Ok had a long show down with web host and then switched...

The new Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Modern Reformation is out. My article "Recovering Vox Dei" was included in it. Please check it out at http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=issuedisplay&var1=IssRead&var2=110

“Can you serve in the nursery?” As you try to pick one of the thousand excuses that have popped into your head, you secretly hope that the pastor’s question was merely theoretical. Of course, you know you should say, “Sure, I will serve anywhere!”, but you just can’t bring yourself to say it. The last place you want to be is with a bunch of screaming babies, having to change diapers and dodge spit-ups, while your friends listen to a life changing sermon. Why you? Can't someone else do it?

5:30am - You’re awakened by that obnoxious and traitorous alarm clock. You have to get up, but you don’t want to. The thought of going to the school - where church currently meets - to set up the auditorium (for the 3^rd week in a row) paralyzes you with bitterness and frustration. Outside your window, a heavy rain soaks down. You’ll need to bring extra clothes; it’s a long walk hauling equipment from the church van. You desperately hope that maybe you are sick today. Why You? Can't someone else do it?

Maybe you have never had strong feelings about serving one way or the other. For you, serving is simply part of church - a necessary nuisance. You punch in and punch out doing your job without much thought as to why - only that it needs to be done. So like a robot, you systemically and faithfully go about your task. In your world, serving is passionless duty simply going through the motions. You never ask “why you?” because you see much point in such a question. It is a task so that people can do church effectively, so someone has to do it.

If any or all of these situations describe you, then I know how you feel. I have been there. I lied about being sick to get out ushering. I deliberately ducked requests to serve in children’s ministry by making sure that I worked in the cushy book store. I was purposefully late to avoid certain jobs that I especially hate - like lugging in heavy speakers.  I performed more tasks on uncaring auto-pilot than I care to remember. I have lain in bed, procrastinating, as the irritation and resentment about having to serve consumed me.

Yet, my Christian life did not start out with such an attitude to serving in the church. When I became a Christian at the age of 25, immense joy and gratitude fueled me to give back to God. I was so excited to be saved, that I didn’t mind the time or effort spent serving and I threw myself into all kinds of service. After awhile, however, it became harder and harder to force myself to serve in the church. The tedium and insignificance of the tasks began to take its toll on my affection for both God and the church. Bitterness and laziness soon set in. I started to loathe Sunday mornings because I didn’t want to serve, I didn’t want to give up another Sunday.

The bitterness strengthened as I perceived that everyone else, seemingly able to remain Christian without serving, were enjoying their Sundays while I toiled. The more I thought about enjoying my Sundays, the more I became sour to the idea of serving.  Serving in the local church seemed a thankless, monotonous, meaningless, and colossal waste of time and talent. Why me? Can’t someone else do it?

If you have been around church long enough, chances are good you have encountered similar feelings or situations. The struggle to serve is not limited by age, social, economic, or racial differences. Neither is it restricted by the type of church. Whether it is a large church or small, a rural church or urban, a new plant or established, owns a building or rents, people are going to have issues with serving. The frantic, overburdened, and burnt out servant in church plant can become complacent and disengaged in an established church. Basically as long as there are people in your church, there will be struggles with serving at some point and time.

We believe in a good sovereign God who takes personal interest and delight in His children. How then can such a God create such a futile and menial drudgery such as parking duty, children’s ministry, and setting up chairs? These things are not church! How can we encounter God with such pointless serving? Yet while we entertain such thoughts, how can we not think that maybe our good and sovereign God has a purpose for us, the task at hand, and the church? Why would God (as we have in the Bible), who sent his only son to die in our place, then subject you and me to futile and menial drudgery? As if God realized after he instituted the church, “Great now my people can worship me. Oh wait, there are some little annoying details to take of like child care and how people get seated. Well my people can sweat the small useless stuff; I need to worry about more important issues.”

This is not the standard “God don’t make no junk” speech.  Instead, maybe it is more than possible that the all-powerful, all knowing, made the whole universe God who loves us to the point of sacrificing his son for us, well maybe that God has a plan and a purpose for those little details of church. Maybe serving in the local church is more than just an afterthought. It is hard to imagine that God would go to such lengths to establish and support the church and not care about every detail. It is even more difficult to fathom that God would let menial and senseless tasks undermine and exasperate the very people (us) he uses to proclaim His Word and manifest His goodness. However, the most disturbing things about such a lack of purpose of serving would be why God would subject his very children to such spirit breaking tedium.

