Somebody's Servant

The Apostle Paul teaches an important truth regarding our loyalties.

When it comes down to it, our loyalties can't be divided. He writes, For am I now seeking the favor of men or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. In other words, you cannot be interested in the pleasure and approval of mankind and also interested in approving and discovering and finding the pleasure of God. You can't be a bondservant to the world and unto God at the same time. Many Christians want to try to live simultaneously in two worlds. But as the Apostle Paul teaches, we can't serve two masters. Pleasing Jesus Christ often means forsaking the things of the world.

And the opposite is also true. If we want to live to please the world, that often means forsaking the things of Christ. Because of that, it's important that your loyalties lie in the right place. And that's what Stephen Davey explores today on Wisdom for the Heart.

This message is called Somebody's Servant. You're going to serve somebody and today you'll be challenged to choose wisely. If you were asked to share something about your life that you believe to be significant in less than 15 words, what would you say? And then once you thought of something, you wouldn't want to get up here and say it because it would be hard to appear humble and at the same time deliver to us what you believe to be significant about your life. How would others perceive you? You wouldn't want to exaggerate up here. You might say something and someone out there might burst into laughter.

That'd be a dead giveaway. How do people see you? What do you think they would believe is significant?

What would you say? I found it interesting this past week to read the story that toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein, the great physicist and mathematician, took down off the wall of his home his picture of Isaac Newton, the great scientist and discoverer, and replaced it with a picture of Albert Schweitzer, the doctor who went to Africa and built a hospital for lepers. He then remarked to a very close friend that he was way overdue in replacing the image of success with the image of service. Near the end of his life, Albert Einstein, the winner of the Nobel Prize, wanted to be known more for what he did for others than what he got from others. Well, centuries before Einstein ever lived, another man made a similar yet even more profound self-discovery and declaration for the apostle Paul has been living for about 20 years for Christ.

He's an older man. He only has, we know, about 10 years left before the curtain will close on this man's incredible international ministry. He has been and is called the father of the Gentile Church. He was a master theologian and orator. He was a skillful defender of the Christian faith, and he is about to write the most important theological treatise in the history of the church. His letter begins with 15 or so words as he introduces himself to us and delivers to us what he believes is the most significant thing about his life. If you haven't already opened, open your Bibles to Romans chapter 1 and verse 1, and the first few words of this great letter, only 10 words in the original, are translated for us here. Paul, a bond servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. Now, there are three concepts that came to my mind and heart as I studied and read and reread and then reread again, over and over again. Paul's introduction of himself as he stands on the stage and says, may I introduce myself to you?

He says these things. There are three words that came to my mind, and I believe that they would revolutionize every believer here if we would truly grasp and embrace them. The first is the word I've given you in your notes already. It is the word ownership. Paul, a bond servant of Christ Jesus. The most significant thing, ladies and gentlemen, that Paul wanted everybody to know about his life at the very beginning of his letter, that he belonged to somebody else. The impact of Paul's choice of words here is lost on us.

It wasn't on them, the original reader. But it is lost on us unless we get a sense of the context of what it meant to be a servant in the Roman Empire. We're told by historians that nearly half of Rome were slaves during the days of Paul. Let me read you what one man has written, not from a Christian worldview. Some of you have asked me about my sources. This one by Richard Alston entitled Aspects of Roman History, AD 14 through 117.

Not exactly bathtub reading, but it does get across the point. He writes about servants, and by the way, as I read this, I want you to just think through in your mind how it would relate in the mind of Paul to us being the servants of God. Alston writes, slaves were owned. They had no control over their labor or their bodies. They were property to be disposed of as their master pleased. Slaves could be both sold and subjected to almost unlimited violence. Slaves were treated as objects. They were not regarded as men or women, but as things devoid of souls.

They were considered animals with voices. The Romans were unsentimental about slavery. Slaves were economic units and were accounted for as such. A wealthy man named Vitus Polio ordered one of his slaves to be thrown to his collection of carnivorous fish for breaking one glass. When some slaves belonging to a particularly brutal master killed him, the Roman Senate ruled, according to their law, that all the slaves of that household were to be executed.

The chance of freedom was slim. Slaves met even more brutal conditions in the mines, where life expectancy must have been very short, though not as short as that for slaves condemned to the gladiatorial games. Being condemned to the mines or the games was recognized by slaves as a death sentence. Slaves working as personal servants had an easier life. Trusted slaves were often paid, although their wages had no legal status. The owner could reclaim the money at any moment. Without a doubt, Paul's reference to himself as a doulas, a slave, a bondservant, was a description, first of all, of great humility.

