Who Is the Greatest - Part 2

Audio on demand from Vision Christian Media With the conclusion of his message, Who is the Greatest? Here's David. And thank you for joining us today. We are studying the life of Jesus from the last part of the Gospel of Mark, finishing up our exposition of Mark.

This is part three. And by the way, it takes a long time to put all of these studies together for some of the longer books of the Bible. Mark is one of my favorite. It's not really one of the longest Gospels. In fact, it's short in the sense that it's very fast moving. I always tell people the reason I love Mark is because the best word in Mark, the most often used word, is the word immediately.

Mark moves quickly along with the influence of Peter to give us the story of Jesus' life. And right now, we're answering some very important questions. Today we'll get back to who is the greatest in just a moment. Before we do that, I wanted to mention to you that there's an acronym for this in some circles as they talk about who is the greatest.

I never realized this before, but I just read it. They call it GOAT, G-O-A-T, greatest of all time. Who is the greatest of all time? This is a thirst for the answer to this. And you know what?

I'm going to help you with it. I'm going to tell you who the greatest is and how you can become great according to his plan as we open our Bibles together to the ninth chapter of Mark. Jesus does not tell his disciples to cease trying to be great. Instead, he redefines the meaning of greatness. He doesn't implore us to stop pursuing greatness. He demands that we pursue a specific form of greatness. He is encouraging us to desire, to pursue, to crave a certain kind of greatness that serves all. So let me just run through these Scriptures quickly.

If I were you and I'm taking notes, just write down the address and you can look them up and fill them in later. But here's just a sampling of where this is in the Bible. Matthew 20, 16, so the last will be first and the first last, many are called, few are chosen. Matthew 20, 26 and 27, whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave. Matthew 23, 11, but he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. Mark 10, 43 and 44, you shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. Luke 9, 48, whoever receives this little child in my name receives me and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.

For he who is least among you all will be great. Luke 13, 30, and indeed there are last who will be first and there are first who will be last. Luke 22, 26, but not so among you.

On the contrary, he who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger and he who governs as he who serves. That's a sampling. That's not all. That's a sampling of the many times when Jesus taught this core basic principle of the Christian life.

And yet isn't it interesting we hear almost nothing about it in our culture today. Most people are quite surprised when they hear this, that the principles of leadership for believers is exactly the opposite of that for those who live in the culture. The basic concept of serving is found over 300 times in the New Testament, 130 times in the Gospels, and 170 times in the Epistles. So the Lord did not save us to be sensations. He saved us to be servants. And he's giving us this principle so we will know how to function not only in the church but in our culture so that we can know the joy of Christ's likeness. Here's the difference between what Jesus is saying here and where most people are in their understanding of leadership today.

Let's just start with the triangle. If you start out in the business world today, men, women, graduate from college, maybe grad school, and you get a degree and you're ready to go, you enter into the company at the lower level. Nobody starts up here, you start down here. And at the lower level of your company are the most people. There are more people down here on this level than anyplace else, the entry level. If you stay there and you progress in your career, little by little you move up. And at every level where you move up there are fewer people. The next level fewer people. All of a sudden if you work hard and you know the boss's family, you get to the top.

Amen? You get to the top. And all of a sudden you're at the top of the triangle and then you hear people say, it's such a good thing to be able to serve under him.

That's what we say, isn't it, in the world today? I serve under in the military. I serve under. We serve under people.

That's the way the world views leadership. We're the triangle. And the one at the top, at the pinnacle, looks out at his world and he makes this observation. Look at all the people who are serving me. Jesus says, well, that's all right if you want to live that way in your culture, but that's not my way.

Jesus says, you have to turn the triangle upside down. Jesus says, he who will be the greatest among you, let him be the least. That doesn't mean the least in dignity, the least in popularity, the least in ability. It means you understand that in the biblical sense of leadership, it's not how many people are serving you, it's how many people you are serving. That is servant leadership. That's biblical leadership.

