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Preacher: Ross Macdonald
Scripture: Hebrews 12:18-29
Well this morning we continue on with this short series we're doing on evangelical obedience in preparation for our time working through the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. Last week we began by laying this foundation.
We are using Hebrews 12 28, that wonderful banner verse, as a working definition for evangelical obedience. And of course we will continue that for the next two weeks. So we spoke about grace last week.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace. And that was our big focus last week, this grace that's in high contrast to law. And so this gospel law distinction, without which we'll make a shipwreck of our faith.
The law cannot give life, but the Spirit gives life by His grace. The grace that is, as we saw, treasured up in the person and work of Christ Jesus. Now we continue forward this morning to the second part of this verse, verse 28.
Therefore, let us have grace by which we may serve God. And so that's our focus this morning, serving God. We want to look at that in three parts. First, we serve by the grace of God. That's right on the surface of our verse.
Let us have grace by which we may serve. So first, we serve by the grace of God. Secondly, we serve with the mind of Christ. And then lastly, we serve sacrificially from strength and cleansing. So we serve by the grace of God.
We serve with the mind of Christ. We serve sacrificially from strength and cleansing. Serving by the grace of God. This is something that is evident not only in Hebrews 12, but in Exodus 19, where we've left off in the narrative.
What we've seen throughout Exodus is the Passover was the great consecrating event. The people of God consecrated by this blood of the slain lamb and brought out of this house of bondage. Why? That they might serve God.
Remember in Exodus 19, we began that chapter with this beautiful image of God's desire for His people, that He had saved them, rescued them from the tyranny of Pharaoh, in order to consecrate them as priests.
He said, you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests. That's what His people were meant to be. Later on, that consecration ritual becomes the way the Levites enter into the service of God in the tabernacle.
What do priests do? They serve God. What does a kingdom of priests do? It serves God. And that's what Peter captures when he echoes or brings out this allusion to Exodus 19 and applies it to the church, to the people of God.
Coming to Him as to a living stone rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious. You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood. Why? To offer up spiritual service.
And so this holy priesthood, this church of God, is to offer, in this priest-like way, service unto God. To serve the Lord God. And that's what we've seen throughout Exodus. From the very beginning, when Moses and Aaron went before Pharaoh, the demand that came off of their lips was, let my people go.
Why? That they may serve me. Let my people go that they may worship me. Remember that word is a double entendre, so it can go both ways. It can be rendered as either serve or worship. And of course, Pharaoh has the the slaves serving him, right, making bricks without straw, and in that way their service is rendering honor or rendering dignity to his strength as ruler, as tyrant over them.
In other words, the Israelite slaves were worshiping involuntarily, worshiping Pharaoh insofar as they were serving him. What else could they do? And the Lord God was saying, I'm going to deliver them, save them, rescue them from that bondage.
Why? So that they'll worship me, serve me. That's who they were made for. That's what they were made for. Their service unto Pharaoh, their bondage to his tyranny, was a worldly work that was only filling his coffers, was only furthering his projects of idolatry.
Now their service was to be unto Yahweh, from his liberation and to his world work, which was not a project of darkness, but a project of light, his world work of redemption and holiness. That's why they were consecrated to be a kingdom of priests serving him.
So we need to begin with the identity of a Christian. A Christian is a priest unto God, joins into the assembly, this holy priesthood, and every Christian is a servant of God, one who serves God. That is what a Christian is.
There's a big problem in our lives if we don't self-identify in that way. Who are you, believer? Who are you, brother or sister? You are a servant of the Most High God. That is who you are. That determines what you will do.
That will shape the whole course of your life. And if it does not, you'll be bucking against the will of God. You'll be chafing against the way of God. And you'll find that the path is not blessed. No longer are you planted by the river of life, season by season being fruitful, but you'll find even the buds begin to wither.
You are a servant of God. This must be your identity. Romans 6, we spent so much time, remember, in verse 14, a very foundational verse, that we're no longer under law. Remember that sense in which it is a covenant of works.
We're not under the law as a covenant of works, but rather under grace. And so how do we relate to the law? As a rule of life. The way that we serve God. The way that we honor Him. The way that we understand His will.
What love for Him will express itself as. Obedience to His commands. And then a little bit later in that chapter, Paul says, when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Think of the Israelites.
When they were enslaved to Pharaoh, could they obey the commands of God? No. They had to do whatever their taskmasters demanded them to do, or else be mercilessly beaten, maybe unto death. They were enslaved and therefore they were not free to do what God would desire them to do.
They had to be freed in order to be righteous. They had to be freed in order to serve God. And Paul elaborating on this, when you were slaves of sin, just like the Israelites, when you were slaves, you were free in regard to righteousness.
In other words, you weren't bound to righteousness. You couldn't be. You were bound to sin. Bound to darkness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which now you're ashamed? The end of those things is death.
But now. Right? That same but now. That same contrast of you're no longer under the law, but under grace. But now, having been set free from sin, and having become servants of God. You see what he's saying here?
The result of being freed from one taskmaster, one tyrant, unto darkness and death, is you've been freed to the service of the true Lord and the Savior. You've become servants now of God, rather than the Pharaoh or even the prince of the power of the air.
Having become servants of God, you have your fruit to holiness. And the end? Everlasting life. So everyone serves. The question is, who do you serve? Now Christians, like the Israelites, they serve God.
Why? Because they were purchased by God. God freed them, as it were. He bought them into his own service. Remember Paul describing this to the were bought with a price. The Heidelberg Catechism, of course, is elaborating on this, that we do not belong to ourselves, but rather belong to the one who bought us.
I am not my own. I belong both body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. Why? He's fully paid for my sins. And so he's bought us. We were bought with a price. In Paul's reasons, this is why you are now a servant of God.
