Have We Forgotten What It Means to Be a Servant?
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In church, we love to make appeals for people to serve. Some churches have months where they do recruitment drives to help increase the number of volunteers. With serving, especially in church, we like to use words like serve, servers, or volunteers, but somehow, we can gloss over the word servant. It’s one thing to say you are a volunteer. There is a level of respect and even pride in that. However, it is another thing to be called a servant. In fact, people look at these words differently. If you say you are volunteering, there is a level of virtue that comes with that. After all, you are giving someone your precious time of your own free will. You could do anything else with this time, but you are giving it to the church or whatever organization where you are volunteering.
For Jesus to wash the feet of his disciples, it meant he also washed the feet of Judas, knowing he would be the one who was going to betray him. If you are going to have a servant’s heart, then the position of the person you are serving – whether they are friend or foe – should not matter. The way we do church today, we have created a culture where we serve the ones in positions of leadership, sometimes to the neglect of those who aren’t.
Even as leaders, it’s possible to fall into the trap of delegating the things you don’t want to do because there is someone else to do it. We can also risk falling into “Its Beneath Me Syndrome.” However, Jesus’ willingness to serve his disciples in this manner teaches us a lesson. If the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, God incarnate, could wash the dirty feet of his disciples, then we should do the same thing as well. There should be nothing that we feel is “beneath us.”
It can be all too easy to pass on the lowly, dirty work to someone else, especially as leaders. It is also possible to put more emphasis on serving those who lead and neglect others. This is backwards in the way we serve and who we serve. Let me remind you of how we should view everyone in the body of Christ.
If you are going to cultivate a servant’s heart, then you serve everyone and you go to extra lengths to serve those who we may deem less deserving.
2. A Servant Serves from a Place of Humility, not a Place of Authority
In Jesus’ situation, the disciples should have been serving him and washing his feet. After all, he was Lord, and they were not. However, he set an example for us to follow that you don’t just serve the deserving, you also serve the undeserving.
For a moment, consider the role Jesus took. He did the least glamorous work reserved for the lowest of people. By doing this, he was serving from a place of humility. He set aside his place of authority as Teacher and Lord and got on his knees to wash their dirty feet. This tells me there is no position too great that alleviates you from serving. He could have easily delegated this responsibility to someone else, but he took it upon himself because he was leading by example.
What would it look like for the church to embrace this role of servant? Let’s make it more personal. What would it look like for you to embrace this role of servant?
In today’s culture, both in the church and in the world, if I were to teach on how to be great, that might fill arenas or churches. But if I said the path to greatness in God’s kingdom is by becoming a servant of all, that may not get too many amens. However, this is what Jesus said, what he did, and what he calls you to do. Maybe it’s time to remove the volunteer label and embrace calling each other servants. After all, being a servant of Jesus and a servant of others is exactly what God wants us to do.
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Have We Turned Our Favorite Preachers and Teachers into Idols?
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