He was bought, he was purchased, he was owned by another. As he said in one other epistle, have you forgotten that you, as believers, have been bought with a price? Your bodies belong to another, therefore glorify him with your body. It was a statement of great submission and humility.

It's interesting to me that the word doulas was not only a description of humility, it was also a description of great honor. In the Old Testament, all of the Israelite slave owners were required by law to release their servants every seventh year. Slavery during the days of the Old Testament was not so much an issue of race or class as it is in the world today, where even now in Sudan, slaves are being sold on the open market.

It was more an issue of economics here. A man might sell himself to a master for an indentured service where he might repay a debt. But at the end of seven years, his debt was to be wiped off the books and he was to go free. However, if after the end of seven years, this man so loved that man he served that he wished to stay with him. Exodus tells us that if a slave in chapter 21 plainly says, I love my master, I will not go out a free man, then his master shall bring him to a judge and pierce his ear and he shall serve him for life. Wherever that man went, his ear, pierced ear was a silent declaration, as it were, to his love for his master.

And by the way, it was also a powerful testimony to everybody else about what kind of master he had, that he'd want to do that for the rest of his life. Now I found it interesting also to discover that it wasn't uncommon for high-class men and women to call themselves in Paul's day servants of the emperor. In fact, a Greek inscription found where Paul once lived and served had the words, Agathopas, which was this man's name, servant of the lord emperor.

So it was a great statement of loyalty and deference to the emperor, to call yourself his servant. And so that title of honor is also used in the Old Testament, as God refers to some of his choice individuals and followers as servants. In Genesis 26, 24, God referred to Abraham as my doulas in the Septuagint, my servant Abraham. In Numbers 12, 7, the Lord said, my servant Moses is faithful in all mine house. In Joshua 24, 29, the Bible speaks of Joshua as the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord. In 2 Samuel 7, 5, the Lord says, go and tell my servant David that you shall build a house for me to dwell in. And in Isaiah 20, verse 3, the Lord referred to Isaiah as his servant.

You see, the readers, men and women, of Paul's day would have picked up on this designation immediately as one of great humility and submission and also one of great honor. Because Paul is in effect saying, I have no rights of my own. I am owned property. I have no will of my own. I am here to do the will of my master who bought me.

And while others in that empire where you are serving and living are impressed that they could ever call themselves servants of the Lord Emperor, I want you to know that I am most impressed, Paul says, by declaring myself to be a servant of the living God. It is an issue of ownership. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that if you could settle that issue in your life, the issue of ownership, it would perhaps settle every other issue in life. Let me go back to what Austin wrote about first century slavery. He said a slave was owned. Well, let me ask you, does Christ really own you? A slave, he wrote, had no control over his labor. Does Christ really control your occupation, your career? A slave, he wrote, had no control over his body. Does God really control what you do with your body? A slave, he wrote, was property to be disposed of as his master pleased.

Does God really have from you the right, as it were, to dispose of your life in whatever way he pleases or must he give you a reason or an explanation whenever in that disposal of your life it is something that does not please you? You see, ownership, I believe, is probably revealed more in our attitude than anything else. We are children of God, but are we willing servants of God?

I think our attitude probably reveals more than anything else whether or not that's true. I remember growing up, I often look at the scriptures in light of being a child or parenting children. I remember doing things for my parents, which I didn't want to do, and I made it very clear that I didn't want to do it.

We were the four sons of my father, but we were not his slaves, and we thought we were at times. Now I'm making my kids do the same things. And they have to take turns doing one of those menial tasks called doing dishes.

But I want you to know doing dishes for them is not what doing dishes was for me. We had to get water in the sink and a little Tupperware bucket, you remember? And you got the soap in there, and you made it all frothy. And you got the dishes in there, and you took a washcloth, and you literally washed the dish. And then you moved it over, and you rinsed it in hot water, and then you handed it to your brother who's been snapping you in the leg with his dish towel, waiting for it to occupy his time, and he dried it, and he put it up on the shelf. That was washing dishes. Today, washing dishes is putting them in a dishwasher, and they want an allowance.

For what? I loved it. A couple of weeks ago, my parents were here. My dad was raised on a farm, and we were sitting at the table, and he was sharing with me and a couple of our kids life on the farm.