This is how you've become a slave to righteousness. And there's implications to being bought with this price. What then? Shall we sin because we're under grace? Certainly not. God forbid. Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves, slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves?
Whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness. You see? Everyone must serve. The question is not whether or not you will serve, but whom you will serve. That's the question.
And to whomever you present yourselves as slaves to obey, whoever's orders, whoever's will you end up fulfilling, that is who you belong to. In Paul's reasoning, Christians were bought with the price and therefore, having been set free from sin, you are now slaves to righteousness, servants of God.
But as we say, the question is not whether, but whom. Whom do you serve? In Matthew 4, when our Lord Jesus was walking in the wilderness, not in paradise as Adam, but in fulfillment of this covenant of grace, He was walking as Adam once walked with the tempter, sort of weaving and slithering His way around our Lord in His great time of distress, hungering, thirsting, being weary, rather than being full, rested, enjoying the goodness of paradise.
And this last Adam, in that midst of weakness, found himself confronted with the tempter. And that third temptation we read in Matthew 4, when Satan took Him exceedingly high, to an exceedingly high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, all of their glory.
And again, this wasn't a false advertisement. In a very real capacity, He's the Prince of the Power of the Air. When Adam heeded the Torah or the voice or the instruction of the serpent, he essentially was obligating or giving his life over to the way of the serpent, and so the serpent became this power, as it were, over our flesh, over our humanity.
Now the same thing comes to the one who's born of the Virgin. He wants this one to fall just as Adam fell. He doesn't just say, ignore all these trees in paradise that are more than enough for you to feast upon, varieties of fruits you have yet to try.
Just focus on the one tree that God said no to. Focus on the one fruit you're not to taste. Don't trust Him, but trust me. And in the contrast here, we have the last Adam. He's not just shown a tree with some fruits, he's shown all of the kingdoms of the world in a display of all of their glory.
And this Prince of Darkness says, all this I will give to you if you'll fall down and worship me. When we understand this is parallel to Adam's fall, we understand the significance of that fall. In partaking of the fruit, Adam and Eve worshipped the fallen one.
They served him. They followed his instruction, his Torah. And so they became worshippers of the evil one, and they became in bondage to the one that they served. And Jesus confirms this, right? Satan says, all this I will give to you if you fall down and worship me.
And Jesus responds, away with you. It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God. Him only shall you serve. In other words, to serve is to worship. To worship is to serve. Worship is not something that, in some churches, ends after the band leaves the stage, right?
Now this concludes our worship, it's time for the sermon. We, as Reformed, we go, no, no, we know it's more than that, right? It's the whole worship service. It's the whole first part of your Sunday. No, it's much more than that.
It's much more comprehensive. Every aspect of your life in one way or the other filters towards service. Insofar as it does, that is worship. When a fan chases some music act around the country, what are they doing?
What does it mean to be a fan? They're adoring, they're reverencing, they're worshiping, they're delighting in, they're enjoying, they're consuming, they're dwelling upon, they're sharing. That's what it means to worship.
And so Jesus recognizes this evil one would enslave him. Serve me. Worship me. Look what I can offer you. And he rightly responds, no, worship belongs to the Lord God alone. Him only will I serve. We see the same thing in Romans 1.
God gave up the sons of men, as it were, to uncleanness in the lust of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves. Why? Because they exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshipped and served.
You see how these things are bound together? Worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. To not serve God is to serve idols, is to serve the evil one behind that idolatry. To not worship God is to worship something else.
Not out of freedom, but out of bondage. It's merciful in some ways if you end up losing your delight in the things that you worship falsely. There's a reason Paul says to the church at Thessalonica, you turned to God from idols to serve the true and living God, right?
You went from serving idols, worshipping idols, to serving the true God, the living God. To not serve God is to serve idols. There is no neutrality. No one, Jesus says, can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he'll be loyal to the one but despise the other.
And that is a reality. There is no neutrality. There's no gray area. There's no halfway Christianity. No man can serve two masters. And you look in the mirror and you ask yourself, is there anything, anyone that I love more than I love you?
Because Lord, I cannot serve two masters. I will either love the one and hate the other, or I'll be loyal to the one. In other words, my time, my energy, my focus, my resources will all be toward this other one.
I'll end up despising you, Lord. No man can serve two masters. One gets the actual service, the other one gets lip service. This people, the Lord says, they worship me with their lips, they serve me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
One master gets the true service, the other master gets the lip service. So heart is borne out by action. This is what it means to be a servant. So I get again to this first point here. We serve by the grace of God.
We have this grace, as we said last week. Grace is something we've received. It's something that we're growing in and something that we give, something that we exercise in charity toward one another. If we have received this grace, we have not received it in vain.
This grace is meant to be borne out in our service to God and to our neighbor. This is what it means to be a Christian, and you must have this as an identity. This must be how you understand yourself in your life.
We live in an age of entitlement. Is it just me? Am I just becoming cranky? Or has customer service fallen off a cliff? I was telling someone a few weeks ago, I was grabbing a burrito and lemon stir at Chipotle and, you know, the person with the window had like earbuds and opened the window and I give my name.
There's just never a word. It was like, you know, it was like a statue. It was so bizarre. I was like, thank you, you know, have a great day, and they're just, you know, stone. It's like, hello? Hello?
What's with that? There was this viral video. Don't go looking it up. I don't know what else it comes with, but it was a funny clip. It was sort of the things that you wish you could say in customer service that you can't say, and this guy who actually worked customer service, I think at IKEA, and so the threat comes.
I'm gonna tell all my friends not to shop here, and he said, go ahead. In fact, give me your phone. I'll tell them. You think you hate this place more than me? I work here. I don't want more of you to come here, but there's this attitude, this entitlement.
We don't want to serve, and the sort of upcoming generation, they don't even want to interact. There's this view that it's like, it's beneath me, beneath my dignity. I don't want to somehow seem happy to serve you.
