What is the work of the
Lord? What is Christian service from God's standpoint? It
is contributing to the fullness of Christ. It is in the
measure of each several part (of His Body) ministering to
that end, that all things shall be summed up in Christ
and that He shall be the fullness of all things.
That great Divine goal
has many ways and many means of attainment, and it is not
a matter of whether you or I are serving the Lord in the
same way as someone else. That is not the point at all.
We standardize and departmentalize Christian work, and we
think of the activities of ministers and missionaries and
such like functions and call that the work of the Lord;
we think of that when we speak of going into Christian
service. But while I do not say that that is not the work
of the Lord, it is a very narrow and a very artificial
way of viewing things.
The work of the Lord is,
and can be, no more than contributing to the fullness of
Christ and ministering of that fullness to Him and from
Him. How you do it is a matter of Divine appointment, but
that is the work of the Lord. So it is not necessarily a
matter of whether I am in what is called the ministry, a
missionary or a Christian worker, in this particular
category or that, or whether I am serving the Lord in the
way in which certain others are serving Him. That is
quite a secondary matter. We would all like to be doing
what certain people are doing, and doing it in the way
they are doing it. You might aspire to be an apostle
Paul, probably if you understood a little more you would
not! But, you see, whether Paul is doing it along his
Divinely appointed line, in his Divinely appointed way -
or Peter, or John, or this one or that one - the object
comes first, the way afterward.
The service of the Lord,
whatever may be the means, the method, is ministering to
the fullness of Christ and ministering of that
fullness, and you may be called upon to do that anywhere.
It can be done just as much out of public view as in
public view. Many who have ministered to the Lord and by
whom He has been wonderfully ministered are those of whom
the world has heard and read nothing. This, you see, is a
'Body' matter, and a body is not all hands, not all major
members and faculties. A body is comprised of numerous,
almost countless, functions, many of them remote and very
hidden, but they all minister in a related way to the
whole purpose for which the body exists; and that is a
true picture of the service of God.
So think again. While we
would not put you back from aspiring to the fullest place
of service, nor say that you are wrong in desiring to be
a missionary, to go forth into the world in a full-time
spiritual capacity, remember that even before the Lord
puts you into that specific work, you are a minister all
the same. For 'minister' is not a name, a title, a
designation, but a function, and the function is
contributing something to the fullness of Christ and
ministering something of that fullness.
So it comes back to us
as a question: What am I ministering of Christ; what am I
contributing to that ultimate fullness? If it be by
leading the unsaved to Him, I am adding to Christ, so to
speak. That is all it means, but that is what it means. I
am building up Christ. If I am encouraging the saints, I
am ministering to Christ and of Christ. That is ''My
servant....in whom My soul delighteth.'' In whom does God
delight as His servant? Those who minister to His Son,
and that is the beginning and the end, however that may
be done by Divine appointment.
"Behold, My
servant....'' God calls attention to the servant in whom
His soul delighteth. The beginning of all service in
relation to God is the servant himself. What makes a
servant of God? We think of a servant of God being made
by academic training, Bible teaching, by this or that
form of equipment; and we think when we have all that,
when we have been through the course and have in our
minds all that can be imparted of that kind, we are the
Lord' s servants. But that is not the way the Lord looks
at it at all.
In the first place, the
Lord looks at the servant, and He is going to demand that
He shall be able Himself to point to His servant and say,
''Behold, My servant.'' I know that there is a right
sense in which the instrument has to be out of view, but
only in one sense; that is, that he in his own person,
his own personal impression as a man, his own impact by
nature, shall not be the registration made upon people;
only in that sense he has to be out of view. There is
another sense in which he has to be very much in view. If
that were not true, all the autobiography in Paul 's
writings would be wrong in principle. Paul keeps himself,
in a right sense, very much in view. He calls attention
to himself very properly and very strongly and
persistently. The Lord is going to require that He shall
be able to say, ''Behold, My servant", and the
servant to whom He will call attention will be the
servant who is the impression of Christ. Yes, Christ
registered, Christ presenced, Christ apparent, in the
servant. The beginning of all service, I repeat, is the
servant himself. God is far more concerned with having
His servants in a right state than He is with having them
furnished with all kinds of academic qualifications and
titles. It is the man, it is the woman, that God is
concerned with.
If you turn to the
letters of Timothy, you find there that beautiful
designation of the servant of the Lord: ''O man of God''
(1 Tim. 6:2). Paul's appeal to Timothy is in those terms.
And then, speaking of the study and knowledge of the
Scriptures, he uses the same phrase again: ''....that the
man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto
every good work'' (2 Tim. 3:17). But note the order: he
says, ''that the man of God may be... furnished
completely", not that there may be a complete
furnishing to make a man of God; the man of God already
exists. Now all his study with the Word is to make him
who is the man of God an efficient workman. The man of
God comes before all his study. He is that before he has
a knowledge of the Scriptures.
You know that 'man of
God' was the great designation given to some of the
prophets of old. Elijah on one occasion, having been
hidden by God at the brook Cherith, found the brook to
dry up; and the word of the Lord came to him, saying,
"Arise, get thee to Zarepath... behold, I have
commanded a widow there to sustain thee" (2 Kings
17:9). Elijah went, and you remember how he found the
food situation. She was gathering two sticks to bake her
last cake for her son and herself, and then to die. But
the barrel of meal did not fail: the Lord was faithful to
His word. But then, after that, it came to pass that the
woman's son fell sick, and so sore was the sickness that
there was no breath left in him. The woman made her very
pathetic appeal to the prophet. He took the child up to
his own chamber and called upon the Lord, and saw the
child revive; and he presented him alive to the mother,
who said, ''Now I know that thou art a man of God, and
that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.''
What were the
credentials of his ministry? That he had the secret of
life triumphant over death. He had the words of life and
the word of life is not always the mere usage of
Scripture. You can use the Scripture and it may have no
effect at all, or you can use it and it may have a mighty
effect. A great deal depends upon who uses the Scripture.
It is the man of God who can use it in that way and be
attested as the true servant of the Lord. It is the
spiritual power of life that is in the man that makes him
(to use Paul's words to Timothy) an approved servant of
God.
''Behold, My servant.''
Do you grasp the point? It is with you and me that the
Lord is concerned; it is with what we are; it is with our
personal knowledge of Himself. It is that we may have
within us the secrets of the Lord that it may be true of
us as it was of the Lord Jesus and of others that the key
to the situation spiritually is in our hands. We, as
Elijah hidden away in secret, have been in touch with
God. There is a background. God had said to Elijah,
''Hide thyself''; and he was a long time hidden before
the word of the Lord came, saying, "Go, show
thyself..." Someone has remarked that for every
servant of God there must be much more of the hidden life
than of the public life. How true that is!
The Lord will take pains
to ensure that the secret history, the spiritual history,
of every true servant of His is looked after. With all
the eagerness to get out to do the work, and may it not
abate!, with all our enthusiasm to be active, all our
desire and craving to be serving, let us remember the
first thing is the servant, not the service. The first
thing, the beginning of all service, is the instrument.
We see that the servant comes firstly into the Lord's
view, that He may have one to whom He may draw attention
in a right way and say, 'Look at that servant of Mine and
see My work. See My grace, see my power, see the traces
of My hand.'
This is an extract from "Behold My Servant", Chapter 2. First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jan-Feb 1949, Vol 27-1