True Christian Ministering

[Footnote: A spoken sermon.]

The passage: Jesus told his disciples that the Gentile rulers lord it over their people, but that it must not be so among them: whoever would be great must be their minister, and whoever would be chief their servant, as the Son of Man came not to be ministered to but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

How little this is believed! People think, if they think of it at all, that it is very well in the church but will not do in the world. Their actions say so: every man struggles to get above the others, ready to make his neighbour a footstool to some throne of glory in his own mind. There is constant jostling for promotion, with noble exceptions. And yet we call ourselves “Christians,” and are, in this much: the truth is within reach of us all, speaking to us at our door and in our hearts. Still we go on like this! The Lord said, “It shall not be so among you.” Did he mean only his twelve disciples? He spoke to them, but—thanks be to him!—he says the same to each of us now: that is not the way in my kingdom. The people of the world will always think it best to rise, to have less and less service to do and more and more done to them. Their idea of rank is a pyramid: the higher you go, the fewer there are to serve those above, and the more you are served, until at the apex stands one who serves nobody and whom all the others serve. It is the same in an intellectual way, to say nothing of bodily service: a man who works to a position where all look up to him and he looks up to nobody has put himself exactly among those our Lord speaks of, who exercise dominion and authority; he really thinks it a fine thing to be served.

But it is not so in the kingdom of heaven. There the figure is entirely reversed, as a pyramid is reflected upside down in water: the Son of Man lies at the inverted apex, upholding, serving and ministering to all, and those who would be high in his kingdom must go down near him at the bottom, to uphold and minister to all they can. There is no other law of rank in God’s kingdom. And mind, that is the kingdom. The other is a transitory, bad thing that must pass away; it is there only on sufferance, because in the mind of God even what is bad ministers to what is good, and when the new kingdom is built the old will go.

But the man who seeks this rank must be honest in following it. It will not do to say, “I want to be great, and therefore I will serve”; a man may begin so, but it will not carry him. He must seek it for the truth’s sake, for love of his fellows, for the worship of God, for delight in what is good. In the kingdom of heaven people do not ask whether I am promoted or you are; they are so absorbed in the glory of the goodness around them that they learn not to think much about themselves. It is the bad in us that makes us think about ourselves, and while it is there we must; but as we go on we think of ourselves less, until the spirit of the kingdom possesses us and we live in gladness and peace. We are prouder of our brothers and sisters than of ourselves. God looks at us and makes us what he pleases, and there is no escape from coming to this.

But the Lord says that “the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto.” Was he not ministered unto, then? Ah, as never man was, but he did not come for that. Even now we bring him the burnt-offerings of our very spirits, but he did not come for that, but to help us. He is the express image of the Father, so what he does the Father must do; and accused of breaking the Sabbath by working, he says, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” So this is God’s way too, or it could not have been Jesus’s. Do not think that God made us and then turned us out to find our own way, or that he merely hovers over us with a wide-spread benevolence. Imagine a mother who takes her child even from its beloved nurse to soothe and minister to it herself: that is God. His hand is not only over us; recollect David: “His hand was upon me.” Wherever he went, David said, God was there, beneath him and before him, asleep or going down to the dead. The earth beneath us is his hand upholding us. [Footnote: The waters are in the hollow of it.] Every spring-fountain of gladness is his making and his delight. He is close to us, breathing into our nostrils the breath of life, and breathing into our spirits this thought and that to make us look up and recognize the love around us. How poor all a mother’s tending would be if the baby never opened its eyes to see her face bending over it! The tending exists for that, and comes by it. To recognize this loving-kindness and stand up in it strong and glad: this is God’s ministration to us. Do you ever think, “I could worship God if he were so-and-so”? Do you imagine God is less good and perfect than your thoughts can imagine? You can never come up to it. Use every symbol of grace and tenderness that nature and human relations give us, and you will never reach what God’s ministration is. When our Lord came he let us see how his Father was always doing this: he “came to give his life a ransom for many.” His dying was the crown of it, but what he gave was his whole life—his whole being, strength and energy, deeper than his days of trouble and toil—and he went down to death for us.

