Form of a Servant 1975

Romans 8 28 and 29. We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.

And if God intends to conform us to the image of his Son, this means that his Son has some kind of shape to him. You know, there's some kind of shape to his mind and to the way he relates to his Father and to the way he deals with people. And the Father intends to conform us to that shape.

He's the potter and we now submit ourselves to him as the clay so that he can mold us and shape us into the image of his Son. But while this is God's intention, if our gospel has any truth to it at all, it seems that near and far we're seeing all over the place evidence that just the opposite is often taking place. Almost as if some kind of disease has been setting in, in the body, across the earth, causing the believers to lose their shape.

So that believers who, when they first began following the Lord, began to take on the shape of their Master and manifested the presence of the Christ in the way they lived, have now lost that shape again. Almost as if the clay became too wet, you know, and just began to sag and sink into whatever kind of form happened to be around. Believers who at one point gave tremendous promise of quickly being shaped into the image of the Son of God are now twisted, warped, sagging, soggy caricatures of the shape they once had.

Believers who once gave evidence that they had found some kind of mastery over their bodies in the name of the Lord are now once more being controlled by their bodies. Believers who once had a zeal for God that was fantastic have now had that zeal replaced by a dullness or a critical spirit or a domineering attitude. Believers who, with tremendous abandon, just joyfully gave themselves to doing the Father's will, are now very, very, very carefully measuring out how much of themselves they're going to give.

Believers who once, by means of their speech, the words that came out of their mouths, manifested hearts inside that had been cleansed by the blood of the Lamb, now by their speech, and I'm not just talking about cussing, but also the vicious things we say, are manifesting a heart that has no longer given evidence of cleansing. And the cause of this disease that causes us to lose our shape is not some secret, hidden sin that has to be dug out of our hearts by some expert, but it is a rebellion that is as plain as the nose on our face. It is caused by an unwillingness to submit to a particular form, as if form itself were evil.

Notice how people begin to cringe as soon as we use the word discipline. And what is discipline? Discipline is simply trying to order our daily lives into a form under God, so that we can do His will, so that we need discipline in our prayer life, or we're not going to have any. We're going to have discipline in the way we handle our money, discipline in the way we use our time.

Or notice all the hassles we've had over the recent years about the liturgy. And what is the liturgy? The liturgy is an attempt to bring our worship of God into some kind of form, so that the Pentecostals, and the non-Pentecostals, the Baptists, and the Catholics, and the Lutherans, and the Jews, and the Gentiles can all worship together. Now what we may be doing, or think we're doing, is reacting to people who act as if form is the main thing, or to those who have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof.

But notice that Paul never knocked a form of godliness. He was knocking rather the fact that there was no vitality inside the form, and that Paul himself spent his life under God, forming the disciples, and forming churches, without ever violating their will, without ever manipulating them. Nevertheless, forming them under God into some kind of form.

What kind of bridge would you have if the engineers decided to tear out all the forms? Get rid of the forms, man. Just let the cement trucks dump the cement down the valley. You know you'd have billions of tons of concrete sagging through the valley, and you still wouldn't have a bridge.

What would happen to you if suddenly all the bones in your body, which give it form, disintegrated, and you would be a formless blob of muscles, fat, and organs? How are you going to talk without a jaw? And how are you going to breathe without a rib cage? And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, and when there was light, there was form. God brought order out of this chaos. Look at our Lord's life.

It was the same. There was order, there was form, there was a pattern, there was discipline. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom.

I thought Jesus wasn't in bondage to customs. And the reason Judas could find him in Gethsemane was because Jesus went to Gethsemane all the time. On schedule, Judas knew when he would be there.

But it's not just our fear of form as such which is our problem. It's that we're afraid of a particular kind of form. We're unwilling to submit to a form which marks the life of the Son of God, and also marks the life of every follower of Jesus who is truly a follower of Jesus.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. What does this mean but, get into this form and learn to be like me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. Who being in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.

