It is good to be with you, brothers and sisters, for these days. When my wife and I left New York City, it was very cold. Here, this is like summer vacation.
Praise God, we can come together to celebrate New Year’s Eve as we rethink the service of God. May the Lord bring us into the new year with a new level of spiritual service.
I was asked in the afternoons to share on equipping for spiritual service. I would like us to look at the three Scriptures that will be the basis of these messages.
The first is Ephesians 4. We want to notice verses 11 and 12:
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,
for the equipping of the saints for the work of service,
to the building up of the body of Christ.
You notice in verse 12 that there is a relationship between equipping and the body of Christ. This is what we will look at this afternoon.
The second Scripture, which we will deal with tomorrow, is 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;
so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.
You notice there in verse 17 that the man of God is equipped by the Word of God.
Then, Lord willing, the third time we speak in the afternoon, we want to look at Hebrews 13:20-21:
Now the God of peace, Who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord,
equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ,
to Whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
In those verses, you notice that God Himself will equip us within to do according to His good pleasure. So, in these three times, we will consider:
Now, we know that only the Lord Himself can equip His servants. Let us begin with a prayer, asking our Lord even this afternoon to equip His servants for spiritual service.
Our Father, we come to You this afternoon. We come in the name of the Great Shepherd, Who came down to be the servant of the Lord and to bring us salvation.
We remember watching Him in the Gospels, equipping the disciples. We pray today, Lord, by Your mercy, through Your Spirit, that You would come among us.
We pray that You would raise up true spiritual service for these last days. We ask that Your Holy Spirit would speak to each and every heart.
We are before You as unprofitable servants, but we have the hope of mercy. Have mercy, have mercy upon us, even in this late hour, we pray.
In the name of the Lord Jesus, we ask. Amen.
As we want to share on equipping in the body of Christ, we want to look at two passages where there are great contrasts.
First, we want to look back in Ephesians 4 and read this wonderful description of the body of Christ. Our brother Paul is encouraging the saints in this matter of walking in unity together as the body of Christ.
He emphasizes that our Lord, Who went up into the heavens, poured out the Holy Spirit upon the body of Christ so that it could be one in spirit. Let us read Ephesians 4:11-16:
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,
for the equipping of the saints for the work of service,
to the building up of the body of Christ;
until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
to a mature man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine,
by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming;
but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him Who is the head, even Christ,
from Whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies,
according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
In contrast to that Scripture in Ephesians, Paul writes 2 Timothy to Timothy, who is in Ephesus. We want to read a portion from 2 Timothy 3:
But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.
For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy,
unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good,
treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,
holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; avoid such men as these.
Here are two pictures: the church at its best and the church at its worst. We must remember that 2 Timothy 3 is not speaking about the outside world, but about the condition within the church.
I bring this matter up because the church has very much to do with the equipping of the servant of God. Before we talk about the work of the Word of God equipping us and the work of the Holy Spirit equipping us, we have to begin by talking about the environment in which a servant of God will be equipped.
The environment of the church makes all the difference in the quality of the service.
God has ordained the church to be the vessel to prepare servants of God. When the church is full of Christ, then servants are raised up full of Christ.
The environment of a child from the earliest days determines the destiny of that child years later. Before a child ever goes off to school, the child has learned an awful lot from the environment of the home in which they spent the first five years.
The same is true for servants of God. What environment do we provide for a young man or a young woman to become a servant of God? What is God’s provision on earth for equipping servants? Is it not His church?
Many years ago, I felt the Lord calling me into service. I was saved in the church. The people were true believers, but they knew very little about body life.
In this particular church, it was the custom that if somebody felt they should be a minister, they sent them away to school. Many churches send their children away to school to prepare for the service of God. But this is not God’s thought.
A young child of God can be raised up in a church that is full of Christ. They can learn more about how to truly serve God in spiritual value than anything they can learn away in isolation at an academic school.
Think about this picture we have in Ephesians 4. When the church is alive and Christ is the real Head over the church, what do we discover? Everybody is a servant.
When there is an open heaven and the Spirit is filling all things, every brother and sister is giving some joint of supply to another brother and sister, and the body is building itself up in love.
Those who are servants of the Word of God are teaching and equipping the saints so that, in turn, they can minister to the other brothers and sisters. Everybody is a servant.
