Paul's Servant Ministry
Colossians 1:23-29
A number of years ago, 1981, February, I had the opportunity to speak for a week at Dallas Seminary. At that time I studied and prepared a week series on the chapter I read earlier - Colossians chapter 1. And that has become a very important part of the fabric of my life and perception of ministry. As I was sort of asking the Lord what I might share with you tonight, I was drawn again to this great rich passage. So open your Bible to the text that I read earlier - Colossians chapter 1, and I would like us to look together even if ever so briefly in a cursory fashion at verses 23 to 29.
I fear that for many the ministry has become more a profession and less a passion. Men seem more committed goals than to God, more interested in success than sanctification. Comfort has a way of softening the hardness of commitment. And we get caught in the method that sort of overpowers the message. And I want us to go back to this passage to just focus again on what I believe to be a very realistic view of ministry. It has a way of sort of stripping off the baggage, the useless baggage and turning Walter Mitty into a realist.
Verses 23 to 29 have so much rich insight into the life and ministry of the apostle Paul that we can't deal with, but I think we can uncover the reality of what is here. In reading the chapter as I did earlier, at least the larger portion of it, I read through that monumental passage from verses 13 to 23 which is a presentation of the majesty and saving dynamic of Jesus Christ the Son of God. It's an exalted look at the glorious Christ.
Coming out of that section in verse 23 at the very end there is a transitional statement. The transitional statement is, "Of which I, Paul, was made a minister." In other words, I was made a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That transitional statement triggers Paul into verses 24 to 29 in which he further defines the nature of his ministry. The message has been clearly articulated in the prior text and now, with that transitional statement, he moves into discussing the nature of his ministry. What it does is give us a perspective on how he viewed his own ministry.
And why is this section here? Well, as frequently was the case with the Apostle Paul, he was under attack as to the validity of his ministry by those who thought they were superior through philosophy, legalism, mysticism, asceticism, which he deals directly with in chapter 2. They felt that they had reached some higher level of spiritual knowledge and he was down on the low ground somewhere. And so in sort of a self defense of his own ministry, he takes some care to offer some details about the validity and integrity of his own ministry in these verses.
It should me marked as an initial starting point that we look at the word minister which is the last word in verse 23. That term is the term deaconia from which we get the word deacon, which basically means a busboy or a table-waiter, a common servant. It emphasizes the simplicity, the meanness or the commonness of the task. He often uses the word servant in the English but doulas in the Greek which means a bond slave, which emphasizes the totality of submissiveness. Sometimes he uses the work hooperatace, which means under-rower which emphasizes the utter base lowliness.
And so whether he sees himself as a common servant, as a submissive servant, or as a lowly servant, he ever and always is a servant. That's a basic identification mark of the Apostle Paul. He says in 1 Corinthians chapter 4, when you write my epitaph, when you lay out your account, when you put down something about me to leave to posterity, may it be said of me that I was a steward, that I was a minister, a servant, a steward of the mysteries of God.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 9 he says, "When you write my epitaph, don't pronounce any great benedictions on my life. Just let people know woe is unto me if I preached not the gospel. I'm not worthy of any credit, I just did what I had to do or I would have been under the curse of God. I was ever and always a servant." He would have pleaded with us, "Don't name churches after me. Don't name colleges after me. Don't name cities in Minnesota after me. Just say, woe was unto him if he didn't preach the gospel." And so he says, "I'm not worthy of any commendation whatsoever. I did what I was under compulsion to do and serious, serious chastening if I failed to do it. I am a servant of the least rank."
I am convinced that the deeper the selfless attitude of unworthy servanthood, the greater the potential for usefulness. William Taylor, writing in that old volume, The Preacher and his Model has given us an interesting illustration. He tells a story about Pusa the Chinese potter being ordered by the Emperor to produce some great work for the Emperor. He tried long in vain to make a pot that would fit the Emperor and he couldn't do it. And at length, he was driven to absolute despair, he threw himself into the furnace in an act of self immolation and he was consumed in his own clay, as it were. And as the Chinese story goes, out came the most beautiful porcelain piece that had ever been produced. And so the Chinese tell the story that self-sacrifice is what makes the most beautiful work. I thought that was a strange story. I was in Hong Kong two years ago. I told it and a man came up to me and said, "That is a very familiar Chinese story." Familiar or not, it illustrates the simple thought that when we get lost in the act of self-sacrifice, the ministry has a sweet savor to it and a beauty.