That's Jesus' kind of leadership. Jesus says, if you want to be great in the kingdom of God, don't ask the question, how many people are serving me? Ask the question, how many people has Almighty God allowed me to serve? And we began to understand the joy of serving as we began to institute this principle in our lives. Greatness is waiting on believers in the form of common and simple tasks.

The more common and humble the task, the greater the deed. So Jesus said in Luke 22, 27, I am among you as one who serves. Now please notice that Jesus is not teaching this principle in classroom. He's teaching it on a road. And where's that road taking him, you guys? It's taking him to Jerusalem. It's taking him to the cross. Jesus is walking out the lesson that he's teaching his disciples. He said, I did not come to be ministered to, but to minister and to give my life a ransom for many.

What is he doing? He's walking toward Jerusalem. He's walking toward the cross. He's saying by his attitude, I'm not going to stay here and be your king with a crown because I understand that before I can be your king with a crown, I have to be your king with a cross. And in his servant attitude, he's giving himself up.

The Bible says he gave himself up for us so that we might be saved. That's what service is. And Jesus is living it out as he's teaching it to his disciples. Every one of us who are parents, every one of us, as we teach our children and our friends about humble service, we should never do it without living it out ourselves. And we should never separate it from the teaching of our Lord.

As we teach others about humble service, we should also be modeling it in practicality and tangibly before them. I read a lot of commentaries to prepare these messages, and one of the best historic writers for New Testament literature is a man by the name of William Barclay. There's a bunch of little tiny commentaries, and you have to have good eyes to read his work. But he has a paragraph about this that I think we will all find very interesting today as we look out on a broken world that seems to be getting more broken every day.

Listen to what he wrote. Every economic problem would be solved if men lived for what they could do for others and not what they could get for themselves. Every political problem would be solved if the ambition of men was only to serve others and not to enhance their own prestige.

Can you imagine, my friends, what would happen if Washington could get a hold of that? If they would really understand that we elected them to serve us instead of to serve their own political ambition? The divisions he wrote and the disputes which tear the church apart would be for the most part never happening if the only desire of the church was to serve the church and not to care in what position as long as the service was given. Gone would be the phrase, I don't go there because I don't get my needs met.

We would be so busy meeting everybody else's needs, we wouldn't have time to calculate that ourselves. When Jesus spoke of the supreme greatness and value of the man whose ambition was to be a servant, he laid down, said Barkley, one of the greatest practical truths in the world. Dwight O. Moody once said, the measure of a great man is not how many servants he has, but how many men he serves.

There's the instruction. If you want to be great, the question you have to ask is, who am I serving? Let me tell you that that's a principle that would work even if you weren't a Christian. You don't have to be a Christian to put this principle in operation.

There's a whole genre of literature now called servant leadership that's growing up in the business world. Everybody's beginning to understand that this works. You know why it works? Because all truth is God's truth.

If it came from the Bible, even people who are trying to use it who don't know God will find that it works. We had the inauguration of all of our new deacons. As you know, deacons are servants.

That's what the word means, diakonos means to serve. I had a question to answer time with our deacons, and they were asking me questions. Don and I, as you know, had celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. One of the questions was, what is the secret to a good marriage?

Well, I always hesitate to answer that like I'm supposed to be some expert on it, but I guess if you survive for 50 years, you must be doing something right, so I don't mind that. I was thinking about this principle, and I remember telling the men something like this. The secret to a good marriage is to learn what it means to serve one another. The Bible says we're to serve one another. It doesn't say wives are to serve their husbands. It says wives are to be submissive to their husbands, but they're to serve their husbands, and husbands are to serve their wives. Can you imagine what would happen in marriages across the nation if everybody got a hold of that? People ask me, how do you keep a marriage together? They're asking me as a man, so I'm just going to give you my answer. Figure out how to serve your wife. You say, what does that mean?

Well, figure out what you think she needs and do it before she asks you. How profound is that? I remember when the day I began to understand that several years ago, and I just began to look at Donna and say, okay, I wonder what I can do to help her today, and I try to figure out what it is before she asks me to do it. It's kind of a little game I play with myself. I'll tell you how it works. Here's a practical illustration. In our kitchen, right by the kitchen cabinet, there's a little trash container.

