What Is A Servant?
Acts 17:25
“At Odds With The World’s Social Order”
The Payback Behavior
How do you serve God so that He is is magnified in your life? Churches are filled with servants of the Lord, and I want to tell you not to be a servant. And I’m basing it on Acts 17:25:
I think you can dishonor God by serving God. That’s what that text actually says. Let’s let say it another way Mark 10:45
Mark 10:45
“The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve”
Stop. You don’t need the rest of the verse to get the point. He did not come to be served. So, be careful with the meaning of Jesus coming by serving Christ. He came not to be served; don’t serve him. So that needs to be heard; it needs to be wrestled with. I think this is kind of big actually..
Maybe you have seen or heard of The Lone Ranger. There’s only one episode that showed why Tonto was always getting the Lone Ranger out of certain troubles with the bad guys, and it’s because the Lone Ranger saved Tonto’s life when he was a young Indian. And in the culture of the Indians that Tonto was a part of, when somebody saves your life, you bind yourself to them by a pact to always serve them the rest of your life. So it meant that because the Lone Ranger saved Tonto, Tonto was going to spend the rest of his life serving the Lone Ranger. That’s great for the Lone Ranger but…
That’s is actually a disrespectful way to behave with God. The Tonto payback type behavior:
What you think of regarding this issue will determines whether you are going to honor God in the way you receive blessings from God and honor grace or whether you’re going to turn grace into works.
Three Reasons Payback Behavior Doesn’t Work
So I hope you can see where I’m headed: God has saved you and now your motivation is to serve him for the rest of your life and help him. Now nobody explains their service of God that way, but I think it comes close: “He gave his life for me. What have I given for him?” Call it what you want “God has done so much for me, and now out of gratitude, I will do and serve and work for him. So you look back to what he did for you, and as you turn to the future, what you see is a God who you should serve. This is wrong thinking, but it’s the way it’s lived out by a lot of people. So I want to show you three things that are wrong with it and then give you an alternative.
1. Grace empowers every act of obedience.
The payback behavior is impossible with God. It’s not just impossible because of human limitations. It’s impossible because of the way God has set up the world. If you say, “God has been so gracious to me with grace. I will now take steps of obedience to pay the debt of grace that I owe him.
Every step you take of obedience is totally dependent on more grace, and so, all you do with every step of obedience is go deeper into debt.
2 Corinthians 9:8
And God is able to make all grace overflow to you so that because you have enough of everything in every way at all times, you will overflow in every good work
How do you do a good work? Grace. You cannot pay one back with obedience because, if it’s genuine Christ like obedience, it is depending on more grace. Your debt becomes bigger and bigger and bigger to the glory of God’s grace every moment that you are obedient of your life.
So we must get out of our heads this payback mentality to God. It’s impossible.
2. Grace is not a transaction
If it were possible, grace would no longer be grace, but a business transaction. If you could successfully pay it back like a mortgage in payments of obedience, grace would be nullified.
Romans 4:4,5
Now to the one who works, his pay is not credited due to grace but due to obligation. But to the one who does not work, but believes in the one who declares the ungodly righteous, his faith is credited as righteousness.
And so, just like Acts 17:25 warns us not to serve, Romans 4:5 warns us not to work. Because, it all depends on grace. So we must find a way to serve fully dependent on grace for every step in serving we take. “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The giver of grace gets the glory, and so, we must find a way to eat and drink so that we are the getter and not a giver. God’s got to be the giver of grace at every moment of your life. We dissolve and cancel out grace if we succeed at paying it back.
3. Our life in Christ depends on grace.
If you make an attempt to live your life with payback behavior — like Tonto’s payback mentality — you will think only in terms of past grace. And most of the grace for your life will be in the future.
The cross is where all our grace was bought and delivered, and we live in it for eternity by depending on it. Romans 8:32, Romans 5:9 and Romans 5:10.
2 Corinthians 5:21
God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God.
Take your stand on the finished work of Christ that purchased you and made you a justified person?
Trust Him? And live. That’s where you serve: serving God so that the power of His grace is magnified in your life, not so that God is put in the position of receiving payments like we do with our mortgages. We serve…..
A God Who Works for You
Now what’s the behavior and action we serve with?
Psalm 50:12–15
“Even if I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all it contains belong to me. Do I eat the flesh of bulls? Do I drink the blood of goats? Present to God a thank-offering! Repay your vows to the sovereign One! Pray to me when you are in trouble! I will deliver you, and you will honor me!”
And here’s the behavior and action God gives us: “Pray to me.” Call out to me. This glorifies me? Call on me to work. Cry out to me when you are in trouble.
2 Chronicles 16:9
Certainly the Lord watches the whole earth carefully and is ready to strengthen those who are devoted to him.
Isaiah 64:4
Since ancient times no one has heard or perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who intervenes for those who wait for Him.
Isaiah 46:1–4
Bel kneels down, Nebo bends low. Their images weigh down animals and beasts. Your heavy images are burdensome to tired animals. Together they bend low and kneel down; they are unable to rescue the images; they themselves head off into captivity. “Listen to me, O family of Jacob, all you who are left from the family of Israel, you who have been carried from birth, you who have been supported from the time you left the womb. Even when you are old, I will take care of you, even when you have gray hair, I will carry you. I made you and I will support you; I will carry you and rescue you.
All the religions of the world have gods that need to be carried by humans working…. slave labor. There’s no grace — no free, sovereign grace — in any religion but Christianity. The One True God glorifies himself by working for us, not by our working for him.