And Paul saw himself as a servant. And that was the key to everything. Some years ago, John Stott wrote, "I cannot help wondering if this may not be why there are so few preachers whom God is using mightily today. There are plenty of popular preachers, but not many powerful ones who preach in the power of the Spirit. Is it because the cost of such preaching is too great? It seems that the only preaching God honors through which his wisdom and power are expressed is the preaching of a man who is willing in himself to be both a weakling and a fool. God not only chooses weak and foolish people to save, but weak and foolish preachers through whom to save them, or at least preachers who are content to be weak and seem foolish in the eyes of the world. We're not always willing to pay this price. We are constantly tempted to covet a reputation as men of learning or men of influence, to seek honor in academic circles and compromise our old fashioned message in order to do so and to cultivate personal charm or forcefulness so as to sway the people committed to our care."
But where there is the heart of a servant, there is the beginning of an effective and powerful ministry. As we flow out of that word, minister, into the next few verses, verses 24 to 29, there are eight key features that fill up Paul's servant ministry. And I just lay them before you. Eight elements of ministry that he identifies for us.
The first is the source of ministry. He is saying, "Now I'm gonna talk about my ministry. First I want to talk about the source of it." I love this. I just love this. What is the source of it? Well back up into verse 23 for a moment. And you read the phrase, "Of which I, Paul, was made a minister. I was made a minister."
Go down to verse 25. "Of this church," he says, "I was made a minister." There is that interesting phrase that, "I was made a minister." Somebody acted on him to make him a minister. He didn't make himself a minister. Somebody made him a minister. And that's obviously the work of God. Somebody might say, "Well what made him a minister?" And the answer might come that it was his training or his education or his abilities or his grades or his professors or his desires or his view of the need or his church or his denomination or his mother or whatever. That answer is, it was God.
If you go back into the history of the Apostle Paul and hear his testimony, you hear him say, "At midday, oh king, I saw on the way a light from heaven brighter than the sun shining all around me and those who were journeying with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.' And I said, 'Who art thou Lord?' And the Lord said, 'I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, but arise and stand on your feet for this purpose I have appeared to you to make you a minister.'" Acts 26:16. Who made him a minister? Jesus Christ made him a minister. And so he says in verse 25, "I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God. The oechenomeion, the stewardship. What does that mean? It speaks about management. According to a God's plan and purpose and the scheme of things, he put me into ministry. It is a God given responsibility. It is a divine appointment. I love what he says in Galatians 2:7, he says in chapter 7 and 8 that it wasn't any man. "It was God and flowing down from there, it was God who put me into the ministry." In fact, he says, "What I learned, I didn't even learn from any man. When the Lord had put me in the ministry, there I was on my way to Damascus, minding my own business, preparing to kill some more Christians, the next thing I knew I was ordained by Christ himself, sent into the ministry." The Lord took him into Navitae and Arabia for a period of three years and there is discipled and taught him as you well know.
Do we need to be reminded that in any ministry it is God who calls, it is God who equips, it is God who gifts, it is God who assigns? Not as dramatically as the Apostle Paul, but just as truly even if only through strong, compelling desires such as is indicated in 1 Timothy chapter 3. That takes us back, doesn't it again to 1 Corinthians chapter 9 as I mentioned it earlier, where the Apostle Paul acknowledges that he is worthy of no commendation whatsoever. He said, "If I did it voluntarily," verse 17, "then I have a reward. But if I'm in the ministry against my will, I have a stewardship that has been entrusted to me." And believe me, he was in the ministry against his will.
When John Knox was called to preach in Scotland, little did the world know what great impact he would have. To this day, if you have the privilege of preaching in Scotland as I have had, when you walk into the pulpit of the Scottish Presbyterian church they will tell you it is the John Knox pulpit. That's what they call it. A man left an indelible mark on the land only could we wish that his theology remained. "But then John Knox was called to preach," his biographer writes, "he burst forth in most abundant tears and withdrew himself to his chamber. His countenance and behavior from that day until he was compelled to set himself in the public place of preaching did sufficiently declare the grief and trouble of his soul."
He was absolutely overwhelmed by the immensity of the responsibility of being called by God. And he fought it. Martin Lloyd Jones writes, "The man who is called by God is a man who realizes what he is called to do. And he also realizes the awfulness of the task that he so much so that he shrink from it. Nothing but this overflowing sense of being called and compulsion should ever lead anyone to preach."
