Romans 12:1-2; John 13:6-7, 12-17. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty on Sunday, May 24, 2020.
We have talked about connecting to Jesus and his people through whole-life worship, and also, growing spiritually to be like Jesus. These are the first two purposes Christians should be fulfilling.
Today, we are going to talk about serving. Those who believe in Jesus are called to serve him. He is the Lord, the master, and we are his servants. Let’s go to Romans 12 to explore this further.
We selflessly serve Jesus by presenting our lives as a living sacrifice
In verse 1, Paul is clearly using imagery from the temple sacrifices that would have been familiar to his Jewish audience. Even the Gentile believers would have understood this imagery since their lands were filled with temples to false gods where people brought offerings and sacrifices to them.
Paul calls this a “living sacrifice.” This is clearly an oxymoron and yet, it makes complete sense once it is explained. Jesus is the only one who literally sacrificed his life so that our sins could be removed from us. It has been said that, since he died for us, the least we can do is live for him. This is simplistic and yet true. Paul even refers to this as our “reasonable service,” which we will look at in a bit.
So, what does it mean to be a living sacrifice? It means that we are living for God’s purposes, and not our own. It means that we sacrifice the desires of our flesh, and all the ways that we lived before we met Jesus, and pick up the desires and ways of Christ. Of course, a person may lay down their life in martyrdom, but this is never seen as a means of removing sin. Thus, even the martyr, who physically dies, goes to be with the Lord and is not really dead. They are still living.
The word that is translated as “service,” at the end of verse 1, has a religious connection to the ceremonial duties Israel had in the temple. For Christians, living for Jesus is presented as parallel to the work that priests did in the temple. This connects to the New Testament concept that all believers are priests before God in the New Covenant. What we do in this life and the purposes for which we do it requires sacrifice and serving the Lord Jesus. I have added the adjective “selflessly” just in case a person doesn’t get what sacrificial living really means.
As a living sacrifice, it is important to present ourselves as a holy sacrifice. This adjective ultimately means that we are declared as belonging to God, or set apart for Him and His purposes alone. As believers in Jesus, we are to be following Jesus, not the culture of the world around us. They continue to plunge into ever diverse ways of rebellion against God, but we are to restrain ourselves and live for Jesus. Of course, this is easier said than done.
Thus, our holiness has two aspects to it. Our identity as being holy is immediate upon our belief in Jesus and it is inseparable. It is he who declares us to be one of his holy ones. We live for him and not the world or ourselves. In this sense, a person never becomes more holy. You can’t be declared as holy to any higher degree. It simply is what you are.
However, the other aspect of holiness has to do with our practical holiness. No one perfectly lives their life (both internally and externally) for Jesus and his purposes. We call this discipleship and “sanctification,” (the process by which one better lives their lives for Christ alone). In this sense, we can become more holy. Yet, this should never be confused with salvation. Our salvation gives us the identity of being holy and cannot be separated by the messy process of discipleship. In fact, discipleship is a battle that we wage against our own flesh, and should be done in the power and with the help of the Holy Spirit.
May God help us to be secure in the knowledge that we are the saints (holy ones) of God, but may He also help us to be courageous in our battle against our sin and the pull of this world upon our hearts and minds. Yes, we must keep our faith in Jesus for salvation, but we must also learn to trust in his commands and his example of how to live this life in order to please the Father.
Another concept that is added is that of being an acceptable sacrifice. We should seek to live our lives as an acceptable sacrifice to Him. This again relies upon the Old Testament sacrifice imagery. A sacrificial animal had to fit all the requirements that God had placed upon it. They were to be without blemish and in the way He commanded. Without Jesus, none of us can be an acceptable sacrifice. It can be easy to look at our discipleship performance and think that maybe we are not acceptable. However, our acceptability comes directly from trusting Jesus for our salvation. We are acceptable to God because we approach Him with a relationship of faith in His Son.
This sets up a tension between knowing that we are acceptable because of our faith in Jesus, and the fact that true faith in Jesus will seek to be like him by cooperating with the discipleship process. We should never deceive ourselves that we can be acceptable without both, and yet the foundation of our acceptance is Jesus, and not our ability to perform.
In verse 2, Paul moves away from the sacrifice imagery and speaks to our lives. The life of a Christian is not to be conformity, but rather a transformational relationship. Paul is talking about conforming to this world, but part of that world is the religious pretenders who only conform to an outward veneer of righteousness, and are inwardly one with the world system. Church cannot become a machine that forces everyone to look, speak, and act like the pastor or the elders. Jesus is our template, but also the inner source of our transformation. The world teaches people to conform to the system in order to get ahead. Many who are nonconformists may make a different way for themselves, but even this is part of the world system. They have conformed to the world in a nonconformist way. When we come to Christ, the Father will not accept an outward conformance to Jesus. If the Church merely duplicates the conforming method of the world and simply uses it for its own purposes then it is not what Christ desires. We would be relying upon the flesh rather than the Spirit of God. People do not necessarily need to look a certain way. There is no power in that. What we really need is the Holy Spirit within us fueling and directing a change that is more than surface. It is a complete transformation that is related to the word that we use today, “metamorphosis.”