It's a real sophisticated one. It's all silver and nice, and the trash is down in here, and you push your foot on a pedal and it opens up. Well, periodically I would hear Donna say, honey, you need to take the trash out. So I decided I'm not ever going to let her say that to me again.

I am never going to let her say that to me again. I'm always going to do it before she can ask me. So now every time I walk by that thing, I push that button and look in there and see if there's anything in there.

If it's looking like it's full, I grab it up and take it out in the garage and put a clean one in there, and I find so much joy in doing that. That's just a silly little illustration, isn't it? Isn't that how it works, you guys? It's the simple task. It's the easy things that we can do to bear somebody else's burden. Of course, a sweet woman I've been married to for all these years, she serves me in so many ways.

When I think about it sometimes, it's almost embarrassing to me. How do we serve one another? Jesus says, if you want to be great, you have to learn to serve. For greatness in the kingdom is not where you stand on the hierarchy, but it's where you stand in serving other people.

Now, that's his instruction. And finally, he gives us an illustration, and the illustration is in verse 36 and 37. Then Jesus took a little child and he set him in the midst of them, and when he had taken up in his arms, he said to them, whoever receives one of these little children in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives not me, but him who sent me. So, we believe that in this situation, Jesus was in Peter's house, and the probability is Jesus went and got one of Peter's children. By the way, that's a shock to everybody that Peter was married, but the Bible tells us he was. He wasn't celibate. He was married. He had some children. I'm just telling you that.

All right. So, Jesus gets one of Peter's children, and he brings him into the center of the circle where all the disciples are, and the Bible says when he got him in the center of the circle, Jesus picked this child up in his arms, and he said, whoever receives this little child receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me. What was going on there, men and women, was this.

In that culture, a child was considered to be the furthest down on the hierarchy of important people in their culture. Women were second from the bottom, and men were everything, and the Bible says Jesus took a child, this little child that didn't seem to have any significance to anyone, even though it was Peter's child. He took this child up in his arms, and he said, whoever receives this little one, this one who has no status, this one who doesn't have any standing, this one who would be considered expendable, whoever receives this little one receives me, and whoever receives me receives the Father who sent me. One author I read said, in that moment, the Lord taught us that we can literally shake heaven with what we do in our service on this earth. By reaching out to those who are unserved and undeserving of service according to the culture in which we live, and ministering to them, and touching their lives, something happens in heaven that's triggered by something that happens on the earth. Jesus receives us and God receives us because we receive them. When we serve, we enter into a kind of intimacy with God that is greater in many respects than prayer, and fasting, and all the other disciplines.

It puts us instantly in God's favor because that's who God is and that's who Jesus is. They serve. And so the question we have to ask ourselves as we fumble along in our Christian lives, are we connected in heaven because we're serving on earth?

What are we doing? Oh, you say, pastor, what do you mean? I come to church every week.

I love to come here. You teach. That's what I do. That's serving.

That's learning. Serving is what you do to help, what you do to minister. You say, well, what can I do?

Well, I can promise you, you can do something. If you're a Christian, Almighty God's given you a gift, so you have a special gift that makes it possible for you to serve. You say, well, I don't know what it is.

Well, find out what it is. But there's no excuse for being a Christian in the kingdom of God and not having something to do that serves others. If I understood this completely and I wasn't serving, I'd rush to the nursery and say, how can I help? Because the Bible says there's no insignificant thing in the kingdom of God. What can a baby do to help a church?

Not a thing. But when we serve these little ones, these infants who don't have anything to offer back to us, the Bible says when we receive them, we receive Jesus, and when we receive Jesus, we receive the Father. What an incredible promise. When we welcome them, when we receive them, that means we look out for their needs.

We try to help them in the areas where they have hurt. And Jesus himself gave us his own commentary on this practice. I want to read this to you from the book of Matthew.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory and all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them one for another as a shepherd divides the sheep from the goats, and he will set the sheep on his right hand but the goats on the left. And the king will say to those on his right hand, come you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry, Jesus said, and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me.