I don't want to be good at customer service. That's beneath me, and I can only retain my dignity if I'm basically dispassionate, and I, you know, take it or leave it. I don't care. I really don't care about this job.
I don't care about serving you. That's the reality of our culture right now. That service is seen as something negative. It's seen as something unbecoming, something that you can't actually take pride in, and it comes with this sense of entitlement.
I'm entitled to more than this. I deserve more than this. That is a pernicious influence. Christians cannot think that way. It used to be when people were coming into covenant membership in a local body, deacons or elders would go to their place of employment.
Where is it you work? What dock do you work at? What factory? They'd go seek out the shift managers. They'd go seek out the supervisor. Is so-and-so a Christian? Maybe the factory worker. I have no idea.
Well, what's his work ethic like? Is he a good worker? Is he honest? Does he do his work with integrity? Does he work hard? Right? They would have to reconsider someone's desire to be in covenant membership if these things weren't true because they had this understanding.
This is what it means to be a Christian. You're a servant. You're a worker unto God. Whether you eat or drink, you glorify God. In everything that you do, you have the heart of a servant, a willing servant, a diligent servant.
This is what it means to be a Christian. Heart being borne out, by action. So we ask the question, if we have received this grace, have we received it in vain? Is there something greater that we're serving?
Do we see being a servant, being a slave to Jesus Christ, as something that diminishes our dignity or something that amplifies it? Is this the greatest possible position you could have in life? You are a servant of the true and living God.
And that leads us secondly into serving with something. We serve by the grace of God, the grace in which we stand, the grace that we've received. But we also must serve with something. We must serve with the mind of Christ.
You remember Paul in Philippians 2 at the very head of the Christ hymn in verses 5 through 11 when he says, have this mind in you also. That was why he recited this incredible display of the humiliation and suffering and death and resurrection of our Savior.
It was all so that he could get across this point. Have this mind in you. Think this way. So much of our unwillingness to serve God is we just don't stop and think. We don't get our mind right. We sort of react and act and just allow the day to sort of manifest and take over our energy, our time, our will.
Rather than thinking, getting into a right mind frame, having the mind of Christ. There was nothing that threw Jesus off of this endeavor. However chaotic things might explode before Him. Dissonance among His disciples, people clamoring after Him, crowds of thousands or people rejecting Him, scorning Him, Him being mocked, Him being sort of teased, songs being sung about Him being illegitimate.
He was never thrown off pitch or off-center. He always understood. He always had this mind frame. I have come to do the will of my Father. I am a servant of my Father. He entered into this status of a servant.
And so we as Christians are to have this mind, the mind of Christ. Could it be any other way for those who claim to be Christians? How could we claim to be Christian if we don't have a Christian mind?
The mind of Christ. If we belong to the One who came as a suffering servant, then we too must have the mind of that servant. His whole ministry was revealed to us in the way of a servant, in the form of a servant.
When Jesus gathered His disciples around Him, He turned the expectations of the world and the flesh upside down. He said, you know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles, Lord it over them.
Great ones, exercise authority over them. Not so among you. That's not the mind you're to have. Not preening and posturing. Not sort of crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. You keep clawing your way to be on top.
Not recognizing you're all at the end of the day still crabs in a bucket. What did all that clawing and clamoring do ultimately? What does it profit a man to gain the whole world in that way? Lose his own soul?
Not so among you. In other words, wrong way of thinking. Wrong mind. Have this mind instead. Whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. It's such a beautiful verse because of course in desiring to become great, if you're being driven with that kind of ambition and the only way to be great according to the Lord Jesus is to become a servant, then in becoming a servant your ambition actually begins to transform.
Because you can't actually serve if the whole time you're only doing it to get ahead. To use those you're serving to get ahead. So it begins perhaps with ambition. I'm gonna be the greatest. But then that becomes transformed into actual service.
By the end of that whole process you've become a good Samaritan. And no longer is it your desire to be seen as great. Now your desire is simply to serve. Whoever desires to be first shall be slave of all.
In the Reformed world there is this sort of toxic trait of celebrity culture. And there's good reasons to honor those who rule well, especially those who preach and teach, right? We all have our favorite preachers.
I have my favorite preachers. It's a joy to listen to them. We want others to listen to them. We like highlighting good gifts that our God has given. But at the same time that can come with it, this sort of worldly celebrity culture that's very unbecoming.
And I love what J .I. Packer said when he was asked, who's the greatest preacher living today? And Packer shot right off the hip, right back, we don't know him. We don't know him. Because the Lord doesn't rank things the way that we rank things.
The Lord doesn't look upon men with eyes of flesh. And so he had this understanding that the one who is probably the most anonymous is actually the greatest servant. The one who the Lord would see as first of all is probably not recognized by any as being great or first of all.
But the Lord sees that heart, sees that loyalty, sees that service, sees that reverence, and He honors it and blesses it in His own way. What He doesn't do is shed the spotlight and allow them to be puffed up with pride, as it were, and sort of pranced around on stages and hit the sort of celebrity circuit among Christians.
Whoever desires to be first shall be a slave. Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of Man, and He uses this title. There's a lot of debate over why He uses this title, but at the very least He seems to use this title to to point out not only His humanity, that's what Son of Man would mean ordinarily, but more to speak of His mission, to speak of His identity in terms of this work of redemption.
It speaks to His identity as a servant and as a suffering servant who's come in order to save. How is it written, He says, Mark 9 12, how is it written concerning the Son of Man, that He must suffer many things and be treated with contempt?
And of course, the answer in part is how the Son of Man is deployed in Daniel 7. We see Jesus in Mark 14 alluding to Daniel 7 as a way of explicating who He is and why He's come. But I want you to notice this title Son of Man, which He connects to suffering as a servant, is in fact held out in Daniel 7 as something glorious, worthy of being served.