Conversely, if God does have a purpose for serving – a purpose that brings both eternal meaning and worth - then what how would the affect how we serve? How does that purpose address our bitterness, apathy, and pride about serving?

A Trinitarian Reflection

 God has passed on the ability to have personal relationships to those who bear his image: humankind. Humans are only personal because God is personal. Not only does He create us to have a relationship with him (otherwise how can it be a relationship), but in Genesis 2 God shows Adam how he can have one with other humans, namely his new wife Eve. In Genesis 2:24, God tells Adam and Eve just how deep this relationship between them should go, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

However God is capable of having far deeper and more meaningful relationships that we cannot even begin to fathom. As Louis Berkhof states, “The original form of personality is not in man but in God…, what appears as imperfect in man exists in infinite proportion in God.”^[i] No matter how hard I try, I could never know anyone as intimately and completely as God could – just read Psalm 139.

In addition to fellowship with God, we also come into union with God’s people. Christ brought us not only individually to him but he also created a people - bound together through his blood, see Eph 2:18-22. Our new fellowship and relationship with God’s people serves as the basis for relationships with others, especially other Christians – since we are one body together.

Pastor John Stott writes, “Thus the very purpose of his (Christ) self-giving on the cross was not just to save individuals, and so perpetuate their loneliness, but to create a new community whose members would belong to him, love one another, and eagerly serve the world.”^[ii] Christ himself prayed to the Father that God’s people may be one even as he was one with the Trinity, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” John 17:10b.

So it is logical that if love is the basis God’s relationship with us, it is also the foundation and model for our relationships with others. Author Bruce Ware writes, “May we see in the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, how their relationships are expressed, and may we learn from this something better about how our relationships and work ought to be lived out, for our good and for the glory of his great and triune name.” ^[iii] A Triune God enables us to establish loving and service-oriented relationships with one another, mirroring the one God has with us and with himself.

In fact, the Trinity not only makes Biblical Servanthood possible, it defines how it should be carried out. The Apostle John again writes, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” 1 John 4:11-12. Love is basis for both God’s relationship within himself and with us.  So therefore, John states, love must be basis for relationships with each other – both in and out of the local church.

In fact, John goes so far as to say that when we love others, God (rather God’s image) is perfected in us. Follow the logic; if God is love and we are made in his image, then if we love, we project and perfect his image in us. Therefore, Trinity not only enables us to enter into relationships, it provides the very values to base them on. For example Paul writes in the book of Ephesians 5:2, “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Here, we see that loving others is based on the Son’s sacrifice, the Father’s acceptance, and the Spirit’s work. Our love for others is based on His love for us.

Our relationships should not only mirror the Trinity’s love, but also its unity and diversity as well. In the Trinity, while each member is fully God and retains all the divine attributes, they each have distinct and diverse roles. Each part of the Trinity distinguishes themselves by their work and relation to man. The Father created the world and planned salvation, the Son came to earth and carried out the redemption, and the Holy Spirit works to change us through sanctification.

The ability to, as Berkhof states, “subsist wholly and indivisibly in more than one person”^[iv] is strictly a trait of God’s divinity. This supernatural ability allows God to both maintain unity and diversity within Himself: Diversity as each member has a distinctive role as part of God’s overall will and purpose; Unity as each member works to complement and serve the others as part of one divine essence.

Like the Trinity, we are to be diversely unified by our love for each other. Servanthood, while it might be different in look and feel, must be unified in love and purpose. Bruce Ware in his book Father, Son, & Holy Spirit explains how the Trinity and the relationship within should inform our own relationships.

“If we are to thus to represent God and reflect who he is in our relationships and activities, part of this involves reflecting the ways in which the triune Persons relate to one another. As we see the love and relationship among the Trinitarian Persons, we should seek the same kind of love to be expressed among us, God’s people…We are created to reflect what God is like, and this includes a reflection of the personal relationships within the Trinity.” [v]

In our reflection of the Trinity through love and service, we glorify God as we seek to be more like him. Indeed, we worship God as we seek to be perfected in his image because it communicates the very nature and power of God. This communicates and celebrates everything about the character of God, as well as our dependence on Him, first for salvation and then for works. Puritan Thomas Watson writes,  “Glorifying God has respect to all the persons in the Trinity; it respects God the Father who gave us life; God the Son, who lost his life for us; and God the Holy Ghost, who produces a new life in us; we must bring glory to the whole Trinity.” [vi]

Paul explains this very thought to the church in Romans, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.” Romans 12:4-8.