It was great. I remember sitting there inside going, yeah, man. Because, you know, you've had your kids tell you, and I've had mine tell me, you had dad tell us about the time when you had to walk two miles to school in the snow, and you were barefoot, and you had to shoot a rabbit for lunch on the way or whatever. Well, the wild thing was that my dad was telling us that he actually had to walk to school two miles.

It took him 30 minutes. In Minnesota, which meant he often walked on and through snow. He said to my kids, he said, you know, there were times when the weather was so bad, if it was really bad, my dad would give me a ride to school on the tractor, but it had to be really bad for me to get that ride. And then when I got to school, which was a one-room schoolhouse with first grade through eighth grade in one room, I would walk up to the front of that room and put on that wood-burning stove my raw potato so that it would cook throughout the morning.

And then at the break time, I'd get that little pat of butter out of my pocket, and I'd eat that potato for lunch. And my kids were... And I know they were thinking, and did you fight in the Civil War too? One thing is for sure, every one of us here today have it better, easier than those before us. Some of you had parents or grandparents who immigrated here to this land and lived a very difficult life. Some of you have grandparents and great-grandparents perhaps who were slaves, and they had a terrible lot in life. But just because someone had to do that labor and had to live that hard life or endure that struggle, that didn't have anything to do with their attitude. See, it's possible to be a servant and at the same time have a bitter, dispassionate, apathetic heart.

You won't pick any of that up in Paul's letter. He is so excited about being the disposable property of God that in the very first verse, it's as if he says, hey everybody, I want you to know that I'm somebody's servant! And that somebody is my Master and Lord Jesus Christ. It comes as no surprise then that following Paul's description of who he was, we're given his chore, or we're told what he did.

The second word that comes from this text is the word assignment. The text goes on and says, Paul, a bondservant of Christ Jesus, called an apostle. His calling, he was an apostolos, that is, someone who was commissioned directly from and by the agency of God. His credibility for ministry hinged upon his apostleship. If he was not a true apostle, then no one would give credibility to his writings. The apostles, we're told in Ephesians 4, were the foundation of the church. We're not building the foundation of the church anymore.

We're building the superstructure upon that foundation. There's no such thing as the succession of apostles. An apostle had two qualifications we learned from the scriptures. Number one, they first of all had to have personally seen the resurrected Lord. That's why the dispute arose to begin with about Paul. In fact, if you could sort of pull back the layers of his heart, you would know that he agonized many times over the fact that people didn't respect him as a true apostle of God.

They didn't believe he was a genuine apostle. And so, in most of his letters, he is defending the fact that he has seen the Lord. 1 Corinthians 9, he says, Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus my Lord? Later in chapter 15, he states that he was even visited by the resurrected Lord. It reads, Then Christ appeared to James, Paul wrote, then to all of the apostles. And last of all, as if it were to one untimely born, he appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, who am not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

But by the grace of God, I am what I am. He makes it very clear, I have seen the resurrected Lord. The second qualification of an apostle is that he must have been a disciple who was personally commissioned by the Lord.

Personally. Galatians 1, Paul wrote in the first verse, Paul, an apostle, not sent by means of the agency of men, but sent by means of the agency of Jesus Christ. He's saying, I'm not an apostle because I woke up one day and I thought, now that'd be kind of neat. He's not an apostle because somebody thought that that'd be great for him to do, or be. He's an apostle because he saw the resurrected Lord, so it was ownership by Jesus Christ and assignment from Jesus Christ. The third word is the word passion. Ownership, assignment, and passion.

He continues with his introduction. Paul, a bondservant of Christ Jesus, called an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. The word set apart could be translated, marked off, surrounded by a boundary, separated unto. And I have no doubt that that word, aphorizo, had tremendous impact in the hearts of his readers about his newfound passion.

You see, here's why. Paul was a Pharisee of Pharisees. What that means is that he kept the law. He didn't just keep the law of Moses. He kept all of those pharisaical prohibitions.

There were 365 of them. He was a man who wouldn't walk 200 yards past his front door on the Sabbath. He wouldn't lift a spoon weighing more than one fig because that would be carrying a burden. He kept the law.

He wouldn't do innumerable things. He was separated from all that would defile him in his desire to please a holy God. But now there's a new passion. He is not separated from. He is separated unto the gospel of God. It's not a negative.