That's so important. That's so important to have that confidence of the call of God. And somebody's going to say, "Well where do you get that confidence?" I believe that if you follow the patter of 1 Timothy 3, it comes to a strong compelling desire that eliminates everything else.
Often I'm asked the question, "If you weren't a preacher what would you be?" And the answer is, "Dead." I don't know. There's nothing else I can do. Ask my wife. My son Mark said to me, when he was young, "Dad, in the pulpit you're something, but other that that you're nothing special." He was exactly right. And he was serious when he said that. And it was very insightful.
If I am called of God, then I have a holy calling, right? And I have a calling to be holy if I'm to represent God. That's why I'm so burdened to emphasize the matter of holiness in the life of the minister. If God called me, he called me to be a holy vessel. For only through a holy vessel can an unadulterated truth pass.
J.W. Alexander put it this way. "The great reason we have so little good preaching is that we have so little true holiness. And I guess we have to be often grieved at the modern shallow superficial, faddish, flippant treatment of God that comes out of the pulpit, but what it is is the reflection of a life that could be defined in the same way. But if you understand the majesty and the holiness and the awesomeness of a wonder-working almighty sovereign God, and you understand that he has ordained and called you and made you a minister to represent him, that is a compelling thing.
When you look at Isaiah 66:2, you're reminded that God says he's looking for a man who trembles at his word, a man who has a broken and a contrite heart and who trembles at his word, who has a healthy awe and fear of God like Isaiah who was broken in the vision of God in chapter 6 as we remember.
And so when you realize that this is a call of God, the implications are absolutely far reaching. Wish we had time to go into them. But I would commend to you a careful study of the concept of the fear of God in the Old Testament that drove those who were the true representatives of God.
And I'll tell you this, gentlemen, you will never rise above, you will never rise above your view of God in your preaching or your living. You will never rise above your view of God. So the first and foremost enterprise of your ministerial life is to know as much about God as you can possibly know. Because the greater your comprehension of God, the greater becomes the capacity that you have to live within the framework of that knowledge. And that becomes the breadth and depth and height of your ministry.
We then can easily understand the prayer of a Puritan who prayed, "There is yet so much unconquered territory in my nature. Scourge out the buyers and sellers of my soul's temple and give me in return, pure desires and longings after your perfect holiness."
God has called us into this ministry to represent him. We have a stewardship from God to be God's representatives. Paul says, "I didn't ask for this. I'm not in it because it was a lucrative profession. I didn't do this because I thought my talent was in this area. I am compelled, I am commanded, I am mandated, I cannot do anything else. I am under a curse if I don't do this. And in trying to accomplish it, I have to beat my body into submission because it is forever trying to run away. And if I happen to fall in that area, I will become useless." And so there was this overwhelming sense of the source of the ministry being God.
I have to confess to you that there are times in my life when it is the fact that I've been called of God that keeps me in the ministry because there are times when there's nothing else to do it.
Second point, just suggesting these things, is the spirit of the ministry. The source is God, clearly. What is the spirit of the ministry? I love this. Verse 24, "Now I rejoice." Stop right there. Many in the ministry admittedly are hesitant, reluctant, discouraged, disappointed, resentful, bitter, disheartened, lonely, angry. And we may go, at some point in out lives, through those kinds of things and I'm sure that none of us is exempt from those experiences, but with some people that's just kind of a settled attitude.
But Paul here tells us about the right spirit of the ministry. He says, "Now I rejoice." What does he mean by that? Well joy is the deep down confidence that God is in control of everything and it's all going for my benefit and his glory. It's not some circumstantial happiness. It's the deep down confidence that God is in control of everything and it's all moving for my ultimate good and his glory.
You look at the Apostle Paul and he had this tremendous joy. And he had it in so many ways, in so many circumstances. He could rejoice in the love of the Thessalonians and they were his joy and his glory. He said in chapter 2 of 1 Thessalonians. But he could also rejoice as he does here in his sufferings. You see, there was nothing that happened, be it positive or negative that could get deep enough to steal that deep down trust. That the relationship he had with God was forever and that God was controlling everything for his good and God's glory.
