SCRIPTURE READING | Galatians 5:13-17 NIV
13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.
I WILL. SERVICE. | Pastor Thanael Certa-Werner
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about the promises that United Methodists make when they join a church – to support it by their prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. We started by looking at prayer as a learning process in which we draw close to God’s heart by spending time with Him. We talked about presence and the importance of being together and supporting each other through both good times and bad times. Last week we talked about gifts – how our gifts are really God’s grace on loan to us to use in partnership with God and His work.
This week we’re taking a look at supporting the Church with our service – and not just any service but Godly service. Before we begin, let’s take a look at the memory verse we’ve been working on over the last few weeks.
For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building. 1 Corinthians 3:9 NIV
When we think of service, especially in our normal day-to-day lives, the first thing we often think of is a restaurant. Or maybe a hair salon or a hotel. Actually, there are a lot of places in our world where we see service. In fact, our economy is a service-based economy. But when we talk about service as Christians, it’s a little bit different.
Paul describes that to best understand service, we have to understand the Law and freedom. Now when Paul, or practically anyone in the Bible, talks about the Law, they specifically mean the Torah. It’s the first five books of the Bible and it contains a LOT of laws. 613 to be precise. Now-a-days, we leave the intensive study of law to lawyers. Most of us don’t have our printed and bound constitutions for us to study, but in Jesus’ time, and for much of history, Jews have been proud to study the Law very closely. In fact, in Jesus’ time it was expected for boys of age five to begin memorizing the Torah and they had until age 13. And you guys thought the memory verse was hard!
But the question really is, why was this so important? As Christians, we also view the Torah as important to our lives, but we hardly take the time to memorize it. Why was it important to the people living in Jesus’ time? It comes down to two things. The first you can thank Gutenberg for. We have books and they’re cheap! In ancient Israel, people had to memorize the scriptures they were going to be able to use them or let them transform their lives.
In many ways, but especially in this respect, we have it much easier. The very fact that we have tools like the Upper Room and the printed Bible to help us be connected to the Word of God daily is an advantage – but also a disadvantage. Memorizing the scriptures meant the scriptures were with people at all times, peculating in the minds of those who memorized them. It meant while you were out in the field performing manual labor, you were thinking over what God has revealed to us and letting it change you.
The second reason that memorizing was so important was because of a group called the Pharisees. You might have heard of them before? Jesus mentions them a few times, here and there. None-the-less, the Pharisees were actually a very large group of Jews whose main goal was to “activate” the coming of the Messiah. They reasoned that the way they might call for the messiah – the batman signal they could use – was the perfect obedience to the Law. If they could just get everyone in Israel to know they Law and obey it, then God would send the Messiah.
But in both the Pharisee’s case and often our cases today, there is a missing piece. The main problem with the Pharisees is that they could not see the Law for what it was intended to do. They were not bad people – Jesus does scold them multiple times but He never says that they are bad people. In fact, multiple times you can see that in a backwards kind of way, Jesus points out that the Pharisees are living good lives. But what they are missing is the key part of a complete and faithful life – freedom in the Law.
There’s a story in the Bible that talks about this. You can find this story in Mark chapter 2. Jesus is walking through a grain field with His disciples and it’s the Sabbath. Now according to Jewish Law – according to the Torah – no work is to be done on the Sabbath. Even to this day, this is a strict law for many conservative Jews who will not even use light switches on the Sabbath. And as Jesus and His disciples are walking, the disciples get hungry, so they pick some grain as they walk by and eat it. Of course, the Pharisees are right on this. They say, “Look at what these guys are doing! We all know that’s illegal on the Sabbath!” But Jesus’ reply is that the Sabbath is made for people and not people for the sabbath.
What does this mean? And will we ever get to the part where we talk about service? Well let me tell you. What Jesus has offered us, as Christians, is a new way of living and of understanding the Law. The Law was made for God’s Children, not God’s Children made for the Law. In other words, the Law is there to give us support and freedom to know how to live Godly lives.
This doesn’t mean the freedom to disregard what the Law says. But as Paul says to the Galatians, “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.” This freedom in the Law is not freedom from the Law. The freedom which we receive in Jesus and in the Law is the freedom of living Godly lives. Jesus summarizes the entire Torah – all of the Law – by saying this, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”
The rest is commentary. If we look at the Ten commandments, we can see this clearly! The first four are about loving God and the last six are about loving your neighbors. Throughout the Law, all 613 of them, you can see this pattern. The Spirit of the Law is love and that same Spirit is the one which calls us to servitude – but not just the servitude which we see in restaurants, hair salons, or even the Peace Core. Paul says that a lesson on service is really a lesson on the Law because we have to walk in the Spirit of the Law – the living, moving, fiery Spirit – which grants us wisdom and guidance. The difference here between the service we do in the world and the service we do in the Church really is in this Spirit.
It is not impossible to do good things and to not be a Christian. It’s not impossible to serve others while denying that Jesus is Lord. But what makes Christian service so different and special is the very fact that it is in this act that we are completing the act of the first. What that confusing sentence means is that when we serve other people, we are fulfilling the second part of Jesus command – to love your neighbor as yourself – but we are also completing the first part – to love God with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strengths. Because when we love God, we’ll love what He loves and He loves His people.
Our freedom which has been granted through the life and death of Jesus really does change everything. No more are we bound to the letter of the law but bound to live in the Spirit of Law – a Spirit of Love which calls us to humble service to each other.
This is our challenge for this week. Right now, it is hard to see clear ways of being in service to each other. But the fact that life is not normal right now allows for us to be in service in new ways – ways we would never have considered before. So this week, think of a new way you can serve your neighbor and carry it out by the end of the week. Then share with someone else in this church – in our community of Christ what you did. Because as we talked about two weeks ago, part of being in this community is encouraging others to live into the life Christ is calling us to.
Amen? AMEN.