Experiencing God: Being God's Servant

"Experiencing God: Being God's Servant"
John 13:1-17

In this chapter of Experiencing God, Blackaby gives an illustration from the life of the evangelist, Dwight L. Moody.  The illustration has to do with Moody first being confronted with the question, "Imagine what God can do through the life of one dedicated man."  Moody took that question seriously, and being only a shoe salesman at that time, dedicated his life to Christ and began serving him.

Moody had some great qualities as a Christian human being.  One of those was being a servant.  Not many great leaders get how important this is, nor live a life of servanthood.  One of my favorite Dwight Moody stories had to do with shoes.

A large group of European pastors came to one of D. L. Moody’s Northfield Bible Conferences in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Following the European custom of the time, each guest put his shoes outside his room to be cleaned and polished by the hall servants overnight. But of course this was America and there were no hall servants.  No one was there to shine those shoes.

 Walking the dormitory halls that night, Moody saw the shoes and determined not to embarrass those overseas Christian leaders who attended his conference. He mentioned what needed to be done to some ministerial students who were there.  But Moody was met only with silence or pious excuses. Moody returned to the dorm, gathered up the shoes, and, alone in his room, the world’s most famous evangelist began to clean and polish the shoes. Only the unexpected arrival of a friend in the midst of the work revealed the secret.

 When the foreign visitors opened their doors the next morning, their shoes were shined. They never knew by whom. Moody told no one, but his friend told a few people, and during the rest of the conference, different men volunteered to shine the shoes in secret.

Perhaps the episode is a vital insight into why God used D. L. Moody as He did. He was a man with a servant’s heart and that was the basis of his true greatness.

As I said, servanthood is not a quality of character that many people, especially our leaders, get.  Our culture is much like the Greek and Roman cultures of Jesus’ day.  Greek culture valued freedom above most everything else.  To have personal dignity meant that you were free.  Those who were most esteemed were those who had no one above them making demands, or exercising power over them.

Thus, in Greek and Roman culture, there was a violent aversion to bondage, to being a slave or a servant.  This even was a part of the Greek pagan religions—there was no kneeling in any of the rites of Greek worship, because kneeling before someone, even a god, meant that you were a servant or a slave.  A true Greek worshipper would have nothing of that.

Taylor University is a Christian college in Indiana. Years ago, Taylor admitted one of the first African students, a young man who went by the name of Sam, as a foreign exchange student. This was before it was commonplace for international students to come to the U.S. to study. He was a bright young man with great promise.

When he arrived on campus, the President of the University took him on a tour, showing him the classrooms and the dorms. When the tour was over, the President asked Sam where he would like to live. The young man replied, "If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me." The President was overwhelmed. Over the years he had welcomed thousands of Christian men and women to the campus, and none had ever made such a request:  “If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me.” That's the kind of servanthood meekness Jesus talked about.

Imagine other servanthood kinds of statements that would be similar, but that you probably wouldn’t hear very often in our power oriented culture:
If there is a job that no one wants to do, I'll do that job.
If there's a kid that no one wants to eat lunch with, I'll eat with that kid.
If there's a hardship that has to be endured, I'll share that hardship.
If there's a sacrifice that needs to be made, I'll make that sacrifice.

Paul opened up all his letters by identifying who he was.  In his letters he used one word most often:  doulos.  Most translations use the English word, servant.  But doulos literally means slave.  Paul described himself as a slave of Christ.  When Paul described Christians, he uses the same term.  We are the douloi of Christ—the slaves of Christ.

What’s interesting in Paul’s theology is that he wrote about the conversion from being one form of slave to another.  That is, we were once slaves of sin.  But we need to be converted from that to being the slave to Christ.  Paul wrote about how we are set free from sin by Christ.  But that freedom isn’t some kind of autonomy in which we get to be and do whatever we want.  Instead that freedom is so that we can make the choice to be in relationship with Christ.  We move from doing what we want to do—which is a kind of awful slavery—to doing what Christ wants us to do within our loving relationship with Christ. It’s the movement from being self-serving to Christ-serving, which includes serving others.

Here’s an example of that.  Maybe you’ll remember the movie, “Patch Adams.”  It’s based on the true story of a man who wanted to be a doctor in an unorthodox way—not the way medical school was training him.

At one point, before he had become a licensed medical doctor, Patch bought a house at which he and others were giving basic care to anyone who walked in the door.  The medical school staff caught wind of it and brought charges against Patch.  There was a hearing, open to the public, and this movie clip is part of that scene at which Patch makes his defense.

Patch Adams movie clip:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXWDSeVeaAE


This is a great movie, if you haven’t seen it.  As you can see from this small clip, one of the main themes is, in the medical profession, in any profession, or just humanity in general, is it all about authoritarian domination, or is it about servanthood?  In the opening part of his defense, Patch says, “If you treat disease, you win some and you lose some.  But if you treat people, you win every time.”

Servanthood is about touching other’s lives.  Primarily, first and foremost, it is about being in touch, through a loving relationship with God.  Once that relationship is started, then you see the value of serving others, and the servanthood life.  The children who came in at the end of this clip and put on the clown noses, were all children from the cancer ward at the hospital where Patch volunteered and became a resident.  It’s caring about the “least of these” that makes the servanthood so winsome and amazing.  The rewards are indefinable.

In an earlier century, there lay a large boulder in the middle of the roadway. Traveler after traveler walked past the boulder, veering off the side of the road to get around it. All the while, they were shaking their head and muttering, "Can you believe that? Someone should get that big thing out of the way. What an inconvenience!"

 Finally, a man came along and, seeing the boulder, took a branch from a tree and pried the boulder enough to get it rolling and rolled it off to the side of the road. Lying underneath the rock, he found a small bag with a note. The man picked up the note and read it. It read as follows:

 "Thank you for being a true servant of the kingdom. Many have passed this way and complained because of the state of the problem and spoken of what ought to be done. But you have taken the responsibility upon yourself to serve the kingdom instead. You are the type of citizen we need more of in this kingdom. Please accept this bag of gold that traveler after traveler have walked by simply because they didn’t care enough about the kingdom to serve."

 I wonder what "bags of gold" we’re missing each day, simply because we don’t bother to get involved in serving our heavenly kingdom. Are we the type of heavenly citizens our Father needs more of?

That’s the point Jesus is trying to get across to the disciples when he washes their feet.  The kinds of disciples Jesus needs aren’t the ones who are demanding, who make others wash their feet, who want to get their way in the world.  Instead the loving Father God needs those who aren’t afraid to kneel, and serve others in some real, foot washing way.  And John makes it clear that Jesus even washes Judas’ feet—the one who would betray him.  As servants of the loving God, we wash any and all feet that come our way.

Jesus said that he came not to be served but to serve.  Washing the disciples feet encapsulates the mission of all who will follow after him.  The method (kneeling, washing, serving) is the message (we are here to serve not to be served; lower yourself rather than promote yourself; the best way to love and show love is to serve.)


Ruth Bell Graham, in one of her books, told of a scene that moved her.  The date was February 11, 1973.  Captain Jeremiah Denton stood at the door of a plane, saluted smartly, then made his way carefully and painfully down the steep steps to the tarmac.  Stopping in front of the microphone, he said, “We are honored to have served our country under difficult circumstances…”  Ruth Graham remembered watching, with the rest of America, as this man just released from years of being a POW in North Vietnam, as he expressed his gratitude.  Gratitude about serving his country!

Ruth Graham then wrote, “Is this how the believer will feel when he, or she, stands one day before God?  Liberated from this earth and its struggles, will we say, ‘We are honored to have served…under difficult circumstances’”?