But how are we to learn this ministration? I will tell you where it begins. Most of us are forced to work, and if you do not see that the commonest things in life belong to God’s plan, you have to learn it. It is infinitely better for us than not working, but not fine unless it leads further. Our work is always doing something for other people; it is ministration in some shape. All work is serving, but not always Christian service. Some work only for their wages, and deserve to starve if they do not; but we must go a very great way beyond that. There is no honest work one man does for another that he may not do as unto the Lord and not unto men. The man who sees the commonest task as part of the divine order, God’s intention that one man should be useful to another, and who does it well because of this and tries to do it better, is doing God service.

We talk of “divine service.” It is a miserable name for a great thing; it is not service, properly speaking, at all. When a boy comes to his father out of love and says, “May I come and sit beside you? May I come and be quiet a little in your room?”, what would you think if he then said, “I have been doing my father a service”? So with praying to God and thanking him: do you call that serving God? If it is not serving yourselves it is worth nothing; if it is not the best condition you can find yourselves in, you have yet to learn what it is. No: the work you have to do tomorrow in the counting-house, the shop, or wherever you are, is how you serve God. Do it with high regard and there is nothing mean in it; it is all mean if you pretend to please people when you look only for wages. But if you do it nobly and truly because it is the work God has given you, you are doing the divine service.

This goes a great deal farther. We have endless opportunities of showing ourselves neighbours to the man who comes near us. That is the divine service, the reality of serving God; those other things ought to be your reward. Go home and quietly go to God in the secret of your heart, and know that he is there. Say, “God has given me this work to do, and I am doing it”; that is your joy, your refuge, your going to heaven. It is not service. The words “divine service,” as used, always move me to indignation: it is perfect paganism, trying to please God by gathering up services supposed to be service to him. He is serving us for ever, and our Lord says, “If I have washed your feet, so you ought to wash one another’s feet.” That is how some will minister.

But still, as we begin to learn this, some of us look about blindly, thinking, “I wish I could serve God, but I do not know what to do! How is it to be begun? Where is there something to do?”

Now, first of all, service is obedience, or it is nothing. We tend to think there is something degrading in obedience and service. By the world’s social judgment there is; not by heaven’s, for God would have us do only what he is doing himself. You can see the tendency now: scarcely a young man will speak of his “master,” as if it hurt his dignity. It is what so many theologians have done about God, who, instead of taking what our Lord gave us, call him “the Governor of the Universe.” So a young man calls his master, and even his own father, “the governor”—another region altogether, and a worse one. I take these as symptoms: a habit may be picked up without much feeling behind it, but a wrong habit tends to a wrong feeling, and if a man cannot learn to honour his father enough to call him “father,” one or other is greatly to blame, father or son, I cannot say. I know there are parents so bad that telling their children that God is their “Father” is no help to them but the contrary. I heard just the other day of a lady who, when someone said to comfort her, “Remember God is your Father,” answered, “Do not mention the name ‘father’ to me.” That kind of fault lies not in God but in those who, not being like him, cannot rightly use the names that belong to him.