It's actually a positive. I am separated unto the gospel, and that gospel of God's grace became his chief passion. The word aphorizo gives us our word horizon. He is in effect saying there's something else, dear friends, that is dominating my view.

It's all I can see. Every time I look out there on the horizon, I see it. Every time I open my eyes, I see it, and it is the grace of God's gospel. He had had religion.

In fact, he had graduated summa cum laude of his class, but it had not satisfied him. His passion was now the gospel of God. Paul was a man, ladies and gentlemen, who never fully recovered from his conversion. The truth is, men and women, you are somebody's slave.

I tracked this word through and came up with some interesting verses. Galatians 1-10, Paul wrote that we could be slaves to the opinion of men. He writes, for am I now seeking the favor of men or of God?

Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. In other words, you cannot be interested in the pleasure and approval of mankind and also interested in approving and discovering and finding the pleasure of God. You can't be a bondservant to the world and unto God at the same time. In fact, Jesus Christ used the same word in Matthew chapter 6, I believe, verse 24, where he said, no one can serve, same word, no one can be a doulas of two masters. He'll either hate the one and cling to the other, or he'll despise one and hold to the other.

You cannot, he goes on to say, serve, doulas is the same root. You cannot be a bondservant of God and mammon or material things or money or possessions. You see, some are slaves to possessions, to career, to achievement. Some are slaves to popularity, some are slaves to immorality, of whom Paul wrote in Philippians 3.19, their God is their carnal, lustful appetite. Some are slaves to past failure, some are enslaved to the fear of the future. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that everyone in this auditorium this morning is somebody's servant. The question is, whose?

I believe the answer to that is found in the answer to this question. If you were brought up here today and you were asked to introduce something about yourself that you considered significant, and you had 15 words or less, what would you say? I think of all of the things that Paul could say, the father of the Gentile.

In fact, if he finished, none of us would ever approach here. The father of the Gentile church, an eminent theologian, a member of Israel's Supreme Court, and on and on and on. And he starts by saying, hey everybody, I want you to know I am a slave to Jesus Christ. You see, the genius of Paul's life was in the order of those words by which he introduced himself. He was a slave before he was anything else.

How would the world remember you? There was a man who actually had an opportunity to know how the world would remember him. He woke up one morning, got ahold of the newspaper, and to his horror and shock he discovered that he was in the obituary column. The editor had believed a rumor that he had died and had actually published this famous man's life in review. The headline read, Father of Dynamite Dies. Then the article went on to talk about this man's discovery with nitroglycerin, his patents in both England and America for dynamite. And then this phrase caught his eye. Quote, he will be remembered for creating the potential for mass destruction.

Can you imagine sitting there reading that? That so pained him that he immediately took his fortune and developed a trust. And he created what would become the Nobel Prize for chemistry, science, literature, and most notably the advancement of world peace. It worked.

You know how I know it worked? It's because whenever you or I hear the name Alfred Nobel, we do not think of mass destruction. We think of the Nobel Peace Prize. What if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and read your obituary? What would it say about you? Paul says, listen, I want you to know something about me.

It's the most important thing of all. My first word to you is I just happen to be somebody's servant. And I have been called by him and am now passionate above all other things to advance the cause of my master in my world. May we be more like him? Yes, we are, by the grace of God, somebody's servants. Servants of the living God. May it be. Let me just read you this entry from Jonathan Edwards diary.

He wrote this in 1722, January 12th. I have been before God and have given myself all that I am and have to God so that I am not in any respect my own. Neither have I any right to this body or any of its members. No right to this tongue, these hands, these feet.

No right to these senses, these eyes, these ears, this smell or this taste. I have given myself away to him and have not retained anything as my own. The only person who can write something like that is somebody who's gone to the judge and had his ear pierced and said, I want to give my life to my kind and loving and gracious master.

Would you pray that today? You're already his child. You don't become his child by becoming his servant. You become his servant because you are already his child. But perhaps you've been his servant in the past and now you're on the sidelines. Maybe disappointment has come. Maybe you've lost your passion for the gospel.

Maybe you desire something he does not. But today, will you go back to the doorpost with the master and say, Lord, bore a fresh hole in my heart. I want to willingly, gladly serve you. You are my master.

I give myself entirely away to you and I hold nothing back for myself. That truth is God's wisdom for your heart today. Let's follow it. Your Bible teacher, Stephen Davey, is working his way through a series from Romans chapter one entitled Gospel Truth.

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