Shaped for Serving God - 40 Days of Purpose, week 5, Adapted from a talk by Rick Warren

Elvis Presley's album of greatest hits was the number one album in many countries 25 years after he died! But in spite of enormous success, Elvis was, according to friends, an unfulfilled and unhappy man. He died of obesity and drug dependency aged 42. In an interview his wife, Priscilla, said this about her husband: "Elvis never came to terms with who he was meant to be or what his purpose in life was. He thought he was here for a reason, maybe to preach, maybe to serve, maybe to save, maybe to care for people. That agonizing desire was always with him and he knew he wasn't fulfilling it. So he'd go on stage and he wouldn't have to think about it." Elvis didn't have a clue where to begin to look. In a sense, he was lost. Elvis couldn't figure out what he was here for, said his wife. I don't want you to make that mistake. So today we're going to look at God's fourth purpose for your life, you were Shaped to Serve God.

The Bible says this in Ephesians 2:20, "We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do". Would you circle the word "workmanship"? You were made to make a contribution, not just to consume. God made you to make a difference. What matters is not how long you live, but how you live. We're all meant to give something back. The Bible says we're created to serve, we're saved to serve, we're gifted to serve, we're shaped to serve. We're commanded to serve God back.

Now whenever God gives us an assignment to do something, He never gives it to us without equipping us first. In the bible Job says, "Your hands shaped me and made me." (Job 10:8). God uses five things to shape you: Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences. That spells 'SHAPE'. God uniquely shapes you, different from anybody else in the world, for a purpose, which is to serve Him. We're going to be reading about this next week in our daily readings. But to notice this, God made you unique and your uniqueness is not for your benefit. Look at the next verse: 1 Peter 4:10, "Each of us should use whatever gift he's received to make a lot of money". No! That's not what it says! It says we're to use whatever God's given us to what? Serve others! Your talents are not for your benefit. Do you remember the first line in the Purpose Driven Life book? "It's not about you." Your purpose in life is to be what God made you to be. He gave you gifts and talents and abilities and background and experiences and all these things for the benefit of other people, to be used by serving others.

So write this down, "My fourth purpose in life is to serve God by serving others." That's why you're alive. You were put here to serve God and the way you serve God is by serving other people. Some people want to serve God; they just don't want to serve others. But you can't do that. The only way you can serve God is by serving others.

The Bible has a word for this, it's called "ministry". Like the words we looked up the last three weeks, worship, fellowship and discipleship, this is a misunderstood word. When I say the word "minister" most people think of priest, pastor. But the Bible says every believer is a minister. Ministry simply means using my shape to help somebody else in the name of God. Any time you use your talents, your abilities, your background, your experiences to help somebody else that's ministering. You're a minister.

In the Bible the word "service" and "ministry" are the same word, "servant" and "minister" are the same word. If you're a Christian, you are called to serve, to minister. We're saved to serve - that's the fourth purpose of your life. All women, all men, all children, all old people, if we're believers, we're all called to serve Jesus Christ.

In the very first week of this series I said that life is preparation for what? For eternity! What God wants you to do while you're here is practice for what you're going to do in heaven forever. One of the things you're going to do in heaven is serve God and serve others. God put you on earth to practice! He wants you to learn how to serve.

God not only created us for service, He gave us a model. He came to earth in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, and He said, "This is what I want you to do with your life". You were created to be like Christ, and what did Christ do while He was here on earth? He served. Notice the next verse. Matthew 20:28, "Jesus said, 'Your attitude must be like My own, for I did not come to be served, but to serve'." Now listen to this, because this is important. Your SHAPE (spiritual gifts, heart, abilities, personality, experiences), your SHAPE determines your ministry, but your attitude determines your maturity. Big difference. Your SHAPE determines your ministry, but your attitude determines your maturity. You want to know what God wants you to do with your life? Look at your spiritual gifts, heart, abilities, personality, and experiences. But your attitude, your servant heart, determines your maturity. It's no good figuring out your SHAPE, if you don't get this second part down, so let's look at learning to serve like Jesus.

