Leadership

Fit To serve - Part Two

Every one of us are called to be servants and yet in Acts 6 the early church saw a distinct need to select and ordain a unique group of men for a specific servant task in the church. They did not merely select warm bodies for the job a practice that is all too common today. What they did was issue a call for the congregation to select seven worthy men who could be trusted completely to do the job not only with integrity but in righteousness as well. It was required that they would be fit to serve the church.

Fit to Serve

The very concept of servanthood which we hold needs to be rewritten. We to often envision servants as unqualified to do truly important jobs - but being a servant is the highest calling in the church. In John 13, Jesus gave one of the most vivid examples of servanthood in the scriptures when he washed his disciples feet. Moreover, when the disciples began to argue about who was the greatest of all, Jesus told them that the greatest must be the servant of all.

When needs arose in the early church the apostles did not do what we normally and unfortunately do. Our common solution is to just shove any warm body into positions of service in the church. But the disciples understood something which we all too often miss: you need to be qualified to be a servant of the Living God.

Warm bodies are not sufficient. Neither does languid faith or weak doctrine make you worthy to bear the title, "Servant of the Church of The Living God". To be certain, anyone who wants to serve God can do so without needing to be a super-saint first. But long before you enter a role of official service you need to be mature. The role of deacon or servant was first of all just a description of a job. But in due time it also became a title. My question for you this morning is "Do you have what it takes to be a servant?" Are you "Fit To Serve"?

Just As the church began to grow and change from the band of Apostles and about an hundred followers of Jesus it strained under the sudden addition of three thousand souls on the day of Pentecost. Surely God was teaching them also in that time that he was in charge of the church and he will grow it according to his design. Many of the difficulties which arose early came as a result of that growth.