So there's this ironic twist that belongs to the mind of Christ, that He refers to Himself as the Son of Man. And if we unload all that the Son of Man means in that Daniel 7 vision, that's like, oh, oh, you are the one who is to be worshipped and adored and served.
And He says, yes, I am that Son of Man who's come to serve, who's come to suffer. And there's a complete reversal of the logic. Even the disciples are thrown by this. Even John the Baptist, the greatest born among women up to that time, the greatest of the prophets, even he is like, are you the Messiah?
Suffering? Serving? In Daniel's vision, he sees one like a Son of Man. And then he beholds the glory of this one. I was watching in the night visions, he says, behold, one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.
He came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him near before Him, and to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom. All peoples, nations, languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away.
His kingdom shall not be destroyed. And Jesus takes all of that and He says, what is said of the Son of Man that He must suffer? And then we get to that midpoint, that glorious, one of the sort of climaxes in the Gospel of Mark, Mark 10 45.
The Son of Man has come not to be served, but rather to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. You see the point that Jesus is making to His disciples. Though He is the glorious One that will have everlasting dominion as the Son of Man, He has not come on the clouds of heaven at this point to receive the service and worship of all of the nations, tribes, and tongues, but He's come as one who will suffer, one who has come to serve.
And He says in this way, if you are My followers, if you are My disciples, so you must serve. This is the mind of Christ. He says in Luke 12, of those who wait for the Master to come, He says of the servants who when the Master returns finds them waiting for Him, He will gird Himself, sit them at the table, and serve them Himself.
This is the mind of Christ, who being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a servant, coming in the likeness of men, and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself even to the point of death, even death on the cross.
This is what it means to have the mind of Christ. And Paul says, have this mind in you also. Christ said to His mother when He was 12, when His parents were in a panic, do you ever have that? We were at a bookstore last summer and caught up, we ran into a mother there that was a pastor's wife and she was there with her girls, and so we were talking and then her husband came and so I was talking and it was just this great time of talking, before you knew it the girls had been playing hide-and-seek, and Elsie found this place to hide underneath this bookstall and we couldn't find her, and as for the rules of hide-and-seek, she thought this is perfect, and we're trying not to make a scene, but we're sort of walking aisle by aisle and beads of sweater starting to form, and it's just like, okay, like what are we gonna do here?
And you know, crawling around, looking under the shelves and all that, and really feeling this panic, and as we're walking by each other in aisles we have these eyes black with terror, like what is going on?
I can only imagine how Mary and Joseph felt when they couldn't find Jesus, and they finally found Him at the temple, and what did Jesus say? Didn't you know I'm about my father's business? How many 12-year-olds among us have that kind of mind?
12-year-olds, in my experience as a 12-year-old, they're not very interested in the father's business. They're much more interested in their games, and their toys, and in the immediate fun of the day, and the things they're looking forward to in the day.
They're looking forward to the next time they have a birthday, you know, it's January, you already have your birthday list planned, even though your birthday is in September, right? That's how a 12-year-old thinks.
How did Jesus think as a 12-year-old? What was his mind frame? What was his mindset? What was his pattern of thinking? Don't you know I'm always about my father's will? I'm here for him. I'm here to serve him.
I delight to do your will, O God. It's the song of the psalmist's heart in Psalm 40. It's the delight of the heart of Christ. It's his mind frame, and when that will becomes sharp, when that will begins to cut, when that will actually costs blood, and sweat, and tears, it is no less a delight.
It is no less the resolute ambition of his life to fulfill all the Father has commanded. That's what it means to have the mind of Christ. He emptied himself, took the form of a servant, denied himself even to the point of death.
That's what it means to be a servant. We read in Isaiah 53 that he poured his life out unto death, right? It wasn't just something that they had to sort of sneak come into, and then he was grasping his way out.
He poured his life unto death. He took apart pain, bore our suffering, pierced for our transgressions. The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. He bore the sin of many, made intercession for the transgressors.
That's what it meant for him to give his life as a ransom for many, and the only reason he was able to do that is because he had this identity. He understood, I am the suffering servant. I'm a servant of the Most High God, and therefore where he sends, I will go.
What he says, I will do. In other words, servanthood encapsulates the whole of the work of Christ. If you want a sort of one-word label to package away the work of Christ, you couldn't do worse than servanthood.
What it meant for Christ to be in the form of a servant. That was his work on the earth. So we don't choose between what Daniel states or what Isaiah states. We recognize that Daniel 7 is that glorious reality.
We await that day when people from every tribe and tongue and nation will bow before him. That's how Philippians 2 ends, right? Knees bending in worship of Christ. Knees bending in service to the Holy One of Israel.
But Jesus says this, he who loves his life will lose it. He who hates his life in this world will keep it. If anyone serves me, let him follow me. And where I am, there my servant will be also. In other words, we must have the mind of Christ.
We must have this servant mentality because the only way we can be with Christ is to serve like Christ. We must have his mind serve in his way if we would be followers of him, if we would be where he is.
If anyone serves me, let him follow me. Where I am, there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, him my father will honor. So how are we going to do that? Moving on to the third point. How do we have the mind of Christ serving with that mind from the grace that we've received?
Well, we serve sacrificially and we serve from strength and cleansing. So again, the key to Hebrews 12 28, we have received grace by which we may serve God. We cannot serve God apart from his grace. Having received grace, we serve God which means we don't receive that grace of God in vain.
We don't receive grace in order to serve ourselves, to go our own way in life. Men have to be very careful about this, right? There's a counterpart to the lies of feminism. Feminism essentially says serve yourself rather than the one who made you, the one who has redeemed you.
If that's the lie of feminism, well it's equally true for men. They'll have a lie that what can be patted and applauded, patted on the back and applauded in our circles as being entrepreneurial or ambitious, can actually be a way that you're serving yourself rather than serving your God.
