A TRUE SERVANT
A TRUE SERVANT
... After reading your letter this morning, I opened my Bible on these words: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe”, John 1: 6. This set me thinking of some of the marks of a true servant, as we see them in John — marks, which I trust, may be more I and more imprinted on our lives and service.
First, he comes from God. In order to do this, we must first be with God. Alas! This is the weak point with so many. The excitement of service has an attraction for the natural tastes which the holy calm of the sanctuary does not possess. In one way service makes something of us, but in the presence of God we find that we are nothing. Men are needed who are really with God. There is no real freshness [p. 377] or power if we are not with God. Our hearts lose their divine sensibilities, we drop down to the level of things around us, and service becomes more or less formal.
The most glorious and soul-stirring realities are soon held as mere doctrines, and of course are preached as they are held. Then very soon the servant begins to feel a complacent self-satisfaction as to his service, which is not disturbed even by the lack of any manifest blessing, and this is the mark, I think, of an awfully back-slidden state.
On the other hand, if we are with God, we are in spiritual reality as to our own experience. We do not deceive ourselves as to the measure of our progress, gift or faith. We think “soberly as we ought to think”. Then it is with God that we learn His love, His unmeasured grace, His glorious purposes, His great thoughts concerning Christ and the assembly, the reality of the Spirit’s power, and many other things which are accepted in theory by many but known as realities by few. Then, having been with God in the secret of His presence, we can come from God in the power of what we have learnt within, to serve in a world like this. We do not then measure the enemy’s power against our own weakness, but against God. We do not put on the armour which others have worn, or follow in the beaten track where other servants have trod. We do not confer with flesh and blood as to the scope or character of our service. There is an originality about every servant who comes from God. God does not fashion two servants in the same mould — that is man’s work — and just in proportion as we are formed in the sanctuary, each will have his own peculiar fitness for his own service, and such stamp will be upon it that faith will recognise that it comes from God.
The second mark of a true servant is that he is consciously nothing. John could speak of himself as only a “voice”, and a greater than John was consciously “less than the least of all saints”. The moment we think ourselves to be anything, we are out of the servant’s true position and spirit. There is a beautiful contrast between John’s account of himself, and the Lord’s description of him (compare John 1: 22 - 27, with Luke 7: 26 - 28). The more worthy we are of the Lord’s commendation, the less do we think of ourselves.
The third mark of a true servant is that he is a “witness”. He speaks of that which he has seen and known for himself.
[p. 378] It was said to Paul that he was to be “a witness of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee”. We may minister things which we have never entered into ourselves, but we cannot be witnesses of them. Hence the deep importance of cultivating communion with God, and increased intimacy with Christ. Instead of this weakening our gospel testimony, I believe it would make it fuller, richer, and more simple. We would be in touch with the grace that can stoop to the lowest point to win a sinner’s heart. Our preaching often lacks weight because we have so little realised the things of which we speak. Whether it be the terror of the Lord, the love of God, the value of Christ’s work, or the blessings which faith enjoys, we must ourselves have entered into that which we press upon others or we become lecturers rather than witnesses.
Another mark of the true servant is self-forgetful devotedness to Christ. John was ready to decrease if so be that Christ might increase. He was willing to be displaced, to pass into the shade, to be forsaken even by his own disciples. The effect of his witnessing was the proof of its divine reality — men left John and followed Jesus. This gave him real joy (John 3: 29), for morally he had left himself and found his Object in that blessed Lamb of God. The result of his testimony was to accomplish in others what had first been effected in himself, and this is the end of true service. We may, through grace, bring others to where we are ourselves, we cannot lift them above our own level. How deeply important it is, then, that we should be vigilant, prayerful, sober, and that we should habitually walk in the Spirit! Christ will then be the Object and Motive of our whole life and service, and it may be ours to say, in some feeble sense of the greatness and blessedness of it, “To me to live is Christ”.
Then the reality of these different characteristics is sure to be tested. Satan will not miss an opportunity of sifting the servant of Christ, and on the other hand, God allows the sifting in order to humble us by the discovery that we are not so spiritual or so devoted as we thought we were; while, in result, the reality of what grace has wrought in us comes out more plainly than ever. The servant must not always expect to be in one set of circumstances. The Baptist was, for a time, the most popular man of the day. Tens of thousands attended his ministry, and honoured him as a prophet of God.
[p. 379] For a time he was unopposed by the religious leaders and even heard by the king with respect and attention. He was the lion of the hour — the dictator of morals to every rank in the nation. How many servants have been lifted up with pride in circumstances similar to this in kind, if not in degree? A crowded audience, the approbation of the world, or of the brethren, the esteem rightly due, and cheerfully rendered to a servant honoured of God, and even success in spiritual labours, will act upon these wretched hearts of ours, and lift us up with a carnal elation, if we are not, through grace, in the continual exercise of self-judgment. If John’s eye had not been steadily fixed on the glorious Person of whom he was the herald, he might soon have thought himself worthy of some higher station than that of the slave who stoops to loose his master’s sandal, but with the divine glory of that One before him, he would not assume to be worthy to render Him even the meanest service. But John was to be tested, like most other servants, in a different way from that of which I have spoken. He must know the north-wind of adversity, as well as the south-wind of prosperity. He must be transferred from the great congregation of the wilderness, to the solitude and apparent uselessness of the prison, and that, too, at a time when it must have seemed more than ever necessary for all true servants to be spreading with divine energy the gospel of the coming kingdom.
Fancy him like a caged lion, immured in a lonely castle on the dismal shore of the Dead Sea, and hearing there the glorious things that were being spoken of “throughout all Judea, and throughout all the region round about”, Luke 17, Luke 18. Can you wonder that when such reports were brought to his ears, his spirit chafed at the confinement which hindered him from having a share in all this? In the day of his prosperity he had said, in effect, that he was nothing, but now he was made to enter into it in an experimental way. The kingdom was being preached without him: marvellous things were being done in which he had personally no share: God’s work was going on without John. Let every servant who knows his own heart describe the feelings that are natural to us in such an hour!
I believe every servant of Christ has to pass through this experience sooner or later. He may have it in a modified form all his life through, or he may pass through it in special [p. 380] seasons of deep exercise, or he may learn it on his death-bed, but he must learn that he is nothing but the servant of God’s purposes (1 Corinthians 3: 5 - 7), and that God can dispense with him at any moment and transfer the service to some different vessel of grace. I am aware that we all accept this in theory, but it is another thing to learn it in one’s own experience with God. It was when learning this that John was “offended” in the One whose shoe latchet he had professed himself unworthy to bear or unloose. The question which his disciples carried to Jesus (Luke 7: 19) was a scarcely veiled censure of the Master, for allowing the servant to be detained in circumstances which made nothing of him. It has often been remarked that a saint fails in the very thing by which he is most characterised, and this was the case with John.
It is often in the hour when the servant is brought low in his own eyes, and, it may be, in the eyes of others also, that the pride of his heart discovers itself; and it is well, if in such an hour he bows in submission and does not “kick against the pricks” of the Lord’s sovereignty.
I trust that the marks of a true servant may ever characterise you, that you may be proof against the elevation of the day of success; and that in the day of adversity you may not faint, but that you may taste the sweetness of that special beatitude for a tried servant — “Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me”.