Never forget reading about the evangelical free pastor in Vancouver who jumped in a river and drowned himself. I knew a pastor of a church in Mississippi who was under such pressure from his congregation he had a nervous breakdown, they sent him into the city, put him in a hospital in Jackson and he jumped out of the fourth floor window the second day he was there and killed himself.
Those are very extreme illustrations of despair in the ministry. There are a lot of people, of course, who don't do that, but live in a kind of quiet desperation. Some of you would fit into that. I'm sure there are some pastors who might agree with Voltaire who said men are tormented atoms in a bit of mud, sick fools who only talk of happiness. Sad way to live your life.
But Paul rejoiced. Paul rejoiced even in a difficult situation. His joy was incessant, and his joy was independent. That joy, now mark this, was bound up in the depth of his relationship to God. Most people sadly devise their joy from material gain or human love or thrills or imagination or fantasy or the absence of pain or whatever, but our joy is in the Lord. And that's so obvious.
There's a wonderful hymn that sometimes you hear a choir sing, "Jesus, my Joy". That's the spirit of the ministry. No matter what happens in the church, no matter what happens to steal my pain, to bring me tears, to break my heart, and I've been there. I've been there just like you've been there. I've been there with tears. I've been there when people have put the knife in and turned it. I've been there when there was nothing to hold on to, but that relationship, but it never varies.
I've even learned to embrace my pain. I've even learned to love adversity. Why? Because it drives me to the depth of my relationship with the Lord. And if I don't have the pain, I tend to stay on the surface. And when people have disappointed me at every turn, the Lord never does and that's not a cliché. You run to that relationship and you rehearse in your mind all of the realities of that relationship.
Told the people recently a couple places where I preached, I'll never forget sitting in a staff meeting and saying, "I'm so thankful that you guys are my friends. You'll never know how much I love you." And one of them said to me, "If you think we're your friends, buddy, you got another thing coming." Just absolutely devastated me. Before it was over there was a mutiny. You know, those kinds of things are deep pain. Sometimes people say things to you that cut very deeply. Sometimes you work so very hard and people walk away from the effort you've made in their lives and they break your heart. But when your joy is related to the fact that you, unworthy as you are, are redeemed by Jesus Christ, and that heaven is your promised future and that God has privileged you to spend your life cultivating an intimate, deep relationship with him out of the overflow of which you can talk to other people, you've got to be thankful. Even if nobody shows up.
The very heart, believe me, of your joy is that relationship. And let me tell you something. At the very heart of your joy is a true assessment of your own unworthiness. Do you know why men lose their joy in ministry? I'll tell you in one word. Pride. You lose your joy because you believe you deserve better treatment. And the truth is, you don't. And neither do I. The worst treatment that you could possibly get from men doesn't come close to what you deserve because what you deserve and what I deserve is eternal hell.
And so, if I get anything other than that, I have a reason to be a happy man. And I can't expect any more than that. And I also know that the God who knows me best loves me most. Moses at the burning bush saw only his imperfections. Gideon at the threshing floor, only his weakness. Isaiah and the temple, only is filthiness. Peter, when Christ was there and he knew he was the living God because he controlled the fish, said, "Depart from me for I am a sinful man." And it was in the sense of humbleness and unworthiness and inadequacy that they deserve nothing, that everything they got from Christ became the source of their permanent joy.
There's old Jeremiah and they're about to throw him in a pit. They don't listen to anything he says and he weeps his way through his whole ministry. And all alone, he says, "Thy words were found and I did eat them. If nobody listened, God, I listened. And your word in me was the joy and rejoicing of my heart."
And I can tell you that men, that there are plenty of times when you wonder whether anybody listens. And you know, the most frightening thing in the world is to meet somebody from your service on Monday and ask them what you preached about on Sunday. If you really want to inflict flagellation, do that. And you wonder whether anybody listens or anybody knows. But you say to yourself, "If nobody heard and nobody knows, your words were found and I did eat them and I feasted on them and they were in my heart the joy and rejoicing."
See, unhappy people in the ministry think they're not getting what they deserve. That's a pride issue. Where pride is present, joy is gone. And joy is the right spirit in the ministry. I'll tell you something. If you can rise above the pain and demonstrate the joy, you'll capture the congregation in that joy. It has to be joy in spite of very often.
Thirdly, the source of the ministry is God, the spirit of the ministry's joy, the suffering of the ministry, the suffering of the ministry - verse 24 he says, "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake. And in the flesh I do my share on behalf of his body, which Is the church and filling up that which is lacking in Christ's affliction."