The one true God says “I’m here to help you. You can come to me broken, empty, hungry, thirsty, weak, tired.” “Come to me, and work for me, and I will pay you and you can earn wages” is not the gospel. But
Matthew 11:28
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
— that’s the good news. It’s a rare thing to find a person whose faith is so profoundly rooted in Jesus Christ’s work, that whatever circumstances unfold they understand — whether it’s cancer and health issues, terrible divorce, rebellious children that are breaking your heart — that the promises of God are completely able to turn every circumstance into something good so that they can rest in him. You don’t have to work for Him. He’s going to work for you.
God Supplies
Let me give you a biblical text to put the icing on the cake.
1 Peter 4:11
Whoever speaks, let it be with God’s words. Whoever serves, do so with the strength that God supplies, so that in everything God will be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.
Let him who serves serve in the strength that God supplies. So that in everything God might get the glory through Jesus Christ.
God Is the Giver
I believe the church makes the mistake in serving God in a way that diminishes him.
Don’t Serve God
Here’s the warning:
Acts 17:24, 25
“The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands, nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He himself gives life and breath and everything to everyone”
God is not served by human hands or mouths or arms or legs or brains. God is not served, as though he needed anything. Many people serve as though God needed them, and in doing so, in the very act of trying to honor him, diminish him.
“If you do anything for God, it’s because God is enabling you to do it.”
Jesus said in
Mark 10:45
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve.”
Do you serve Jesus? You’re disobeying him if you serve Jesus. We must understand and come to terms with Acts 17:25 and Mark 10:45. The Son of Man came not to be served.
We gloss over these verses so fast on our way to service that we don't give them enough thought that we might dishonor the Lord in our service.
So we need to figure out how to come to terms with this. This is a warning on how to serve God in a way that honors God. Consider
Romans 11:33-36
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how fathomless his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has first given to God, that God needs to repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever! Amen.
If we want to glorify God, and honor grace, we must recognize that we stay a receiver always. He stays the benefactor. We stay the beneficiary. If we try to reverse those roles, and say: he’s given so much to me, now I must give so I can enrich or meet his needs, then we dishonor him. Usually, we don’t articulate it like that because as soon as we do, it sounds really bad and awful, but we live it.
Why is this thinking bad? — that is, God has given so much to me, I’m now in his debt, I’ll pay back the debt the rest of my life.
1. Because it’s impossible. Every time you undertake to do an act that is meant to pay God back for grace, you just go deeper into debt. You don’t pay back any debt because everything you have is a work of grace: What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as though it were not a gift?
So if you do anything for God, it’s because God is enabling you to do it, and so you go deeper into debt. You may as well get used to it, you’re going to be in debt for eternity, and there is no paying back, none.
2. If it were possible, it would destroy grace and turn it into a business transaction, like somebody who invites you over for dinner. You invite somebody over for dinner because you love them, you want to be with them, you don’t expect them to pay you.
And as they’re leaving, you hear them say “I guess we’ll have to have them over next week” And they destroy grace. And that’s the way many people relate to God — he did this for me, I guess I’ll have to serve some time with the teenagers or have to go on the mission trip — and God’s grace is destroyed.
3. It takes our attention away from all the grace that God will offers us in the future. By trying to pay back God for past grace we focus our attention onto the past, away from the future, we so we don’t live in the power of God’s promises, and it’s the only power there is to break away from sin and overcome discouragement.
The self-sufficiency of God that makes him continually a giver who will not be served but always wants to be the servant of his people is unique among the religions of the world.
God is the carrier. God is the bearer. God is the Savior.
So, how do we serve?
I Peter 4:11
“Whoever serves, do so with the strength that God supplies, so that in everything God will be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.”
So we must find a way to serve God in such a way that he is always the giver. Serve by receiving, so that in all of our serving, God is getting the glory as the giver. Gods instruction with money helps us understand
Matthew 6:24
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
How do you serve money? You don’t serve money by working so that money gets any benefit. You don’t consecrate, or bless money. You don’t add anything to money. You serve money by calculating and investing all of your behavior to put yourself in a position to benefit from all that money can give you— that’s the way you serve money. You think and you strategize to put yourself in a position where money will maximize its benefits for you.
And God says you cannot serve me and money that way. So how then do we serve God? Exactly that way. You serve God by using all of your mind and all of your maneuvering and all of your heart to be in the place to maximize how much you love of God.
Where is God moving? There is the place of service for you. Some of you are struggling with where’s the place? Here’s a guideline.
Where are the places that when God is experienced as the giver through me, that people are impacted the greatest and God receives the glory?
Where can I showcase the most of God being the giver?
Where can I showcase the most of who God is and where He is the giver that gets the glory?
God is not served with our hands or mouths, arms, legs, brains, gifts or anything else. God is not served, as though He needed anything. Most people serve as though God needed them in our churches, and by doing this, the act of trying to honor him, depreciates Him. God is disparaged and denigrated, even depreciated and trivialized when we serve Him as though He needed anything! A servant of God understands that he is the getter not the giver.
We should serve but we serve by taking our stand on the finished work of Christ that purchased us and made us a justified person? We trust Him and live. That’s how we serve: serving God so that the power of His grace is magnified in our lives, not so that God is put in the position of receiving payments like we do with our mortgages. We serve A God Who Works for us
Luke 15:10
I tell you, there is joy in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who repents.