Brown's Daily Word 10-5-10

Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this new day in His Kingdom. The Lord has given another day to serve Him and to enjoy His blessings and grace. I often like to quote the saying, "Volunteer is the language of the club and servant is the language of the Kingdom". The word “servant” in one form or another is used over 1,000 times in the Bible. There’s a world of difference between a volunteer and a servant. A volunteer picks and chooses when and even whether to serve. A servant serves no matter what. A volunteer serves when convenient; a servant serves out of commitment. 1 Peter 2:16 challenges us to “…live as servants of God.” As we look at Scripture, you and I are called first to be servants, and second to serve. We must settle the fact that we are called to a life of servanthood that leads to loving acts of service. Serving flows from the heart of a servant.
Fred Craddock, in a message to ministers, once said: “To give my life for Christ appears glorious. To pour myself out for others…to pay the ultimate price of martyrdom – I’ll do it. I’m ready, Lord, to go out in a blaze of glory…it would be easy to go out in a flash of glory; it’s harder to live the Christian life little by little over the long haul.” He then told a story about a wealthy man who handed his pastor a check for fifty thousand dollars. The pastor looked at it and then handed it back to the man and said, “Go cash it in for quarters or dollars and spend fifty cents or a dollar at a time doing the Lord’s work.” The man was flustered and said, “But that will take the rest of my life!” “Precisely,” replied the pastor. “That’s the point.”
A servant’s service never ends ( Luke 17:7b-8). After working all day, the servant came back to the Master’s house. He was probably tired and hungry but it still had no time to relax. The principle is that a servant’s service may change locale and the specific job description may be in flux but service never ends. Actually, the job description for a servant is very simple and straightforward: “Do everything your Master commands.” Look at what Jesus said in the second half of verse 7 and verse 8: “Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’”?
The servant moves from outdoors to indoors, from day to evening, and from hard labor to home life. He goes from the fields to fixing food. A servant serves whenever, wherever, for whomever, and doing whatever it takes. We could say it this way, “It’s not break time yet.” We talk a lot about opportunities for service within the church, but we’re actually to be serving all the time. Matthew Henry has said that we must make “the end of one service the beginning of another…when we have been working for God, we must still wait on God…continually.”
I heard about a little girl who finally learned to tie her shoes. Instead of being excited, she was overcome with tears. Her dad bent down and asked her why she was crying. “I have to tie my shoes,” she said. Her dad responded, “You just learned how. It’s not that hard.” The little girl started wailing and said, “I know, but now I’m going to have to do it for the rest of my life.”
I suspect that some of us feel as if we have already put in our time. We have done the hard labor and now we feel as if it's time to sit and relax a bit. While we live, we are still servants. The location and intensity of our serving may change as the seasons of our lives change, but no Christ-follower has the option of sitting down to have his or her needs met, when there are still things to do.
One of the best biblical images of a single-minded resolve to deflect devotion from self to the Savior is found in Psalm 123:2, “As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God…”
In Christ,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_4EjXlLOIA