Don’t settle for a life that isn’t changing to become more like Jesus, but neither settle for a life that only looks enough like Jesus on the surface to get you by. Paul states that this transformation takes place as our minds are renewed. The world has taught us all manner of things that are completely hostile towards the things of God. We don’t often know all the ways that our mindset is actually antichrist, like Judas was. God’s Word, His Holy Spirit, and the community of mature believers, surround us with the power to change our minds and thus to transform our lives. This is not merely a power of the mind, but is a mind renewed by the working of God’s Spirit.
Ultimately, Paul says that we will end up proving that God’s will is perfect. This is one of the ways that we serve Him. We serve as His proof to the world and to the devil and his angels. Satan has rebelled against God because he thinks his way is better. May we live in such a way- you know, like Jesus- so as to prove the Father’s way right. In fact, our transformation doesn’t stop in this life. On the day of Resurrection, our transformation will be completed and we will stand beside our Lord Jesus as completed, adult Sons of God. We will be a myriad of proofs against the will of Satan and those who follow him.
Now, let’s look at one more passage to talk about another side of our service to Jesus.
We selflessly serve Jesus by serving one another
In John 13, Jesus is interacting with his disciples in the last hours before he is arrested and crucified. There is a duality throughout the first three purposes in which Jesus and his people are inseparable. I can’t only connect to Jesus. I also need to connect to his people. I can’t only grow spiritually as an individual. I also need to grow as a part of a group of people that are becoming more like Jesus corporately. So, it is here. We must serve Jesus, but part of that service is to serve one another with a selfless attitude.
Jesus employs the washing of feet as a powerful picture to prove to us that he means business in this area of service. He took up a basin of water and a towel, and washed each one of their feet. Think of it. They had gone through dinner lying next to each other’s dirty feet. Not one of them was willing to take the lowest place and wash each other’s feet. In fact, they hadn’t even taken the time to wash their own feet. This is important because Jesus did not rebuke them and tell them to wash their own feet. Instead, he gets up and focuses their attention on serving one another.
Peter is surprised at what Jesus is doing. Of all of the people there, he was the last one that should do such a menial task. Peter protests, and, in so doing, becomes a picture of how our flesh protests learning to selfless serve others. What Jesus was doing was so across the grain of Peter’s own mentality (if we are honest, ours too) that he doesn’t want to accept it. Humility is not something that our flesh immediately embraces. Humility simply means that there is nothing that is “beneath me,” when it comes to serving Jesus and serving each other. When love sees that something lowly must be done, it rises up and goes to work without pride or arrogance. Our flesh doesn’t like this. We can only do it if a true transformation is happening in our hearts, minds, and lives. You could say that it is a test to see if we will follow over the top of the protests of our flesh.
The noble motivation for serving one another is to have our hearts so transformed by the love of God that we now serve each other out of that same love. However, love is not just a feeling. It is a decision for a beneficial course of action that is mixed with the understanding that we are obligated by Jesus to serve each other. Once Jesus took the lowest place, none of his disciples could ever again pretend that service of others was beneath them. To refuse to serve each other is to demonstrate that we think we are above Christ. In question form, it is this way. If taking the lowest place to serve us was not beneath Jesus then how could it be beneath me? It isn’t. We either cling to our pride, and then perish, or we surrender it and follow Jesus. Just like the cross is a hideous image to our flesh, so the basin and the towel are another image that causes our flesh to shrink back.
Jesus drives the point home in verse 16. The servant is not greater than the master. None of us are greater than him, and he took the lowest place. We can’t out do Jesus, but we can surrender and seek to become like him.
Jesus also calls this an example. His intention is not to set up a ritual of foot-washing services, although they can serve the purpose of shocking us out of lethargy. This was just one small area that was relevant to those 12 men in that moment. Elsewhere in the New Testament, we see Tabitha making clothes for the poor, and others selling some of their possessions in order that widows could receive the care that they needed. The key is not conforming to a particular act, but rather being transformed into a servant that sees the needs of people and serve them.
In the moment, Jesus washed their feet because his love for them compelled him to do it. He knew that they would need this lesson in the trying times ahead. May God help us to see each other enough to know how to use the gifts that He has given us in order to serve one another with humility.
Jesus ends the portion by telling us that we will be blessed by God if we do this. This blessing is both as an individual and as a group. Our families will be blessed when we serve one another, and our church will be blessed when we serve one another.
The blessing of God should not be seen as some kind of lucky rabbit’s foot that makes everything go well. Instead, the blessing is the pleasure of God who walks before you, behind you and at your side. Lord, we bless you today because you are the source of all blessings. Help us to learn how to serve like you did.