Each of us has various talents, experiences, and traditions. Yet we are to act in unison and out of love for God and one another.  It is through, not despite, our diversity that we love and serve others. Presbyterian pastor Edmund Clowney writes, “The gifts of the Spirit do differ, but they never divide, for they enable the church to function as an organism, the body of Christ… Organic unity requires diversity of function (1 Cor. 12)” ^[vii]

In the early part of the 1600’s, Jesuit Priests who lived, worked, and proselytized among the native tribes began to experiment with the potential medicinal effects of the cinchona bark.  Despite being bitter and fetid in taste, it was important to South American tribesmen who used it as muscle relaxant to combat shivering caused by exposure to the cold, damp Andean weather.

In 1631, a Jesuit elder boarded a ship off the coast of Peru bound for Rome. He had heard horror stories of the 1623 Papal election in Rome when 44 of the 45 electing cardinals became sick with the fever, shivering, and vomiting of the Roman Fever. Ten of them, along with hundreds of their attendants, died suffering from the shivers of the fever. He brought with him a pouch containing the medicinal powder made from the bark of the cinchona tree.

So it was that, when the Jesuit elder arrived in Rome several months later, he set in motion a chain of events that would impact world history. We now stand on the cusp of our own discovery that will forever change how we serve. The Trinity has changed everything.

[i] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology,

[ii] John Stott, The Cross of Christ pg. 249

[iii] Bruce Ware, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit pg 22

[iv] ibid

[v] Bruce Ware, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit pg 133

[vi] Thomas Watson, Body of Divinity

[vii] Edmund Clowney, The Church pg 81

The Relational God

The relationship within the Godhead is the foundation and the reason we can have relationship with God himself.  The threefold nature of God shows us that He has the ability personally to relate us. In Understanding the Trinity, Pastor Alister McGrath explains the importance of a personal God, “The fundamental point behind the idea of a personal God is this: God is able to enter into a personal relationship with us.”^[i] God is not some distant, unapproachable, uncaring figure; he is capable of having real meaningful relationships with man.

God can and does enter into a relationship with his creation because not only is he capable of such an act, but he desires it. In Genesis, he is personally involved with creation and oversees every aspect of the work. Then after he creates Adam is his own image, God speaks to him, blesses him, and starts a relationship with him in Genesis 1:26-29. The Genesis account alone stands as a testimony to the very personal nature of God.

God’s relationship within himself is the origin for his relationship with us. This love based intra-Trinitarian connection means then that God’s relationship with us is also characterized by that same love. But if, as the Bible states, humans are naturally fallen and undeserving of fellowship with God because of sin, then why would God love us in the first place? God loves because of his goodness and not because of ours. God’s love for us is a consequence of His goodness.

J.I. Packer states in Knowing God, “Of this goodness God’s love is the supreme and most glorious manifestation.”^[ii] Because he is relational, God has created a people to be His to manifest His own glory and gladness. To that end, the Trinity acts in self-sacrificing love to accomplish their shared will.  God also deals lovingly with his people because ultimately they will be united him as adopted sons.

But how can we know for sure that God really loves us? Assurance that God loves us is found in the fact that he sent His son, the second member of the Trinity, to die for us so that we may have a relationship with Himself. As the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 5:8 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The Father loves us so much that he was willing to sacrifice the Son for us.

The incarnation of Christ was the single greatest proof that God loves us and desires a relationship with us. It also shows how personal God is willing to be. The apostle John writes, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” 1 John 4:9-10. Thus here we see the proof of God’s love for you and me. It is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the second member of the Trinity. 

Through His goodness, God reaches into our world to establish a relationship based on the characteristic that defines His innermost relationships, love. To prove and secure it, He sends one whom His own son to suffer, die, and pay the cost of man’s sin. We have a God that was willing to send His beloved Son to condescend to our level because of His love towards man (John 3:16).

The Son of God was to endure humiliation and pain at the hands of man in order to die on a cross. There he was momentarily cut off from the love of the Trinity, the greatest relationship ever known, to bear the wrath of God on behalf of sinners. On the Cross, Jesus sacrificed more than is body; he temporarily exchanged his loving relationship with God the Father for God’s wrath for our sin. He did this so that we may have an eternal relationship with God.

The covenant of grace allowed man to enter a relationship with the loving Triune God. TF Torrance writes, “It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in his grace and outgoing love he graciously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate himself to us, in such a way as to be received and known by us.” ^[iii]

[i] Alister McGrath, Understanding the Trinity pg. 82

[ii] J.I. Packer, Knowing God pg123

[iii] T.F Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God pg.4