And you really have to know the difference between the two. You always have to examine your hearts in this way. I have not received the grace of God in order to pad my life with luxuries, in order to make a name for myself, in order to be a cut above, but rather I'm to, with all of my strength, with all of my abilities, I am to serve the Lord my God.
I never leave that identity of a servant. I think I want to be an entrepreneur because I never want to deal with customers. I want to be customer service. Well, bad news, you're a servant no matter what.
Whether you're the CEO of some business empire you've built, you are a servant if you're a Christian. And all of your time, all of your resources, all of your success is at His disposal because you were bought with a price if you are a believer.
Let us have grace by which we may serve God sacrificially, which is to say we cannot serve God if we don't have sacrifice included in that definition of service. Service is sacrifice, right? In order to serve, you're putting off your timing, your needs, your wants, what you would do otherwise in order to serve.
Serving is, at root, sacrifice. Now, thankfully, service doesn't always have to feel that way. Sometimes we serve and it feels the very opposite of sacrifice. We delight to do it. It's what we would want to do.
We're happy to do it. But other times we serve and we feel the drain. We feel our flesh kicking, writhing against it. We feel that this is costing a lot. We're not sure that we're willing to pay. That's what serving looks like.
So the Christian life isn't just a life of service. It's a life of sacrifice. Where faith in Christ is a reality, where His grace has been received, this life of servanthood will play out in various areas of sacrifice.
Does your faith cost you something? Does it cost you something to be a Christian? How could you be a Christian if your faith doesn't cost you something? Has it cost you a way that you would have moved through life, but now you're a Christian?
You no longer can operate in that way. You no longer can approach life in that way. Has it cost you some dream that you had? Maybe that you still have. Has it cost you some use of your talents that you recognize this is something you have to count as a sacrifice to God?
Because the use of your talents would be, in a way, against how He's moved providentially. Has it cost something of your time? Something of your resources? Something of your energy? Does it cost you anything to be a Christian?
Does it cost something in your relationships? Have you lost friends because you're a Christian? Hopefully it's your Christianity that chases away your former friends and not your personality. Sometimes I wonder.
I've lost a lot of friends. I'm like, I hope that was because of Christianity, not because I can be annoying and, you know, turn people the wrong way. Does our faith cost us anything? Do we have that mind of Christ that David had?
In 1st Chronicles 21, when when Aaron of the Jebusite found out that David was planning on building a holy site on his threshing floor, he said, well, if it's unto the Lord, you can just have it. And David wasn't like, sweet!
He didn't do what we would do. All right! Woohoo! You know, this is blessed of God. He said, no! If I'm gonna devote this to God, I'm not gonna offer it to him without it costing me something. I'm not gonna offer to him something that doesn't come by way of sacrifice.
He understood in the whole system, the way that God is pleased is by sacrifice. And if David would be a servant of God, it must have a cost. There must be something that costs him. Tozer said somewhere in a sermon on this theme, how utterly terrible is it that Christians will only serve God at their convenience?
How utterly terrible is it that we will only serve God at our convenience? Now I'm ready to serve you, because it won't cost me anything. I was already going to do this, or I have nothing else I would want to do, so now I'll serve you.
And there's no cost, there's no bite, there's no skin in the game. What does it mean for you to be a Christian? How are you inhabiting the mind of Christ? So why don't we sacrifice? Well we think, perhaps chief number one, at least for me, reason number one, I'm too tired.
I'm tired. And sometimes what drives me is a sense of duty. Now that's good, but often that duty is not duty before the eyes of God, but duty before the eyes of men. And we have to be very careful that we do things seeking the face of God, before the face of God.
It doesn't mean you won't feel tired, but it means your motives will be more pure. You can own it and say, Lord, I am tired. Lord, I'm not feeling well. Lord, I just don't have anything in the tank right now, but I know that this is your will.
I know this is what you delight, and I am your servant, and so I go. Please give me strength. Please give me help. Please give me energy that I'm lacking. That will keep your motives in a way that the eyes of men, well if I don't go, someone's gonna text me, ask how I'm doing, you know, elders are gonna like give me furled eyebrows, or oh it'd be nice, you know, where were you, you know.
I don't want to deal with all that, so I guess I'll just go. And we can actually go pretty far in the Christian life by just navigating service to God or service to neighbor from the eyes of one another, from the eyes of men.
What will they think of me? Are they gonna go? Are they gonna do this? I guess I will too. And what's missing is this mind of Christ. What if Christ operated that way? Well, my disciples are doing this, I guess I'll do it too.
My disciples are tired, you know, I'm tired too. Good thing that he was living quorum deo, you know. I have one master, one Lord of my life, and I live before his eyes, and I'm serving him no matter what the gain or loss would be, I serve him.
So one of the reasons we don't sacrifice is our eyes aren't fixed on him, and for that reason the things that are against service pile up and and mountain over all the good desires and good motivations we might have.
We're too busy, we're too tired, things are too chaotic right now, but that's the whole point of the word sacrifice. Sacrifice is also driven by desire. Sacrifice is driven by desire, and this is another reason we must fix our eyes on him.
We must live quorum deo. You have to get to this place of Psalm 63, you know, my flesh thirsts for you, O God. You recognize that this is not like working in a customer service department. You're not there always unwillingly, just having to sort of tow the company line and follow those old VHS training videos and all your responses.
In the most profound way, you were made to serve God, you were made to worship him, enjoy him, delight in him. And so you say with the psalmist, I long for you, I'm yearning for you, I must serve, I'm always serving something, I'm always adoring, working towards something, and Lord, the more time the more energy, the more drive I have toward anything that is not of you or for you, the more tired, the more wilting, the more defeated I feel, Lord, my flesh is longing for you, thirsting for you, I want to serve you.