If you have known the Lord for six months, you serve those who were just born again last week. When the church is vital and full of Christ, everyone senses their desire to serve.
It is a fact of church history that most of God’s servants of spiritual value come out of times of revival in the church. When there is a revival among God’s people, when people come back to God’s thought about the way the church should be, suddenly many young people rise up and say, “We want to serve God.”
Some of the Lord’s greatest servants were raised up in such times of revival. But when the church is dead, nobody wants to serve God. Those poor ones who are serving God—everybody feels sorry for them.
The only people who want to serve God are often people who should not serve God. Often we find very low spiritual quality in such servants. The environment is difficult.
But praise God, He still raises up servants in every age.
We will be looking at Timothy, this young man, and we understand how wonderful it was for Timothy to be raised up as a servant of God.
In the Book of Acts, on Paul’s first missionary journey, he went to Derbe and Lystra. While he preached the gospel there, probably Timothy’s grandmother Lois and mother Eunice were saved. We do not know that for certain.
But when Paul began his second journey, he visited Derbe and Lystra, and the brothers came up to him and said, “There is this young man, Timothy. God is raising him up.”
Let us pause. How did God raise Timothy? There was no Bible school. As far as we know, there was no apostle there in residence. There was no prophet that we know of—just brothers and sisters who had been saved.
Ah, but it was not just brothers and sisters who had been saved. It was the Lord Jesus in the brothers and sisters who had been saved.
By the grace of God, Timothy was saved. Because his grandmother and mother taught him the Scriptures, suddenly the Old Testament was lit up with the revelation of Christ to Timothy. The Spirit inside began to show him things about Christ from the Old Testament.
In the process of time between Paul’s first and second visits—perhaps five years—how could this young man be raised up? The environment of the body of Christ.
He was breathing every day the oxygen of the Holy Spirit. He was learning how to serve and worship God. Probably he helped in the work, studied the Bible, and drank of the waters of the Bible.
We do not know how many were in the church, but let us say there were forty people. Every brother and sister was serving, so Timothy served as well. It is wonderful to serve when everybody is serving.
Then, when Paul came along, he could see something in this young man. That is when Timothy went to seminary—not a school, but he traveled with Paul.
He prayed with Paul, talked over the Bible with him, preached the gospel with him, and carried his luggage. They threw stones at him as well as Paul. He was trained as a servant of God according to God’s thoughts, from an assembly alive with Christ.
Now I have a question. It is a chicken-and-egg question: does the body of Christ affect the environment of the servant, or does the servant affect the environment of the body of Christ?
It is chicken and egg. You cannot say which came first.
Imagine Paul the apostle and Barnabas coming to your town of Derbe. They preach the gospel. These are wonderful servants of God. Everything they do has the fragrance of Christ.
You see God’s power as they heal somebody who is crippled. You see God’s patience as they deal with people who are just becoming saved. These servants are so full of Christ that a church is built with life.
You see, servants of God affect the church. Paul says that the apostle is supposed to lay the foundation, but then he builds upon it. Every apostle builds with different material.
Some build with gold, silver, and precious stones. Some build with wood, hay, and stubble. Those churches built with gold, silver, and precious stones become vibrant churches.
Everybody is serving. Even little jobs, such as setting up chairs, are done to the glory of God. It is wonderful to see how servants of God can affect the life in the church.
But, on the other hand, the church affects the environment of service.
While Paul was in Ephesus for three years preaching the gospel, we see by the record that many young men were raised up as servants of God there in Ephesus.
These people in Ephesus had first love. They had love for one another. They served one another. They respected Paul. When Paul wrote to Ephesus, they responded.
But Paul also had to minister to the saints in Corinth. Corinth was not so full of Christ because Corinth was full of themselves. Whenever Paul ministered to the Corinthians, he was tested.
Some people did not like Paul much. They said, “Give us Peter. We like Peter better.” Some said, “Paul is too short. I think he is not a true apostle.” Others said he could not be a true apostle because true apostles always take up a collection for themselves.
Every time Paul dealt with Corinth and wrote a letter to Corinth, he was crying, and they were sending back arguments and this and that.
Even Jesus, Who was the greatest servant of God—God said, “Behold, My servant in Whom My soul delights”—could not do much in Nazareth. How important this matter of environment is.
We need true spiritual service in the body of Christ. We need a Christ-filled church to raise up servants of God.
Even though, as we talk about service, we tend to think about ourselves, this matter of service is much higher and deeper.
