that moment, what Mary was doing was what was needed the most.  "Martha, you worry about many things.  Mary has chosen the better part which will not be taken from her.”  Jesus was challenging Martha to change the way she was looking at things.

To be a servant of Christ requires that we must often make a mental shift in our minds, and change our attitudes.  God is more interested in the underlining intentions of why we do something versus what we are actually doing. 

As Christian servants, this means that a mental shift in attitudes is often required so that we can begin to think in the following manner about our role as servant:

1 Servants must think more about others than about themselves and what they want.

2. Servants must focus on the mission to be accomplished, not on personalities, or being directors of the mission.

3. Servants must focus on their work to be done, not on what others are doing.

4. Servants must see their ministry as a response to serve Christ out of love, not to look or feel good about themselves.

5. Servants must see their ministry as an opportunity to serve, not as an obligation to fulfill.

St Paul summarizes these five attitudinal changes in the reading from Colossians chapter 1:

"I became a servant for the sake of the Body, that is the Church, according to God`s commission given to me for you.  And that commission is to make God`s word fully known, teaching every person in all wisdom, so that we may present every person mature in Christ. "