At your right hand is blessedness evermore. Sacrifice is driven by desire. You husbands here, you remember, or you bachelors that perhaps are on the way toward marriage. When you fell in love, you made a lot of sacrifices for the sake of love, all right?
It was easy for you to sacrifice time, sacrifice money, all right? Half your paycheck gone on a dinner, worth it, right? Then you're married and you're like, we'll do PB &Js for the next two days, all right?
We can't, we got to cut that down, right? It was an easy sacrifice to make when you were, you know, struck with the arrows of Cupid as it were. You sacrifice because of this great love. The time, your parents were like, we haven't seen you at all.
Are we ever gonna see you again? Where have you been? Every waking minute is consumed. You wake up and you think, I've got to text her, I can't wait to see her, right? You go to bed daydreaming about her.
You made all these sacrifices from the time you woke up to the time you went to bed for her. It's a beautiful picture, it's a very wonderful godly picture in a lot of ways. My point is that that desire, that love drove you to make these sacrifices and guess what?
You never thought that they were sacrifices. You didn't even, that didn't even enter into your thinking. It wasn't a sacrifice, it was something you wanted to do, something you were happy to do, something you were excited to do.
When something is valued, in other words, you are willing to make a sacrifice. So the question is always put, are we valuing the Lord? Are we valuing who He is and what He's done in a way that makes our service, though it is sacrificial, not feel like sacrifice?
Men, Stephen Charnock says, men have naturally such slight thoughts of the majesty and law of God, they think any service is good enough for Him. The dullest and the deadest times we think the most fit to pay God our service.
When sleep is ready to close our eyes and we are unfit to serve ourselves, only then do we think it's a fit time to open our hearts to God. How few morning sacrifices God has for many people, for many families.
Men leap out of their beds to their carnal pleasures or worldly employments without any thought of their Creator, any reflection upon His will. You see what Charnock's getting at. What do you value? What drives you?
What satisfies you? What master are you serving? Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, right? Have this mind in you also, the mind of Christ. As you're growing in the grace you've received, part of that growth is conforming your mind to the mind of Christ, conforming your will to the will of Christ, conforming your life to the commands of Christ, so that you may prove what is good and acceptable in the perfect will of God.
I prefer the old king there, the old King James. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, because of the grace you've received, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
Is it not reasonable for God to expect you to serve Him in this way? Paul says if you comprehended the mercy of God in Christ, will you not willingly present your whole body and all that comes with it as a living sacrifice to God?
That's the most reasonable service there could be. Do you have this mentality of, of course I make these sacrifices, I'm a Christian, it's my work, I'm a servant of Christ, it's my job, what choice do I have, right?
I was watching an interview some years ago with an old, it was a group of D-Day veterans and they were at an anniversary of June 6, 1944 when they stormed the beaches, and one of them, he was one of the first men, his unit was one of the first on the beaches of Utah, and somehow he survived.
His name was Sherwin Callender, and they interviewed him at age 99, and he said this, I prayed every time I heard bullets and bombs, and I would say, dear Lord, I know you have to kill some of us, kill me if you have to, but please don't send me home a cripple, and my prayers were answered, and people when I came home said, we're heroes, but we're not heroes, we had a job to do and we did it.
What, how do you, what do you say to a veteran, thank you for your service, thank you for serving, thank you for being a servant, it's my job, I have a job to do, you're welcome, but whether you thanked me or not, it's my job, it's what I do, I have a job to do, and I do it.
Do you have that mentality, where you are right now, you are a servant of God in whatever capacity, in whatever providential situation you find yourself in today. There's a danger in this mentality of, I will serve God when I get there, because the reality is, if you don't serve God here and now, you won't serve Him when you get there.
Are you a servant of Him now? Are you serving God now? That's the question. If you can't serve God where you are now, you'll never serve God anywhere else. A lot of people think, you know, maybe I'll go on the mission field.
Well, are you witnessing now? Are you engaged in missions now? Oh, no, no, no, not now, but if I were to go to Cuba or Haiti, if I were to go to the Far East, then I would start winning souls for the Lord, and if you can't do it here, you won't do it there.
You have to have this heart, this mind of Christ, this willing servitude. As Vance Havner once said, God's far more interested in your availability than in your ability. When God is scouring the nation of Israel for the next king, a king after his own heart, does he go to some prep school and go to the Israelite king training program and say, you know, who's the valedictorian of this school?
You know, I guess he's been groomed and prepared all the way along to be the king. What does he do? He goes out to the field, and he says, out of all of my people in Israel, here's a boy, and his heart is really toward me.
Here's one after my own heart, and so he says, he'll be the king, right? So a shepherd boy, never daydreaming about maybe one day I'll be a monarch over the people of Israel, he's just out in the fields tending to sheep.
In other words, he's seeking to serve and adore and love the Lord God where he is, and that is the one that God goes and puts above all of his countrymen, all of his brethren. There's this mentality that needs to absorb into your life, that it's not about your ability, it's about your willingness, it's about your availability.
God will use you. God will use you when you are willing, when you are bent, when you desire to be used. Serving the Lord then is not merely, as Spurgeon said, not merely external or outward. It's a matter of the heart, a matter of the soul, a matter of the conscience, and of our affections.
Serving the Lord is not something that comes and fits and starts, spasms or excitements. It's a constant, thorough, practical subservience to the mind of God. Serving the Lord is not just thought or scheme or plan or resolution, it is actually spending and being spent.
That is what it means to serve the Lord. Do you have that mind? Do you have the mind of Christ? Are you a servant of the Most High God? Is He your master? And you're not paying lip service, but from your own heart you seek to serve Him.
You say, here I am today, Lord. These are my resources. These are my abilities. This is the time that I have. These are the things that I'm afraid of. These are the things that I feel I lack in. But Lord, I'm at your disposal.
How would you move me? How would you use me? Who would you put before me? How would you navigate me in this week? How can I pray to be more useful in your service, not my own, but in your service, Lord?
