Be Serving

It is so good to be back with you all this week. As you know, Annette and I were gone for about 10 days on a trip to an island in the Indian Ocean.

We had a wonderful time with two sets of friends, although the travel part of the trip was pretty brutal. Our return trip took a total of 32 hours from the time we boarded the seaplane at our resort until we pulled into our driveway.

Some of you have heard me talk before about one of the couples that was with us for this vacation. They are a rare breed of atheists who love to sit and talk about theology with me.

And so, I look forward to every opportunity I get to sit with them and talk about Jesus. And one of those opportunities came on the last night we were at the resort.

Annette had gone to bed, but I sat up with them until the wee hours of the morning. They wanted to talk about politics, since the election was approaching.

And he said something that made my ears perk up. He said, “I’ve lost faith in the system.”

I told him that I understood what he meant and that I had come to a similar place in my own life some years ago.

And I said that at about the same time, I had come to realize something important about the Christian walk: that we who follow Jesus in faith were never meant to put our faith in anything but Him.

He is the only real answer to the problems of this world. And it will be Jesus — not any political party — who finally redeems all the brokenness we see around us.

His response was unsurprising, because we’ve had so many of these discussions throughout the years.

He said that the problem with most Christians is that they “confess Jesus as their Lord and Savior” and then just sort of sit back and watch the world burn, comfortable in the knowledge that they’ve been saved.

It’s amazing to me how the Lord arranges these kinds of encounters. I knew at the time what I would be preaching about today, and my mind had already been working through my approach to this sermon. And so, I already had some thoughts in mind that I shared with him.

Today, I want to share them with you.

You’ll recall that we’ve been looking at the Apostle Paul’s 13 Imperatives for the Church from Romans, chapter 12. Let’s read the passage together this morning, starting in verse 9.

Romans 12:9–13 NASB95

9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; 11 not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; 12 rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, 13 contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality.

You might remember that I’ve said the first two of these commands — “let love be without hypocrisy” and “abhor what is evil” — provide the framework for understanding the other 11.

In other words, all of the last 11 commands in these verses flow out of the first two.

Indeed, the command to love one another genuinely and with a choosing love that isn’t driven by either emotion or the desire for that love to be reciprocated — this command is a sort of umbrella over all the other 12.

In recent weeks, we’ve talked about hating evil, especially that which still resides within us as Christians. We’ve talked about clinging to what is good and about giving preference to one another in honor.

While we were gone, Pastor Primm talked about the diligent faith of Christians walking in the Spirit, and he talked about how Christians should be fervent — on fire for the work we have been called to do.

Today, we’re going to talk about what it means to serve the Lord. But first, we’ll have to come to an understanding about the meaning of a word we often take for granted: Lord.

Now, in the Greek, the word that’s translated in this passage as “Lord” is “kurios.”

We tend to think of “Lord” as one of the names for Jesus. But “kurios” isn’t a name; it’s simply a noun that means “lord or master.” A kurios is one who is in charge by virtue of possession. In other words, an owner of something.

So, how is it that we have come to associate this term so closely with Jesus that we often use it as a form of addressing Him, as we sometimes do when we pray?

To understand how we got here, let’s go back and look at something Jesus had to say about sin back in John’s Gospel.

John 8:34 NASB95

34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.

Who commits sin? Everybody, of course. Paul said so previously in the Book of Romans, where he wrote: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

In big ways and small ways, every one of us has fallen short of displaying the character of the God who created us in His image.

We were made to be like him — righteous and just and merciful and gracious. But every one of us fails in this regard.

Sometimes the failures are great and terrible, and so the sin against God is also great and terrible. And sometimes the failures are minor, though the sin against His perfect righteousness and holiness is no less great and terrible, even with those “little” sins.

And what Jesus says in John’s Gospel is that we who commit sin are slaves to it. We are “owned” by our sin. We sin because we are sinners.

The Apostle Peter put it this way in 2 Peter 2:19: “By what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved.”

In other words, whatever controls us is our master.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 6:16:

Romans 6:16 NASB95

16 Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?

Earlier in this letter to the Romans, Paul said that God gives sinners over to their sin. And the idea behind that doctrine is that God allows sinners to experience the consequences of their sin AND He allows them to fall deeper into sin as they set their minds against Him.

The parable of the prodigal son provides a great example of this. You’ll remember that the younger son in this parable demanded that He be given his inheritance while his father still lived so that he might go off and live the life he wanted to live.

And so, the young son, flush with cash, went off and spent his money on wine, women, and song.

He sinned against his father by demanding the money he had no right to demand, and then he fell further into sin by pursuing a life of fleshly desires.

And when the money ran out, he became a literal slave as he was forced to find work feeding pigs. And finally, he became so poor that he had to eat the pigs’ food in order to survive.

Here’s what Warren Wiersbe wrote about this young man: “His rebellion only led him deeper into slavery. He was the slave of wrong desires, then the slave of wrong deeds; and finally he became a literal slave when he took care of the pigs. He wanted to find himself, but he lost himself! What he thought was freedom turned out to be the worst kind of slavery. It was only when he returned home and yielded to his father that he found true freedom.” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 533.]

Jesus came to earth to live as a man so that He could provide a way for us to experience this true freedom.

This was what He announced when He read from the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth at the beginning of His ministry. Luke records what Jesus read that day in the fourth chapter of his Gospel:

Luke 4:18 NASB95

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed,

We who were slaves to sin can be released from enslavement by turning to Jesus in faith that He alone provides a way out of sin.

We can find true freedom by placing our faith in Him and in His sacrifice at the cross in our place and on our behalf.

As Jesus said in John, chapter 8, “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

But we have to understand something about slavery in the Ancient Near East to truly get what it took for Jesus to free us from slavery to sin.

