Jesus said that the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven is the servant of all. And this was not His way of saying that Christians shouldn’t strive for greatness or that Christians will only ever be great in Heaven after being walked all over in this life. No, Jesus taught us to pray that the Kingdom of Heaven would come and that the will of God would be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
So this means that we are to aim at heavenly greatness, but heavenly greatness is not irrelevant to earthly history. In fact, the greater the heavenly greatness, the more impact on earthly history. But it really is heavenly greatness, which means that we must weigh and measure greatness with a heavenly standard, not an earthly one.
When we do that, we find that some of the great movers and shakers of history were killed in coliseums and burned at the stake. Some of them raised children, feeding them, clothing them and teaching them the gospel, and those sons and daughters went on to be great preachers, teachers, missionaries, nobles, kings, queens, wives, and mothers.
We live by faith, which means obeying God no matter what, and trusting Him for the outcome. Those who lived by faith in the past closed the mouths of lions, conceived children in their barrenness, were mighty in battle, and lived in deserts and caves in exile. The common thread was faith, a living, obedient faith, that served Christ and therefore was a servant of all.
A servant of all is not a rug to be walked over by anyone’s whims. A servant of all is the man or woman or child who is set on obedience to Christ. That obedience is our service to Christ and therefore for all. We are serving Christ here as we worship, and we are serving the world. We are the servants of all because we serve the Lord of all. Sometimes we sing psalms in the city square, but most days we teach our kids about Jesus, and do the dishes and laundry and go to work and share what we’ve been given with our neighbors.
Photo by Diego González on Unsplash
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