A lot of people spend much of their time searching for self-esteem, for self-worth, and significance. They want to feel good about themselves. But they're looking in all the wrong places! You don't get your self-worth from success, because there's always somebody else who does a better job. You don't get your self-esteem from status, from sex, or from your salary. The Bible says you get your self-esteem from service. Jesus said to give your life away in order to find it. The greatest thrill in the world is to be used by God, to be used in serving Him. What does it take to be used and to learn to serve like Jesus? It takes three things. Number one, write this down. Serving like Jesus means being available. One day Jesus was walking down to go to Jericho and some blind men start yelling at him. And the Bible says this (Matt. 20:30-32): "Two blind men shouted 'Lord, have mercy on us! Jesus stopped and called them. 'What do you want me to do for you?'."

I want you to circle the word "stopped". Jesus stopped. If you want to be used by God, if you want to serve God, you must be willing to be interrupted. Would you write that down? You must be willing to be interrupted. Most of Jesus' ministry and most of his miracles were interruptions. Almost every miracle Jesus did, He did because He let Himself be interrupted. The Bible says this: (Prov. 3:28) "Never tell your neighbors to wait until tomorrow if you can help them now." Servant-hearted people don't procrastinate. They're spontaneous, they're sensitive, and they say "let's do it!" Here was John Wesley's motto:

• Do all the good you can by all the means you can by all the ways you can in all the places you can and at all the times you can to all the people you can as long as you ever can.

That is greatness. That's what it means to be shaped to serve God. You must be available. You must be willing to step out of your comfort zone, and ask, "God what do You want me to do?" There are hurting people all around us, and the wounded will not wait. We've got to help them now.

What keeps us from being available? Let me give three common barriers. Number one: self-centeredness. The Bible says, "Forget yourself long enough to lend a helping hand." (Phil. 2:4) Whenever you see a need right in front of you, God is giving you the opportunity to learn to serve, to be like Jesus Christ. The number 1 enemy of compassion is busyness - because I'm so busy, I don't have time to serve. I've got my agenda, my plans, my dreams, my goals, my ambitions. We hang on the door of our heart a "Do Not Disturb" notice. "I've got my goals, my life going here, so don't disturb me for the needs of other people." But if you have a servant heart, like Jesus Christ, you don't mind being interrupted because your agenda is God's agenda. You get up in the morning and say "OK, God, you want to bring somebody in my life today? Bring them in!" Almost every miracle and almost every act of ministry Jesus did, He did when He was interrupted. Self-centeredness gets in the way.

A second barrier to being used by God is perfectionism. Wanting every thing to be perfect - "When it's all just right, when things settle down, then I'll serve." Let's read Eccl. 11:4: "If you wait for perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done." Real servants, Christ-like servants, do the best they can with what they have for Jesus Christ today. They don't wait. We can make an idol out of excellence - we say "Well, you know if you can't do it first class, don't even try." There's a term for that… hogwash! We need to learn that it doesn't have to be perfect for God to bless it. If God only used perfect people, what would get done in this world? Nothing, zero! We're all misfits. We all have weaknesses, faults, failures and handicaps. But God uses us all. God doesn't use perfect people because there aren't any.

Materialism is the third barrier that keeps us from being available to serve. Jesus said, "No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money." (Lk. 16:13). Would you circle the word "cannot"? He didn't say, "You should not serve both God and money." He said, "You cannot serve both God and money." You've got to decide whether you want to be rich or you want to be blessed. Really! You have to ask, "What's number one in priority in my life?" You cannot serve both God and money. It's an impossibility. You get so busy taking care of things; you don't have time to take care of people. The most important decision you have to make in life once you become a believer is, "Am I going to be a kingdom-builder or am I going to be a wealth-builder?" If God wants to give you wealth, that's great, but it is not the number one goal of your life. You're not taking your wealth with you to heaven, but your character. So put being be a kingdom-builder first and let God take care of the rest. If your job is keeping you from having any kind of service, you need to make some adjustments.