Now suffering in no way diminishes the joy. In fact, suffering ought to enhance the joy because suffering drives you deeper into the communion that you need with the Lord and the deeper you go into that communion, the greater should be your joy. Right? So, the greater the pain, the sweeter the joy.
And Paul is saying, "Look. I rejoice in my suffering." That sounds exactly like 2 Corinthians 12 doesn't it? I'm content with all that pain. I'm content with it all because of what happens as a result of it. He was not only suffering, of course, at the hands of the world in a physical sense, and all of the abuse and hatred for preaching the gospel, but there was a positive side to his suffering because he didn't view it that way. He didn't view the negative, "Look what's happening to me." He viewed the positive, "Look what I'm accomplishing through the suffering." He had plenty of suffering.
And he knew it was inevitable even in the future he said, you know, to Timothy, "Evil men will get worse and worse, and Timothy get ready, you're going to suffer. That's the name of it. That's just the way it is. And a godly life confronting an ungodly culture is going to get some reaction. You can expect that." But he says, "My sufferings are so purposeful." He says, "I'm suffering for your sake. I'm suffering for your sake." "Well what do you mean by that?" "Well, I do my share of suffering," he says, "on behalf of his body which is the church." "What do you mean?" "Well I'm suffering like this to get the gospel to you so you can be saved and to feed you the Word of God so you can grow up. It's for you. It's for you."
But there's even another element. It's so beautiful at the end of verse 24. He says, "I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions." Boy that is a strange statement. "I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions, what do you mean by that?" First of all to say I'm filling up means that the afflictions given to Christ were not complete. Well what does me mean that the cross was not enough? No, he's not talking about the cross. He's talking about the hatred and the animosity and the persecution and the suffering that Christ endured at the hands of the people who rejected what he said. But he said, "The world isn't through persecuting Jesus. The world is not through persecuting Jesus. The problem is he's not here, so they're getting me. The persecution of Jesus is not over. So I'm filling up what he's not here to take. You say is that positive, you bet. You bet. I receive the blows intended for the one who received the blows that were intended for me. He took the blows that I should have received on Calvary. I will gladly take the blows meant for him."
When they persecute you, they're not persecuting you, they're persecuting Christ. He's not here. You have the privilege of receiving those for him. Paul says, Galatians, he says, "I bear in my body what? The marks of Jesus Christ." I don't know if they had a piece of metal he could use like a mirror. I don't know if he could hold his back to a pond, but I'll tell you what. If you had as many lacerations as that man had, five times he was whipped by the Jews, three times he was beaten with rods which would have laid his back bare to the bone. And he was stoned to the degree that - you remember they left him for dead and I believe that's when he was transported to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 10. This man was one battered human being. He must have been as ugly as sin, physically. They said his bodily presence was really weak.
I mean this man had it all over his body, you can see him at night as he takes off his clothes and he looks all over his body and he sees all this stuff - scar upon scar. And you know what his response is? "This was meant for Jesus, but I got to take it for him. See this big scar on my head? Well that was meant for Jesus, but I got to take that blister when the crushed my head with that rock." Those are the trophies of his ministry. He was standing in the gap and whatever the world would have done to Christ, it couldn't do it. They were doing to him.
See, that's what grieves me so much about this kind of preaching that wants to sneak up on everybody and offer them some kind of non-descript synthetic seed that is utterly inoffensive to make sure that they sort of sneak into the kingdom and they hardly even know what they're doing. To remove the offense of the gospel is not an act of subtle technique that is going to be effective. It is an act of cowardice. Says, "I'm not willing to preach the truth boldly. I will not bear the offense of men." Paul says, "I'll take it." Believe me, there wasn't one subtle thing about him. Not one.
We bear the blows meant for him. And we're not talking about suffering for stupidity's sake. We're talking about suffering for righteousness' sake. There's a difference. If you suffer for stupidity's sake, those are your own scars.
Where the church is built, Satan's going to react, right? The world system is gonna rebel. Disobedient Christians are gonna criticize. Jealous people are gonna condemn and you'll be falsely accused and false teachers will arise and people will misunderstand and you'll labor long and hard with a sense of inadequacy and some guilt for your failures. But through it all, a church will grow and the scars are the scars you took in the process that would have been Jesus' scars if he'd been there doing it.
Suffering then is the suffering that comes to the one who is bol