Serving to Please Jesus

 

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

Dear Friends and Members of IBC,

As we ended our three-part sermon series on the spiritual gifts on Sunday, I shared that we must see the spiritual gifts as tools to serve others. In this week’s Word for the Week, I would like to share two quotes from two very faithful Christian leaders, which really get at the heartbeat of serving.

It is easy to serve out of self-promotion or with good intentions for the church itself, but we are first and foremost to serve to please God. To do things for the sake of the gospel. Let’s meditate on the following words:

“A wise older pastor said to me as I started out that I must make sure I always did things for the gospel. If you do things primarily for yourself, you’re twisting Christian ministry into self-serving self-promotion. If you do things primarily for your church, you’ll grow jaded, cynical or bitter because your church will let you down. But do things for the Jesus who never has and never will let you down and you will be ready to serve, in whatever way you’re called to. In this sense there’ll be no difference between bathing your child and giving a talk at a huge conference. Both will be about serving. And so serving to please Jesus proves to be a far more satisfying way to live than spending our time labouring to build our own empires.” (Rico Tice)

“It is a wonderfully liberating experience when the desire to please God overtakes the desire to please ourselves, and when love for others displaces love for self. True freedom is not freedom from responsibility to God and others in order to live for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves in order to live for God and others.” (John Stott)

Let’s live to serve Jesus Christ. What a wonderful privilege that is.

God bless you
James