Romans 12.7a-The Function Of The Spiritual Gift Of Service
Wenstrom Bible Ministries
Pastor-Teacher Bill Wenstrom
Thursday October 15, 2009
Romans: Romans 12:7a-The Function Of The Spiritual Gift Of Service
Lesson # 408
Please turn in your Bibles to Romans 12:1.
This evening we will study Romans 12:7 in which Paul presents two more spiritual gifts, namely, the gifts of service and teaching in addition to prophecy that he mentioned in Romans 12:6b.
Tonight we will note in detail the gift of service and tomorrow the gift of teacher.
Romans 12:1, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.”
Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:3, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.”
Romans 12:4-5, “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”
Romans 12:6-8, “Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith. If service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.”
Let’s now concentrate on verse 7.
Romans 12:7, “If service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching.”
“Service” is the accusative feminine singular form of the noun diakonia (diakoniva) (dee-ak-on-ee-ah), which was used for the activity of “service,” which is rendered by the diakonos, “servant.”
Morris has an excellent comment regarding this word, he writes, “Originally it meant the service of a table waiter and later it came to mean lowly service in general. It is not without importance that this term came to be the typical term for Christian ministry. Christian ministers (even apostles) are not lords of the flock, but servants.” Leon Morris, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, page 409; William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
In Romans 12:7, the noun diakonia refers to the function of the permanent spiritual gift of service and is synonymous with “helps” in 1 Corinthians 12:28 and “whoever serves” in 1 Peter 4:11.
The gift of service or helps expresses itself in a variety of ways that aid the church and its members.
Often individuals who hold the office of deacon have this gift.
This word does not refer to a deacon since being a deacon is not a spiritual gift since it was not a gift from the Holy Spirit.
Rather, the office of deacon was established by the apostles to meet a need in the first century apostolic church in Jerusalem and they were elected by the Jerusalem congregation according to Acts 6:1-6.
Thus, diakonia in Romans 12:7 cannot possibly refer to being a deacon as a spiritual gift since spiritual gifts are assigned by the Holy Spirit as authorized by the Lord Jesus Christ.
The gift of service or helps is manifested in a multitude of ways in the sense that it can be manifested through cleaning the church building or the homes of those who are in need or are incapacitated.
It is manifested by those who maintain the upkeep of the church building by performing carpentry work, electrical work or mowing the lawn of the church building or those who are in need and are incapacitated.
Construction work can manifest this gift by the construction of a church building.
This gift can manifest itself in cooking by providing meals for the body of Christ at funerals, weddings or pot-lucks or food for families who have lost loved ones.
This gift can manifest itself in the publications department of a ministry whether editing the pastor’s books or producing them.
It can involve maintaining the website of your church or taking care of the computers of the pastor and the church.
This gift manifests itself through financial or accounting work by keeping the books of the church and overseeing its finances.
The gift of service or helps is manifested through helping out in the prep-school by teaching the children.
The Bible does not teach that women have the gift of teaching but only men as we will see when we study the verb didasko.
However, women do manifest the gift of helps or service by serving in the prep-school and teaching children or immature Christian women with regards to how to love their husbands and children the way the Bible prescribes (See Titus 2:3).
Therefore, we can see that this gift is absolutely essential for the body of Christ since it function encompasses a wide range of activities unlike the gift of pastor-teacher, which functions through studying and teaching or the evangelist, communicating the gospel to the unsaved.
Romans 12:7, “If service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching.”
“In his serving” is composed of the preposition en (e)n), “in” and the articular dative feminine singular form of the noun diakonia (diakoniva) (dee-ak-on-ee-ah), “his serving.”
The preposition en functions as a marker of means and the noun diakonia as a dative instrumental of means indicating that the function of the spiritual gift of service, i.e. helps is experienced by the body of Christ, those who are its beneficiaries and those who have the gift “by means of” serving.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the perfect example of servanthood that we are to imitate when serving God and each other.
All precedence for Christian service during the church age is derived from the dispensation of the hypostatic union when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ voluntarily denied Himself of the independent function of His deity in order to serve both God and man (Jn. 13:1-7).
The Lord Jesus Christ served both God and mankind with His voluntary substitutionary spiritual and physical deaths on the cross.
The Lord Jesus Christ serves both God and man through His 3-fold offices: (1) Prophet: The Lord Jesus Christ served both God and man by revealing God and His will to man (Deut. 18:18; Isa. 42:11; Mt. 24:3-35; Acts 3:22-23). (2) Priest: The Lord Jesus Christ served both God and man by offering Himself as a sacrifice for sin and does so now by praying and interceding for believers at the right hand of the Father (Heb. 3:1-2; 4:15; 7:26; 9:13-14). (3) King: The Lord Jesus Christ serves both God and man by ruling justly over all creation (Mt 22:43-45; Jn 18:36-37; 1 Tim. 6:15-16; Rev. 19:11-16).
The believer is to imitate the servanthood of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 20:20-28; John 13:1-17; Ephesians 4:29-5:2).
Since the believer is to express self-sacrificial love towards both God and man, consequently, service has two directions: (1) Vertical: As an expression of self-sacrificial love toward God (Deut. 10:12; Joshua 22:5; Luke 4:8; Hebrews 9:11-14; 12:28-29) (2) Horizontal: As an expression of sacrificial love toward man (Gal. 5:13; Matt. 23:10-12).
The believer must never perform any work of service for men but rather he must perform his service to men as unto the Lord (Ephesians 6:5-7; Colossians 3:17, 22-24).
Christian service demands humility, which is viewing oneself from God’s perspective, namely sinners saved by the grace of God and is expressed by possessing a servant’s mentality.
The humble believer will imitate the Lord Jesus Christ’s servant mentality and as a result perform acts of service for both God and man.
The Lord Jesus Christ taught His disciples the importance of being obedient servants of God (Matthew 24:47-51; 25:14-30).
Every believer will have to give an account of himself to the Lord at the Bema Seat Evaluation of the church (1 Cor. 3:11-15).
It is at this time that it will be determined by the Lord if the believer was an unprofitable or profitable servant during his life after salvation.
A profitable servant of the Lord is a believer who operates in his spiritual gift or special talent that God has given him in order to serve the Lord and the body of Christ (1 Pet. 4:10-11).
1 Peter 4:10-11, “As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. Whoever speaks, is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God; whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength, which God supplies; so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”