What does it cost you to think that way? What's on the chopping block for you to serve the Lord God? Is there anything that you would hold against this service? Is there anything that you would deny Him?
Then you cannot be His. There can be nothing in your life that you say, all of this, Lord, I will do. I'll show up at these times. I'll be participating in this way, Lord. You can have all of this part of my life, but not here.
Here's where I have a desire. Here's where I'm trying to work something out. Here's where I'm trying to pursue something. Lord, can't we have a neat little divide? And He says, no. I have all of you or I have none of you.
And if I have none of you, you have none of me. Has it cost you something to be a Christian, to be a servant? What dreams have you laid up? I think it's a beautiful testimony that we have young women in our fellowship that have denied the lies of feminism that are so awash in our age because they desire to serve God in this path of blessedness that He puts before them.
That's a beautiful testimony because not only are there only two masters, but there's only two ends of service. One way of service, serving yourself, serving the course of the world, ends in death and destruction.
But the hard way, the narrow way that few find, that way of service ends in life and blessedness. And God is so good that He often showers peace and blessedness along the way. It's not always easy, but I trust if you've made that sacrifice, young mothers, if you've made that sacrifice, young husbands, it's not easy to raise a family on a single income, in a dual income economy.
It's not easy to make certain sacrifices, to tighten the belt in certain areas, but I trust even you have been able to sit back and say, this is good, this is blessed, we would not have it any other way.
Do you have that mind of Christ? Does it lead you to an instinct of sacrifice? That's what we want to see developed. I want to see that developed in my own life. I want to see an instinct for sacrifice, an instinct for self-denial.
The martyrdom of Polycarp, one of the first accounts of martyrdom we have coming out of early Christian writing. Maybe some of you have heard the story when he was an elderly man and had been hidden away in a farmhouse, as word got around that there was a warrant out for him, and eventually he was captured by the soldiers.
And it says when the soldiers drew near the house, he came out greeting them as friends. They actually delayed for several hours arresting him because they were so kind of bewildered. He wasn't someone they had to chase down like other convicts.
He came out, you know, come, can I get you something to drink? Come sit, eat with me. I'm going to pray. Like what do we do with this guy? But eventually he's dragged into the amphitheater and the proconsul comes and demands that he pays homage to the divine Caesar, right?
That's the issue. Christians were seen as atheists at this point in history. So the proconsul urged him, you know, take a vow to divine Caesar, take the oath of divine Caesar, and say away with all atheists, all right?
And I'll spare your life. And he denied. So they showed him the beast that he would be thrown to. They got the fire pit ready that he would be burned at. They're showing him, you know, here's what you're up against if you don't bend the knee or pinch the incense to Caesar.
And so finally it came to the breaking point, and this is one of the more beautiful moments in that account. The proconsul says, take the oath and I'll let you live. Curse Christ. And Polycarp, elderly man, he said, 86 years I've served him.
How then could I blaspheme my Savior and my King? What led him to lay down his life in that way? Why did he have this instinct for sacrifice? It was because he understood what it meant for him to be a Christian, though he was this great bishop over Smyrna, though he was this tremendous leader in the church, he never lost the identity of a servant.
For 86 years I have served him. I'm a servant. And you might think you have the power in this situation. I recognize I only stand before you because he is in charge. And if as part of my service he is now requiring my life, so be it.
I'll never curse him. Burn me. Throw me to lions. Tear me to pieces. I will never curse my King and my Savior. That instinct for sacrifice was born out by this identity of being a servant. So I ask you, if you are a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, what does it cost you?
What is on the chopping block? What sacrifices are you making to be his servant? To whom much is given, much will be required. And then secondly, we cannot serve apart from the strength that he provides.
Peter says, whoever serves must serve as one serves by the strength that God supplies. So we recognize that this is nothing that Polycarp musters up in himself. This is not the kind of service that you have.
You are tired. You're not making that up. It is chaotic. That's not a lie. You're gonna come back to a mess. That's true. This is gonna be uncomfortable. This is gonna be awkward. Yep. All those things are true and valid.
You're not gonna be able to do it from your own strength, but you will serve him from the strength that he supplies. And sad to say, you will not get that strength that he supplies unless you're willing to serve him.
So you'll be more tired because you're refusing to serve him. Things will be more chaotic because you're refusing to serve him. Have you not found that testimony that when you fought against the flesh and the providence and the circumstances, that somehow he's met you along the way?
It didn't necessarily make everything daisies and bubblegum, but it did give you strength to endure, and you were able to sit back and say, thank you, Lord. As one put it in the New Testament, we are all priests.
We all have access to God through our great high priest, Jesus Christ, and so we must urge each other to serve in the house of God according to his purpose, with a focus upon serving and blessing him, not just going through the motion.
And if we're not living quorum Deo, we're not serving with our eyes fixed upon the Lord, then we will be going through the motion. If your service is dependent on how others are serving or not serving, upon what others are sacrificing or not sacrificing, you will just be going through the motions inevitably.
Your parameter is not what it should be. You don't have the right mind. You're not thinking like Christ. And then lastly, and most importantly, we cannot serve unless we're cleansed by him. We cannot serve unless we're cleansed by him.
And this is going to carry into next week. We talk about, let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably, that word acceptably, which is a beautiful way of getting at the gospel. And I've been, you know, I mentioned last week this pendulum swing, evangelical obedience, you know, something gracious and something sort of demanding, and we want it to settle where it should be between the two, holding these things in harmony rather than in discord.
And hopefully next week there'll be a compliment to this sermon. This sermon was meant to be a little more blunt and heavy, but where we're going next week, we recognize that we serve acceptably because the strength that he supplies is by his own spirit.
We actually fulfill the law by walking with the Spirit. We have an indwelling Holy Spirit within our members, and so that's where we're going to go next week. But as a way of getting at that or previewing that, we cannot serve God unless we've been cleansed by him, unless we are continually cleansed by him.