So serving means being available. Serving like Jesus also means being grateful. To serve like Jesus, we have to serve gratefully, grateful for the opportunity to serve. John' gospel tells us about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Jesus prayed out loud so that we could see what He had to say. John 11:41-42, "Jesus looked up and said, 'Father, I thank You that You heard me. I know that You always hear Me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here.'" Jesus had an attitude of gratefulness in everything that He did. He started with gratefulness. That was His attitude in ministry. Now you might think, "I'd be grateful too if I could raise people from the dead." However, Jesus was grateful in the tough times. Jesus was grateful when He was criticized. Jesus was grateful when things were not easy in ministry. Ministry and miracles always happened in this attitude of gratefulness. The apostle Paul was grateful. He said, "I thank Jesus Christ because He trusted me. He gave me this work of serving Him." And the Bible talks about the attitude of gratefulness in Psalm 100:2: "Serve the Lord with gladness."

Why should we serve God with gratefulness, not with a sense of duty, but with a sense of delight, not out of a sense of obligation, but a sense of the great opportunity that He's given to us? We serve Him with gratefulness because He's given life to us through Jesus Christ. He saved us! And if He never did anything else for us, that is enough to be grateful for the rest of our lives to serve Him. Look at what the Bible has to say about that in 2 Tim. 1:9: "It is He who saved us and chose us for His holy work, not because we deserved it, but because that was His plan." He saved us, and out of gratitude for that, for what He has done for us, we serve Him.

However there are things that get in the way of gratitude. One of them is comparing and criticizing. When you compare to others, when you criticize others, that is a barrier that gets in the way of being grateful. The Bible tells us in Rom. 14:4, "Who are you to criticize someone else's servant? The Lord will determine whether His servant has been successful." We're all His servants. So it's a matter of His opinion, not my opinion or your opinion of one another. Competition with each other in service doesn't make sense. We're on the same team, with the same goal. We're trying to show the world how good God really is. He's given us different abilities, different tasks so to think we can compare or criticize in that is pretty ridiculous.

The second thing that can get in the way is wrong motivations. Jesus said, "When you do good deeds, don't try to show off. If you do, you won't get a reward from your Father in heaven" (Matthew 6:1). Self-promotion and servant-hood don't mix, but it's easy to get them mixed up. Service can be self-serving at times. We serve to get others to like us, to be admired, to achieve our own goals, as sort of a bargaining chip with God. "God, I'll serve if You take care of me here." All kinds of wrong motivations. We're serving, but thinking about how noble we are. We're humble, but thinking proudly about how humble we are! How do you know if you have a wrong motivation? Gratitude. When you lose a sense of gratefulness in your life, you can know there's something wrong with your motivation. Wrong motives don't last and get us caught up with the wrong things. So let's ask God to give us his motives to serve.

To serve like Jesus, you have to learn to serve gratefully with a generous heart, to make yourself available and to be grateful. There's a third thing. Serving like Jesus means being faithful. That means you don't give up, you keep on going. At the end of Jesus' ministry on earth, he said this in John 17:4, "I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work that You gave me to do." Circle "completing the work". I want you to be able to say that when you get to heaven. You completed the work that God gave you to do. Jesus was faithful in fulfilling His service. He didn't give up. He didn't give in. He was persistent. If you're going to be like Jesus it means you're going to serve as long as you're alive. You may retire from your job someday, but you never retire from ministry, from service, because God wants you to serve the rest of your life.

So what motivates us to keep on going? The Bible says, (1Corinthians 4:2) "The one thing required of servants is that they be faithful." How do we be faithful? There are a lot of things. We've just talked about being grateful for all the past that God's forgiven in our lives. If God never did another thing for me, I owe Him the rest of my life for what He's already done for me. And then I think of trust and faith in future rewards. He said, "You're going to be rewarded forever and ever in eternity for what you do here on earth in serving Me by serving others." We have gratitude for the past and we have faith in the future reward. We also know that what we're doing really matters. Honestly, most of what we do in life doesn't matter. But any time you're serving in Jesus' name, no matter how small, it matters. The Bible says this in 1Corinthians 15:58, "Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for Him is a waste of time or effort." Notice "nothing" - that means it all matters, even the little stuff. In God's book, there is no little service. Jesus said, "Even if you give a cup of cold water in my name to a child, that counts."

If you're going to learn to be a servant of God, you must learn the difference between significance and prominence. They are not the same thing. On my body, my nose is quite prominent. But I could lose my nose and still live the rest of my life, because while it's prominent, it's not significant. But if I lost my liver, or my heart, which are not very prominent, I'd be dead. A lot of people think that if something is given a lot of visibility, it's the most important, but that's not true. In fact the stuff behind the scenes is more important, God says. The parts of your body that you don't see are more important than the parts you do see, and the same is true in the Church, the Body of Christ. It all matters. With our limited perspective, we can't see how our small acts have big consequences, but they do!