Actually, in this universe there are only two kinds of people: kings and servants. God has established His throne in heaven. He is the King, and everybody else is a servant.
This is a very high calling. It is being the second most important person. There is only one Who counts as King, but when He has servants—and He always has had servants—He must have servants in order for Him to reign as King.
Someone says, “It is the glory of God to command, and it is the glory of man to obey.”
When God commands His servants, He is displaying His power and eminence. When a man, as a servant of God, says, “Yes, Lord, I will obey,” that is when a man glows with glory as well.
Whenever the servant of God is completely obedient to the throne of God, it produces an environment of life.
Think about our Lord Jesus when He was on earth. He always did what the Father told Him. What was the result? Everywhere He went, there was blessing.
Everywhere He went, you could sense the Father’s throne. Everywhere He went, the environment was glory. Wherever Jesus went, you could sense that the kingdom was there.
How wonderful when a servant of God is obedient unto the throne.
We see that throughout the history of the people of God. What happened every time God raised up a servant like Moses? The people of God responded and obeyed. You could sense, in some way, the throne of God.
The people could understand God’s will and believe, “Yes.” The servant of God affects the environment.
All of this brings us to where we are today. Before we talk about being equipped as servants, we must clearly understand our environment.
The Lord has been merciful to us. Probably the fellowship you are in has fed you, cared for you, and perhaps enabled you to harvest some people in salvation. Perhaps you have sensed the Lord’s light and leading as the assembly gathered together.
I do not know what the environment is like where you are, but I know by the Word of God that when we stand before the Word of God, we see the condition we are in.
Brothers and sisters, what is the condition today of the church? The Lord looks at all of His people, the whole church, those who are born again. What does He say?
In this matter of service, in this matter of church life, is the church overflowing with life, with servants totally given to the Lord?
We thank God that there are probably some assemblies that are really vibrant and living right now. But, looking at the church as a whole, it is under judgment.
Peter says that judgment must begin in the house of God. The Lord is looking for true spiritual service. But when He looks, what does He find?
Does He find assemblies where everybody is serving? Are those who are serving full of the life of the Lord? Are they profitable servants, useful servants?
I do not know what the condition of the church is in the particular country where you live. But in the United States, the church is in a complete mess.
There are good servants, and there are evil servants. There are churches containing every kind of person you can imagine. There are servants preaching every kind of right and wrong doctrine, and God’s children are confused.
They do not know what is right or wrong. If some young person feels they want to serve God, they may be offered a career as a minister, and they go off to study in a Bible school. But when they are through, they have no idea of spiritual service.
Surely there is so much confusion. That is why people often refer to Revelation 2 and 3, where Jesus examines His church. However you interpret Revelation 2 and 3, the basic bottom line is this: this is our condition.
There are some men of God who frankly look at the church and say that it is completely corrupt and beyond repair.
There is a nationwide Christian radio network in the United States. The founder and pastor of that radio network is now preaching every day, telling believers, “Come out of the church. Come out of the church. It is completely corrupt.”
You can imagine that this causes great trouble, because the churches are the ones supporting these radio networks. When he tells the saints to come out, he means come out and go nowhere.
He says that you should just meet in your house with your family, read the Bible, and pray. In one sense, he has a true estimate of the state of the church. But surely there must be a way through.
It is useless to talk about raising up servants of God if we do not face the environment in which we are.
Sometimes, in our little assembly together, we are just trying to maintain things as they are. We remain, for the most part, isolated and ignorant of what is going on around us in this so-called Christian world.
We are sort of locked down as a small band of Christians, just trying to hold on. But the problem is that our young people leave.
If there is no life, they will find life somewhere. We can argue the correctness of our doctrine all day long, but if the church is not the church of the living God, then you should not have young people’s meetings.
If they come together and have a retreat, if they consecrate themselves to the Lord, if they desire to serve the Lord, and then they come back to the assembly, all they meet is resistance.
The leaders ignore them, and they find no room to serve. They find an oligarchy of a few people serving at the top. You know what happens. I need not predict what happens.
Most of our children will leave. The megachurch will offer them a career. They will have an immediate place of ministry for them at the college or at a mission station. They will send them out on projects and send them away to school.
Make no mistake about it: when you go to Bible training school, you come back as one of theirs. But this is not God’s thought.