I was in prison and you came to me. And the righteous will answer him saying, Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you as a stranger and take you in or naked and clothe you?

Or when did we see you sick or in prison and come to you? And the king will answer and say to them, assuredly, I say to you, in as much as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Jesus says when we minister to others, we minister to him.

And here's something else. It is really, in my estimation, the only way you can ever minister to him. You say, well, I come to church and I worship him.

That's worship. But the only way you can serve Jesus is by serving other people. Some people say, I love Jesus and I want to serve him, but other people, you've got to be kidding me, you know? No, the only way you're going to serve Jesus is to serve other people. And in serving other people, you're going to get hurt, you're going to get wounded, you're going to get disappointed and discouraged, but so did Jesus. If you want to be Christ-like, you have to serve other people.

And I want to ask you again this pointed question. What do you do to serve Jesus? Do you host a Bible study? Do you work in the Sunday school?

Do you park cars? Whatever it is that you do. But are you serving? And there is nothing we can ever be asked to do that is beneath the dignity of a servant of Christ if he knows he's doing it for the Lord. A large group of European pastors came to one of Dr. D.L. Moody's Bible conferences in the late 1800s. And following the European custom of the time, each guest put his shoes outside his room to be cleaned by the hall servants overnight. But of course, they were in America and they didn't have hall servants in America. And so Moody was walking through the dormitory that night and he saw the shoes and he determined not to embarrass his brothers from Europe.

And he mentioned the need to some of his ministerial students who were there and they didn't seem to be all excited about helping him with the project. So Moody went back to the dorm, gathered all the shoes into his room and alone, the world's most famous evangelist began to wash and polish the shoes of his European guests. Only the unexpected arrival of a friend in the midst of this work revealed the secret. And when the foreign visitors opened their doors the next morning, their shoes were shined and they never knew by whom. Moody never told anybody but his friend told a few people.

And during the rest of the conference, different men volunteered to shine the shoes of the European delegates in secret. Perhaps the episode that I've just told you is a vital insight into why God used D.L. Moody so powerfully. He was a man with the servant's heart and that was the basis of his true greatness. Ladies and gentlemen, let's just say the first time you see Jesus walking on this earth or the first time you see him visiting this earth, he's in a poor humble cradle surrounded by shepherds and sheep.

The last time you see him before he goes back to heaven, he's broken on a cross, cruelly massacred by the Romans. All of those humiliating, humbling pictures of our Lord are simply to remind us that he came to serve. Somebody said, how do I know if I'm serving? And the answer to that question is easy, by how you respond when somebody treats you like a servant.

That's how you know. And it isn't that interesting. When the Lord wanted to reach this world, he reached us as a servant. He came as a servant to reach us and it's in order to help us understand that if we are to reach the world, we have to reach the world the same way. I want to encourage us all to find something we can do to serve the Lord. Find something that God has enabled you to do and do it with all of your heart. For I'm telling you right now, looking back over a life of serving the Lord, there is no greater joy outside of becoming a Christian than waking up every morning and knowing I get to spend my life today serving the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. What joy there is in all of that. Amen.

Amen. Well, thank you for listening today. Thank you for being a part of this study and I want to encourage you to get to church this weekend.

I want to make sure that you watch Turning Point on television if it comes into your community, as I know it will. And let's gather here on Monday, continue our study of In Search of the Savior. Monday and Tuesday we're going to talk about leadership.

I hope you'll join us then. I'm David Jeremiah. My privilege to be your teacher and host and thank you for your support and your prayers and your encouragement. God bless you.

Have a great weekend. Well, visit our website at DavidJeremiah.org. radio, ask for your copy of always Hawkins, you book, the Bible code, finding Jesus in every book in the Bible.

It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah study Bible in the English Standard version, the new international version and the new King James version filled with hopeful notes and articles by Dr. Jeremiah. Visit DavidJeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hoogfleet. Join us Monday as we continue the series in search of the Saviour. That's here on Turning Point with Dr David Jeremiah.