Hebrews 9 14, how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works in order to serve the living God. So the Spirit must purify your conscience, your way of living, your way of looking back at your past, the sins that so easily entangle you.
Your conscience must be purified by the Spirit, purified from those dead works, so that you can serve the living God. In other words, you will not be able to serve God unless the Spirit is actively cleansing your life.
And Satan, of course, will do all that he can to prevent the Spirit from purifying your conscience from dead works. He'll make those dead works out of steel in your conscience. They won't be something you can blow away.
They won't be something that easily leaves. What he'll do is he'll keep pointing out the hypocrisy. He'll keep reminding you that you've served out of your own ambition, that you've served before the eyes of others, that you haven't even come close to serving God out of a desire and love for God.
He'll remind you that you're a hypocrite at best, a non-christian at worst. Satan loves to point this out. He loves to defile our conscience so that we will not serve. And God gives his Spirit to cleanse our conscience so that we will serve, which means if you're not standing in grace, if you're not operating under the gospel, you will not be able to serve God rightly.
You will not have the mind of Christ. In Pilgrim's Progress, when Christian faces Apollyon, and Apollyon is accusing him, showing him his hypocrisy, showing him how inconsistent his life and journey had been, and what does Christian say in response to that?
It's one of the reasons he's able to to gain the upper hand. All this is true. Much more you've left out. But the prince whom I serve, you're accusing me of inconsistency, hypocrisy, all that's true, much more is true, but the prince that I'm serving, however inconsistently, however much at times out of the flesh, out of my own will, out of my own desire, however much that is true, the prince that I serve is merciful and ready to forgive.
Besides, these sins possessed me in your country, and I groaned under them there, and I'm sorry for them, but I've obtained pardon from my prince. He's essentially opening up Hebrews 9 14, the conscience being cleansed from these dead works so that he can serve, so that he can press on in service to this prince.
That's the way we deal with accusations. David Dixon once wrote, after he was extremely sick in 1662, he was on his deathbed, so he thought, and he wrote to a friend and wisely said, I've taken all my good deeds, and then I've taken all of my bad deeds, and I've cast them together in a heap before the Lord, and I've run away from them to Jesus for refuge.
He wasn't trying to cling to the good and hope it outweighed the bad. He thought he was dying, and he said, I've reflected a lot on the good things in my life, and I've reflected even more on the bad things, and I've put them all in a big pile in front of the Lord, and I've run away to cling to the cross.
Wise man, cleansed conscience from dead works to serve the living God. So we can only serve sacrificially from strength and from cleansing. Let me close here. Are you discouraged by the way things have taken shape in your life?
Are you frustrated by a circumstance you find yourself in right now? We always, at any point in our lives, have something that we wish could work out differently. I'm sure that every mind here has something weighing upon it that, if only this wasn't the case, right?
And that thing usually changes season by season and year by year. If only this was different, everything would be great. And then that's different, and now something else needs to be different in order for everything to be great.
And you pinball your way through life waiting for everything else to change. Well, let me encourage you with this. Recognize that you are a servant of the Lord, and your master has put you in the situation by his providence, by his wisdom, in which he sees fit.
And you are to serve him there, according to his will. You are to serve him there. It may not be what you like, but it's what he has willed. It may not be how you want it to be, but it is from his hand.
So look carefully at Joseph's life. Look carefully at the life of Daniel. Serve him with integrity. Serve him quorum deo. Serve him when everything around you is crumbling. Serve him alone with an eye to his glory, and know that when you have done all, as Jesus says, just confess, I'm an unprofitable servant.
I served you from the heights of Egypt, to the heights of Potiphar's house, to the depths of the dungeon, and at best, despite all of my integrity, my walking in righteousness, at best, I'm an unprofitable servant, Lord.
Thank you for your mercy. Thank you for cleansing my conscience. Thank you that the day awaits when you will say, well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master. If you don't view yourself as a servant now, and you don't view Jesus as your master now, why would that day be a joyful day to you?
It would be a day of shame. It might even be a day of terror, but if you're a Christian, and you've received grace not in vain, and you have the mind of Christ, and for all of these reasons you recognize you are a servant, and he is your master, and he has put you where he sees fit for you to serve, then you can look forward to that day, even beyond all the things that are discouraging, tiring, disappointing, hurtful, you can look beyond all of that and await to hear from his own voice, well done, servant.
Enter into my joy. Amen? Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Please help us in these ways, Lord. Help us to understand how this salvation was not for us to go in our own way, but to be your servants, Lord.
Help us to realize that in many ways this is the end of life, that you would be served, Lord, as it's said in Revelation 22, Lord, in that paradise renewed, that there your servants will serve you. Help us to recognize that the angels in glory have found the chief joy of their existence, their very reason for being, to serve you, Lord.
That has defined them. Could it be, Lord, that that is why the angels that fell were cast away, Lord, that they didn't reverence and hold to the fact that they were serving you, they were jealous of your care for us in the creation of us, Lord, and those that should have sung at the bursting forth of the sons of God in fact fell in rebellion.
And Lord, as you say in Hebrews, you did not give aid to those angels, but you gave aid to the children of Abraham. But how then shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, Lord? We have been saved to serve you.
Thank you that you give us your Spirit. Thank you, Lord, that we can serve you in an acceptable way because the Lord that we served shed his own blood to save us from our sins. Thank you that that blood cleanses our conscience from dead works, from guilt, from those things that trip us up and cause us to stumble.
Thank you, Lord, that imperfect, inconsistent, even at times fleshly or hypocritical service can be rendered clean and acceptable through his blood. Our great high priest who ever stands to make intercession for us.
May we serve him, honor him, Lord, and may that translate into real sacrifice for your glory and for our gain. These things we ask in your Son's name. Amen.