The Lord has to do something. He still raises up young men and young women who desire to serve. What can we do? We do not have a Bible school. We do not have mission stations to send them to. We cannot offer them careers and money for serving.
What can we do? There is only one thing we can do. There is only one thing we need to do.
There is hope because there is only a single issue involved. Here is that issue: wherever you live, brother and sister, wherever you fellowship together with the saints, in your heart you need to be a servant of God with one single prayer:
“Oh Lord, make the church the school of Christ again.”
We do not need Bible schools. We need the presence of Christ—the fullness of Christ, the living Christ. Christ trains servants.
That is the provision of God for raising up servants. The church is to be the school of Christ, and when the church is the school of Christ, people are truly raised up in spiritual service.
The environment has so much to do with the quality of the servants we raise.
Reason with me for a moment. The school of Christ trained the twelve apostles. That is to say, Christ took each one of those men. He revealed Himself, walked with them, and taught them. They became true servants of God.
In the Book of Acts, the risen Christ took a new generation of servants to school. In the churches dotted across the lands, people learned Christ. The assemblies were full of Christ, and God raised up true spiritual service.
This is God’s thought even for today. When there is a reviving of the church as the school of Christ, with Christ as the center, then there is a revival in the church, and our children become servants of God.
In the days of the Moravian revival, almost everybody was a servant. Many of them went out as missionaries. Whenever God touched the church, suddenly you found many people willing to serve God.
There is that wonderful verse in Psalm 110:3:
Your people will offer themselves willingly
in the day of Your power.
When the presence of Christ is experienced in the midst, people are willing to serve.
When I visit various places, I meet such precious people. They really desire to serve the Lord, but the environment around them is stifling.
If you, as a servant of God, really love the Lord, then you should pray, “Oh God, make us the school of Christ.”
Maybe you only meet with twenty people. That is big enough for the school of Christ. Just Christ in every member, and we can learn how to serve together.
I recently went on a trip to South America, and there I saw some precious people. They were full of life, full of love, full of the Lord. Many people were serving.
You could not go there without saying, “My, how they love one another.” They had some full-time workers who truly were examples to the flock.
I remember watching these servants as people came up and talked to them. A little poor lady would come, and they would talk quietly and patiently with anyone who came.
These humble servants inspired young people to want to serve. I love to visit such a place.
But if I were to visit your assembly, would I find the school of Christ, or just some kind of low-grade life? The church is under judgment because our Lord Jesus wants to recover His life in the midst.
Where there is His life, there is true service. We, as the people of God, need to desire this with a holy desire.
Sometimes I think the church today is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We sometimes say, “Oh, our church is pretty good.” But when you look at it compared with the standard of the presence of Jesus, you realize that we are in bankruptcy.
By the mercy of God, the Lord allows us to keep going and provides for us. He is hoping that we will come out of bankruptcy. He wants us to repent truly.
As I travel around various places, I know how poor the quality of God’s service is. We are unprofitable servants. I know this is true.
When we look around, it is only God’s mercy that keeps us going. This is hard, but I believe there are some here today who are willing to give their lives so that the school of Christ would become their assembly.
Forget about doing something flashy or something the young people will like. What they really long to see is the reality of Christ in His church.
When this happens, those who want to serve the Lord rise up. There is so much that has to do with environment.
To put this matter of the school of Christ in a practical way, I will give you this little definition: as Christ was to His disciples, so the church needs to be to her children.
We, as God’s people, need to be Christ—a testimony of Christ—to our children. Just as we see Christ in the Gospels and see the environment around Christ, we see how those disciples were raised up.
This is the practical thought I have for this afternoon. I want to speak about five environments around Christ as He taught His disciples, because we are equipped as much by environment as by training.
First, we need a yoked-together environment. We need to see Christ yoking Himself with young servants of God.
In 1 Peter 5:3, Peter exhorts:
Nor yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge,
but proving to be examples to the flock.
The first matter of environment we need to see practically is an environment where those who are servants train those who want to be servants by example.
When the disciples first joined Christ, they traveled with Him and observed Him. I have often felt that one of our problems is that when our young people come, consecrated and desiring to serve, nobody trains them two by two, yoked together with them.
What am I talking about? I want to see an elder, an elder sister, or a worker take a young person out witnessing. How will they know how to witness if nobody shows them?
My own experience was pretty strange. My father-in-law was a witnessing Christian man. As soon as I got saved—probably one month after I was born again—he took me out witnessing to the lost.