In that time and place, slavery was common, but it wasn’t the chattel slavery that we know from our own country’s dark history.

During Jesus’ time, slavery in the Roman Empire was one answer to debt. Someone who owed a great debt that he could not repay could become the slave of the person to whom the debt was owed.

And only when that debt was paid could the slave be redeemed and set free.

With that as the context, when we hear Paul say, “The wages of sin is death,” what we can understand is that sin creates a debt to God that is only paid by death.

Throughout the Old Testament, what we see is that lambs and goats and oxen are sacrificed to cover the sins of the people of Israel. But the sacrifices needed to be repeated for every sin.

But what the sinless Jesus — the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world — did at the cross was to represent us. To take upon Himself the sins of all mankind from all time. To bear the punishment that each of us deserves for our sins by His physical death and His separation from the Father with whom He had experienced perfect and eternal fellowship.

And in raising Jesus from the dead on the third day, God demonstrated that His Son’s sacrifice was satisfactory — that He would consider the sin debt of all who put their faith in Jesus to have been paid in full.

In his death and resurrection, Jesus redeemed us from slavery to sin. He paid the debt that we owe and could never repay ourselves. He bought our freedom with His very blood.

And so, if He bought our freedom, what does that suggest about the relationship between Jesus and those who have followed Him in faith?

It suggests that He now owns us. We belong to Him.

We who follow Jesus in faith have been redeemed — in other words, bought at the price of His blood — from enslavement to sin.

Because we have been bought by Him, we now belong to Jesus. He is our new master, our new Lord. He owns us. And we are now to serve Him as our Lord and master.

This is the thing I told my atheist friend that night during our vacation. And this is what he seemed to understand about the problem with much of Christianity.

There are too many people who have professed Jesus as Savior without ever having professed Him as LORD. There are too many people who call themselves Christians because they have understood and agreed to the message of the gospel without ever allowing it to change them.

There are too many who have made a profession of faith that amounts to nothing more than a transaction. They are willing to admit that the Son of God gave His life to save them from the penalty for their sins, and they are pleased to accept His promise of eternal life in return.

But for too many Christians, this is where everything ends. Their faith never produces a real change in them. Their faith never results in them submitting themselves to the Master who purchased their freedom.

They are perfectly happy to accept Jesus as Savior, but they’re not willing to accept Him as Lord.

And people like my atheist friend aren’t wrong to scoff at that kind of Christianity. That’s never what following Jesus was supposed to look like.

That’s not what we see when people believed in the Gospels. That’s not what we see when people believed in the Book of Acts. That’s not the kind of faith that Paul writes about, or Peter, or James, or John, in the letters of the New Testament.

What they write about is a faith that doesn’t just admit the historical facts about Jesus or even agree with the message of the gospel.

What they write about is a faith that manifests itself in a life completely submitted to Jesus as the one whose blood purchased our salvation.

“Faith without works is dead.” That’s what James wrote about this. And dead faith isn’t saving faith.

Jesus came so that we might have life and have it in abundance. Does that sound like the kind of thing one gets from dead faith?

So this imperative or command for the church that we’re looking at today reminds us that we have been freed from serving sin so that we might serve the Lord, our new master. And that’s what should be in the back of our minds as we call Him Lord in our prayers.

And lest we miss the point, Paul uses the Greek word “douleuo,” which is translated here as “serve.” And douleuo means “to act or conduct oneself as one in total service to another; to perform the duties of a slave.”

So the clause can be translated like this: Perform the duties of a slave for the one who is your new Master.

So, what are the duties of a slave? Well, the most basic way to answer that question is to say that a slave’s duty is to do whatever the master tells him to do.

And what did Jesus tell us to do?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. And this: Take up your cross and follow me.

That means to deny yourself, to set aside our own desires, maybe even the things we believe are our rights, and live our lives in obedience to Jesus. To live like Jesus — in humility, in perfect obedience to the Father, in self-sacrificing love, in grace, and in truth.

I suspect that if more people who call themselves Christians lived this way — completely submitted to Jesus and working every day to reflect HIS character — the world would be very different from what it looks like today. Perhaps some of those atheists would lose one of the excuses they put forward for rejecting Jesus.

Near the end of that long night of talking, my atheist friend said something that gives me hope for him: “I love REAL Christians.”

It was a kind of throwaway comment, but it gives me hope, because it gives me a specific way to pray for him — that God will bring some REAL Christians into his life so that he will see in them the Christ who IS real.

And for you all today, I want to challenge you to be those people to someone this week. To be REAL Christians whose faith is more than just a transaction by which you’ve been saved from hell. To be REAL Christians who have accepted Jesus as Savior AND Lord.

I want to challenge you today to submit yourselves completely to the Master who bought your freedom at the price of His own blood, shed on that cross at Calvary.

I want to challenge you today to examine your life and see what parts of it you’ve been holding back from Jesus.

What is it that you want to continue to control, instead of turning it over to Him? What is it that He has called you to do that you’ve rejected? What has He asked you to give that you’ve withheld?

I want to challenge you this morning to make your faith a living faith. To perform the duties of a slave for the Master who redeemed you. In this way, you will find true freedom and abundant life.

And if you’ve never taken the step of following Jesus in faith — of professing Him as Savior and Lord — let me challenge you today to take THAT step.

Your freedom from sin has already been purchased. All that remains for you is to admit that you are a sinner unable to buy your own freedom from sin.

And to step away from your old master and follow Jesus in faith that He is the Son of God, whose life, death, and resurrection are the ONLY answer to the biggest problem in your life, your sin.

He came to give you freedom. He came to give you life. But you have to accept those gifts in order to benefit from them. Will you do that today?