On This Day: A Servant Who Dies to Live For God

“Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes.” (Matthew 24:45-46)

   Why is this so liberating for me? Because it puts to rest all my expectations for myself, and all the worries about what anyone else in the world wants from me.

   The thought that I could be pleasing to our Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, simply by being faithful and wise in serving his servants is having a remarkable effect. The Scriptures I shared give the sense of how God is affirming this through his word, so I will just add a bit more that I couldn’t fit into the box!

   Part of the context for me is considering the cost of losing people through my efforts to live as a servant of Jesus Christ my Lord. I won’t elaborate. But it is important for folks to know that we serve Christ knowing he is Lord, and knowing that we will be hated by people just as he was.

   So here is a Scripture that has ministered to me so much this past couple of years and driven home the way that the Triune God is everything to me. You can read of the horrendous loss that a man named Job experienced in the book of the Bible by his name. What has ministered to me, and what connects with being a servant of God even today, is how he responded to his losses:

Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. (Job 1:20-22)

   This is remarkable and humbling to me. Job did not know what I know. He had never heard of the Son of God coming into the world to lay down his life for sinful men like me. He had not heard of the way God would demonstrate “his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He did not know that Jesus Christ would rise from the dead, be glorified at the right hand of his Father, and send the Holy Spirit to fill believers so they could serve God in the glories of new life.

   And yet he stands as my example of a man who lived as a servant of God no matter what horribly painful things happened to him. He worshiped God. He grieved his losses. He confessed God’s right to give and take away. And he set an example of simply knowing that God is never wrong no matter how we are wronged.

   I will end with this clarifying encouragement. “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:6). What we died to was killing us. What we live for is to serve the living God in the “new way of the Spirit”.

   So let us see where the Spirit has put us, how he has gifted us, how he is working all our life experiences for good, and give glory to God as our Creator, our Master, our Lord, and our God, who makes serving him the greatest “returning us to joy” experience of all, with the bonus of getting to join him in returning others to joy in Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

© 2024 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)