We went and talked to people who were not Christians. I watched my father-in-law. He had so much wisdom. I saw him answer questions. I saw him use Scripture. I saw how he prayed.
Within the first two years as a Christian, I went out witnessing with my father-in-law perhaps twenty-five times. I had already seen ten or fifteen people get saved.
Young people need to be joined together with somebody and go out to see how things are done. How wonderful the body of Christ is when the older go out with the younger.
How about taking a young person with you when you go to talk to somebody who is inquiring and desires to become a Christian?
I saw one of the young people back home the other day. He said he had a friend who was very close to becoming a Christian. I said, “Well, go talk to him. Pray with him.” He said, “I do not know how.”
Praise God, somebody went with him. We found out that the person got saved.
There should not be this thing where older people do things and young people do things, and there is never any connection. I think, for older people, your greatest contribution will be to be an example to younger people.
When new Christians come along, they have a hundred questions. You may give them answers, but they cannot understand any of them. The next week they ask you the same hundred questions.
But if you take somebody with you, you begin to show them how you answer and pray, answer and pray. Then they understand how to do these things.
Jesus went along with His disciples. They saw how He did these things. This is how the church should be to her children.
A second environment of the church for equipping servants of God is an accessible environment.
Many Christians come up to me and wonder what kind of mysterious life the worker lives. “What do you do on Thursdays? You must read the Bible all day long.” They do not know the secret life of the workers.
Many times the disciples did not understand Jesus, but Jesus was always accessible to the young, aspiring servant. He did not keep secrets in that sense.
They prayed together. They read the Bible together. They talked about things together. They saw that this Man was accessible.
They asked Him foolish questions. He told them things to read. He helped them when they were getting ready to go out and share the gospel. He was accessible.
Of course, Jesus did not have a library, but if He had one, He would have given it away. I know some servants of God who have huge libraries. Mine is not so huge, but I do have one distinction: I have given away more than a hundred books that never came back to me.
After I read a book one time, I just give it to somebody. Give them your best treasures. Why not? To be accessible—how it encourages young people. They find out that you are just human beings.
A third thing is that, when Jesus was with His disciples, He was always encouraging an environment of spiritual growth.
With young people, this is very difficult, because you have to commend spiritual growth, but you have to cut off carnality.
If somebody wants to serve the Lord, they have to learn when they are being carnal that they are wrong. But when they are spiritually and intuitively accurate, they need to understand that what they did was right.
Jesus could say, “Blessed are you, Simon Peter,” because Peter saw that revelation. But He also had to say, “Get behind Me, Satan,” when Peter became carnal.
When you read Paul’s letters to Timothy, he was always stressing the importance of character and godliness in Timothy’s life.
As Paul dealt with Timothy, this young servant, he would take many of the issues Timothy was going through and bring them into the fuller revelation of their greater purpose in God’s purpose.
When there are young servants, we need to promote their spiritual growth.
The fourth thing: there needs to be an environment of encouragement.
When I say encouragement, I am speaking about when a servant is trying to serve. If our dear brother or sister gets some opportunity to serve, it is not that we should give them empty affirmations and say, “Oh, good job,” even when they did a bad job.
But we can take these opportunities to prove such young servants, bring correction, and show them some direction they could take if they are ministering a word to young people or something like that.
I think anybody would prefer to have true help in their ministry rather than just a pat on the back: “Good job for trying.”
When opportunities arise for these servants to minister, many times the church just says, “Well, we need somebody to teach ten-year-old children,” and they put them in there. You never hear from them again.
It is like sending a servant into the wilderness and seeing whether they come out alive.
If we are going to put our young people in positions where they help in the Sunday school with the children, we need to help them grow in that experience.
For every servant, there needs to be a discovery of ministry and of their sphere of ministry.
When somebody begins to serve, they have no idea how much they really have. If there is a gift there, if there is some grace there, then by doing these things with somebody watching and helping them, they understand the measure of ministry that they have.
If they really seem to have some kind of measure, we should encourage them. But if they do not have some kind of measure, we should not keep them in that wilderness.
Sometimes at home in our assembly, I go and look at the children’s classes between the worship time and ministry time. I just look in.
You look in, and there are some teachers who have a measure of faith. The children are sitting in order, and they are teaching. You go to another room, and the children are climbing all over the room, the teacher has lost their notes, and everything is out of order.