Several years ago two teenage boys tried to come into a church service but it was packed out and they couldn't find any seats. So they turned around and decided to leave. But one usher said, "Come on, guys. I'll find you a seat." He did, and that night both of them became Christians. One was Billy Graham who has since led millions of people to Christ. We have no idea of the significance of small acts, so never belittle the little because it's all important. Real servants do every task with equal dedication because they know it all matters. Would you write this down? Don't mistake anonymous for insignificant, or even unnecessary. Just because it's not known doesn't mean it's unnecessary. Do you know the names of all the people who have made this service today happen - preparing the room, and what's in it, the different aspects of our time together? It was all done by anonymous volunteers. It's all important.

Do you ever think our church doesn't need your help? There are always more needs to be met than people willing to get up off their seat and say, "I was shaped to serve Christ." You're here in this Church partly because God knew you had something to give back. He did not bring you here just to sit and soak and enjoy. He brought you here to serve. God knows that you have something – background, talent, skill, ability, contact, network, interest, hobby, or whatever - that he can use that to serve others. The question is how will God use you? There's a paper on the seats today called, "You Were Shaped For Serving God". I want you to take this home this week, to study it prayerfully and ask, "Where might my niche be in my church family?" I want you to contact the person who's overseeing any areas where you feel God is perhaps calling you to serve. You have something to offer. God brought you here, where you could find serving possibilities. The fact is, God wants to use you. He really does.

When you boil it all down, you can do two things with your life. You can waste it, or you can invest it. The best use of life is to invest it in that which is going to outlast it. One day you're going to stand before God and He's going to say to you, "What did you do with what I gave you, the talents, the abilities, the background, the experiences, the freedom, the education, the family experiences? What did you do with your SHAPE?" If you answer, "Well, God, I was a little busy with my ambitions and plan. I never got around to serving You." God's going to say, "Wrong answer! What were you thinking? I didn't put you on earth to live for yourself. I put you here to serve Me by serving others." You may think nobody's watching you, or noticing what you do, but God's watching. Look at this verse, Hebrews 6:10: "He will not forget how hard you've worked for Him and how you've shown your love to Him." How? "By caring for other Christians". God keeps His promise. On earth they give awards for 10 years of faithful service? In heaven you're going to get eternal rewards. Look at the next verse (Matthew 25:21). "Well done good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things so; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness." I want God to be able to say that about you. I want God to look into your eyes and say to you, "Good job! Well done! You did what I put you here on earth to do. You worshiped me, you shared fellowship with other believers, you grew in character to be like Christ, and you served Me, the way I shaped you. Well done! Come on in and enjoy eternity and all the rewards I've planned for you." I want God to be able to say that about you, because you were shaped for serving God.

I started this message talking about Elvis. A curious fact about Elvis… the only Grammy award he won for an album out of 250 million albums sold, was for a religious album that he recorded called, "He Touched Me". And a song on that album expresses this very verse. It says this:
After the lightening and thunder,
After the last bell has rung,
I want to bow down before Jesus
And hear Him say, "Well done, my son."
He is my reason for living,
He is my King of Kings.
I long to be in His possession.
He is my everything.
Is God going to be able to say "well done" to you? "You spent your life in serving Me." Are you giving back unselfishly, or are you too busy? Are you waiting for things to slow down? Or do you have other priorities? If everybody here served, what impact would we make for God in the world?" The most important thing you'll ever do with your life is serving God in ministry. It's far more important than your career, than your hobbies, than everything else you can think of because they aren't going to last. But this is. You were put here on earth to practice serving.

Let's bow our heads. Would you pray this?

Father I realize that I was shaped to serve You by serving others. Forgive me for the times I've put a "do not disturb" sign on my heart. Help me to see the interruptions as opportunities to serve. Help me to make time for what matters most. You've been so good to me. I want to give something back. I want to serve You freely and gratefully and faithfully, and I want to practice before I get to heaven so one day I can hear You say "Well done, good and faithful servant". In Your name I pray, Amen.