But now, as to this service, this obedience. Our Lord came to give his life a ransom for the many, and to minister to all, in obedience to his Father’s will. We call him equal with God—most of us here do, I suppose—without pretending to explain it. We know God is greater than he, because he said so, yet somehow we worship him with our God and need not distinguish more than is necessary. Do you think he was less divine than the Father when he was obedient? There he was not the ruler; he did not give the commands, he obeyed them. And yet we say he is God! That is no difficulty to me. Obedience is as divine in its essence as command; in a human being it may be far more divine, and in God it cannot be more so. It is not the ruling being who is most like God; it is the man who ministers to his fellow, and the man who will sternly and rigidly do what his master tells him, whoever that master may be, is likest Christ in that one matter. Obedience is the grandest thing in the world to begin with, and we shall end with it too. I do not think the time will ever come when we shall have nothing to do simply because we are told to do it, without knowing why. Parents act most foolishly who wish to explain everything to their children. Teach your child to obey early: it is the plainest, first and most precious lesson you can give him, and if he never goes to school he had better have that than all the schooling in the world. So when people glorify this age of ours as better in everything than those before it, I look back to the times of chivalry, which we now almost laugh at, and I find that the one essential of chivalry was obedience. It is recognized in our army still, but then it was carried much farther. At seven a boy was sent into another family, put with another boy to wait on the master and mistress of the house, and taught what little they knew then of intellectual cultivation; but he also learned a stern obedience he could not forget. After seven years behind the chair, ministering, he was made an esquire. He was given his armour and had to watch it all night in the chapel, laid on the altar in silent devotion to God. The esquire’s duty was more important service: he attended his master the knight, groomed and checked his horse, and cleaned his armour, seeing that every bolt, rivet, strap and buckle was sound, for the master’s life was in his hands and he, having to fight, must not be troubled with such things. Seven years later, in a more solemn ceremony, the squire was made a knight; but was he then free of service? No; he swore to help everybody who needed help, especially women and children, and rode out to do the work of a true man. There was a grand and essential idea of Christianity in that—wonderfully broken and shattered, no doubt, but no more than the Christian church has been—and still the essence of obedience. In every army, where it is lost, the army is worth nothing. You remember that terrible story from the East, that fearful death-charge, one of the grandest things in our history though one of the most blundering:—

So with the Christian man: whatever meets him, obedience is the thing. If his conscience, the candle of God within him, tells him he must do something, he must. He may tremble from head to foot at having to, but he will tremble more if he turns his back. Our old poet Spenser’s Knight of the Red Cross, the knight of holiness, ill in body, diseased in mind and without armour, is attacked by a fearful giant. Does he run away? No; he catches up his sword and, trembling in every limb, goes to meet the giant. That is what every Christian man must do. If death itself lies before us and we know it, there is nothing to be said; it must be done, and then there is no loss; everything else is lost to God. Look at our Lord. He gave his life to do his Father’s will, and on he went and did it. Was it easier for him than for us? Ah, the greater the man, the more delicate and tender his nature, and the more he shrinks from opposition even from his fellowmen, because he loves them. It was terrible for Christ, and in the little touches of the scanty story this breaks out. John tells us that at the Last Supper he was troubled in spirit, and testified. And when Judas has gone out to do what was to finish his great work, see how he comforts himself: the Son of Man is now glorified, and God is glorified in him, and God will glorify him in himself—and, he adds, gathering up his strength, straightway. This was said to his disciples, but I seem to see that some of it was said for himself. This is the grand obedience! It is a hard lesson to learn, and a hard one to teach. We are continually grumbling that our servants and tradespeople will not do just what we tell them; it makes half the misery in the world that they will have something of their own against what they are told. But are we not doing the same? Ought we not to learn forgiveness for them, and much from being in the same position? We only partly recognize that we are put here precisely to learn to obey. He who is our Lord and our God was obedient all the time; it is as divine for us to obey as for God to rule, and God, as I have said, is ministering the whole time. Do you want to know how to minister? Begin by obeying. Obey every one who has a right to command you; but above all, find out from what our Lord left behind what he wants you to do, and see whether obeying it does not make you conscious of being of use, ministering, part of God’s grand scheme—a vital portion of the divine kingdom or, to use a better figure, of the Godhead. Try it, and see whether obedience is not salvation, service dignity, and whether you will not feel you have begun to be cleansed from your plague when you begin to say, “I will seek no more to be above my fellows, but I will seek to minister to them, doing my work in God’s name for them.”

Both the room and the action are good when done for God’s sake: that is dear old George Herbert’s way of saying the same truth. The gift of the Spirit of God, to make you think as God thinks, feel as God feels, judge as God judges, is the one thing promised. Nothing else is positively promised, and who dares pray for anything else with perfect confidence? God will not give us what we pray for unless it is good for us, but this we must have or perish. Let us pray for that, then, and with the name of God dwelling in us—if this is not true, the whole world is a heap of ruins—go forth to do this service of God, ministering to our fellows and so helping him in his work of upholding, glorifying and saving all.