You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though He was God, He did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to. Instead, He gave up His divine privileges; He took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. (Philippians 2:5-7 NLT)
We have got to draw a very broad distinction
between doing a lot of things, as we think "for the Lord," rushing about and
being busy and organizing and conducting and speaking and preaching and taking
meetings and classes and all this, and we call this "Christian service." We have
got to draw a very broad line of difference between that and real service to the
Lord. Real service to the Lord is the emancipation of a people from this world
for Him and the formation of that people according to Christ for a heavenly
vocation, and a heavenly vocation now, not afterwards.
You can test your service by this: the measure
of the emancipation of the people who come under your hands and the measure of
the formation of Christ that is going on. These are things which are service.
And then you will discover that, whereas the other line of things with all the
movement and activity and feverish and excited work does not call for very much
patience of this kind. It does not call for much real self-emptying, no, it does
not call for a great deal of meekness: rather I think it ministers to the
opposite. It makes us self-important. It makes us proud. It makes us
self-sufficient. It makes us self-assertive. It makes us jealous for our
position and our ministry, and resentful if it is interfered with. Yes,
Christian work does that with many. The true service can be tested by these
things, and the true servant can be tested by the measure of those virtues of
Christ: utterly selfless, self-empty.