You even find occasionally some teacher whose only gift seems to be bringing snacks for the children.
We should not just throw them into something. If we are going to place them somewhere, we need to observe what is going on there and help them to grow.
When a young person gets an opportunity to go somewhere and share, it is actually a test. The Lord desires us to serve linked together with other brothers and sisters.
When our young people get an opportunity to go speak, perhaps to a college group or something like that, we should see whether they come back and ask to pray with somebody about whether they should go. Perhaps they ask for covering in prayer before they go.
When a young person does that, what does it tell you? They see something of the body of Christ. They do not just want to go out there by themselves.
I do not know whether you can put a percentage on this, but more than ninety percent of God’s workers today, so-called, are completely independent of the will of the body of Christ.
The last thing I would say by way of environment is this: for those who are serving, trying to serve, and learning to serve, there needs to be an environment of mercy.
When somebody starts to serve the Lord, what do they discover? Usually, a lot of failure and mistakes.
They were told to speak for five minutes, and they spoke for fifty minutes. They attempted to serve in some way that was way over their head, and they came back defeated.
We know, from watching the disciples, that they also made many mistakes. But our Lord Jesus always had mercy.
Serving the Lord involves a lot of the dealing of the cross in our lives. When that cross is doing its work, there is a consolation of mercy.
When the young servant knows that they have not failed utterly, there is an environment of mercy among those who serve the Lord.
Anybody who has served the Lord has made many mistakes. But the Lord, by His mercy, keeps us from sinking.
In this environment of mercy, the young servant needs to learn how to be merciful in relation to all the other workers.
The Lord knows how to deal with our own flesh, and He often puts us with somebody we co-work with who is full of thorns and briars.
Then the young servant comes back and says, “This person is this, this person is that. Do You not think we should beat them up?”
But you have been there before. You just tell them to forgive and to love their brother and sister.
Think about Christ and His love for His disciples. Now we who are servants, serving and leading in the various assemblies, it is time to lay down our lives again as examples to the flock.
There are those who have a heart to serve. We should not ignore them. We should be praying for them. If we see that they are truly consecrated and something is stirring within them, then we need to learn to encourage them in their spiritual service.
Among the servants of God today, what is our biggest problem? Nobody ever corrected their carnality. They were like children, and so today they are incorrigible and hard to deal with.
Many of those carnal tendencies in their early days, if they could just be brought to correction and see how wrong these things are, would not become the problems they are when they lead churches with a heavy hand.
I finish with this question: Is your assembly the school of Christ?
If it is, you will raise up useful, valuable, honorable servants. But if your answer is no, I say again to you: you may be the servant who lays down your life so that the assembly could become the school of Christ.
When we think of successful servants of God, we often think of those who have a widely recognized ministry. Some young person thinks about serving and imagines speaking, traveling, and going to great places.
But we know that God’s measurement of service is completely different.
Back home, I fellowship with more than three hundred people gathered together on Sundays. There are some workers like myself in that assembly. But my privilege is to watch brothers and sisters who truly serve the Lord.
Nobody recognizes them, but they are approved by God. They are helping to bring an atmosphere of the school of Christ into the assembly.
Some sisters have busy lives, as we all do, but they always take time to visit the sick and witness to the lost. I think they have a greater reward.
If you fellowship with brothers and sisters and there are only twenty people gathering, but your assembling together is full of Christ, then that is a good work. “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
If your life is one of those servants who has laid down your life so that Christ could be present in your midst, that is a good work.
We are praying in these last days that the Lord would revive His church and bring it from its low estate to its high calling as the school of Christ.
May God raise up servants in the last days through the school of Christ. These ones will have tremendous spiritual value.
Father, we look to You. You sent Your Son as the example. We ask You to impress upon us the beauty of the school of Christ.
Most of us assembled here today cannot speak of schools that we have or mission stations that we have. But if we have Christ enthroned and manifested in our midst, then we have all that we need.
Oh Lord, revive Your church today. Bring it back to its proper position and raise up servants of God—a house full of servants, all serving gladly.
We know that the greatest service seems like no service at all. The greatest service is only the response of a grateful heart.
For all who are serving, take away from us all the carnality of our complaining. Oh, let us be grateful servants. We are ever indebted to Your grace.
May we live in such a way as to be examples for others. Oh Lord, have mercy upon us and hear our prayers.
We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.