There it is. The form of a servant, which is the thing we most desperately need to have and the last thing we want to submit. Ever since the revival hit Detroit five or so years ago and all these marvelous things have been going on, we've endlessly heard people talking about being servants.

And yet for all the talk of servanthood, how rarely does it ever come about. Why? Because while we like to be a servant every once in a while, we don't want to submit to the form of a servant. See, and we're so unservant-like in our nature that we will never be indeed and in truth servants of a living God until we submit ourselves to his hands, not some human hands, understand, his hands.

That he might mold us and shape us and chip us and bend us and fit us into the form of his son. So that when God says yield, we yield and we keep being yielded. And when he says bend, we bend and we stay bent.

And when he says wash feet, we wash feet and we keep on washing them. We need to come into the form of a servant. First of all, in our relationship with Jesus himself, just the same way that Jesus emptied himself of his glory and took the form of a servant so that he could commit himself utterly to doing the Father's will, we likewise empty ourselves of our vanity.

We don't have any glory, but we got bags of vanity, all of us. See, you don't get rid of three-fourths of it, but you get rid of all of it. You empty yourself of it.

And only then can you take the form of a servant so that we can devote ourselves utterly to doing our Master's will. So that instead of saying, Lord, Lord, Lord, and going right on doing our own thing, we now train ourselves, discipline ourselves to thinking, speaking, acting as servants of the living God. And everything in our lives that would have us think of ourselves in any other way gets pushed out with an act of our own will.

For instance, let's say you just finished really going way, way out of your way for somebody because you knew the Lord wanted you to do that. Now the job's over, the pressure is off, and you can relax. So what happens? Right away, your ego starts to expand.

And before ten minutes have gone by, you see yourself as the most committed disciple in the whole fellowship, maybe in the whole city. And then, praise God, suddenly the Spirit wakes you up and you see what's going on. And the minute you catch yourself, the minute you do this, you take your mind and your thoughts and you force them, you bend them into the form of a servant by doing exactly what Jesus told us to do.

He said, when you have done everything that was commanded of you, say, we are unprofitable servants, worthless servants, and we have done only that which was commanded of us. And if you have to keep saying that to yourself a thousand times until the reality of that becomes part of your life, until your spiritual, your fleshly servanthood takes on some servant bones, keep saying those words, you know, keep saying it to God until it becomes truth. Secondly, we need to come into the form of a servant in terms, in our relationship, in terms of our relationship with each other.

There are all kinds of weird teachings going around town and all over the country right now that are encouraging people, believers, to exalt themselves over other believers. You know, pseudo pastors, you know, knocking themselves out, trying to make the sheep submit to them, not to Jesus, to me. You know, I'll answer for you, buddy.

Just submit to me. And the same thing is going on with husbands. Oh, they're just straining at the bit trying to make their wives submit to them.

A dispute also arose among them, which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. And he said to them, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you.

Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader as one who serves. God, show us what that means. When he had washed their feet and taken his garments and resumed his place, he said to them, do you know what I've done to you? You call me teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am.

If I then, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet, for I have given you an example that you also should do as I have done to you. And I take this to mean that we have to get hold of this domineering spirit, which we all have, and force it into the form of him who continuously washes feet until washing feet becomes our second nature. And here's a favorite for all the men.

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word that he might present the church to himself in splendor. He wasn't putting her down, making her feel like nothing without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish. And I see this passage begins with the command that we are to be subject to one another, to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Now, if I am my wife's head, I'm certainly not her head by forcing her around. I'm her head by serving her, loving her, spending myself for her, even as she spends herself. And until the male chauvinists among us learn to be pure, holy, godly servants to their sisters in the body, they will never be able to exercise authority over anything in the name of the Lord because they are not submitting to his servant image.

Until they learn to be thoughtful of their sisters. So whether you're male or female, married or single, if you find yourself, you know, in a thankless task, find yourself in a situation that's really drab, a function in the body that just doesn't have any glamour to it at all. Before you get all depressed, take another look at that and see how that very thankless situation is the form you need to hold you in shape until God is able to develop in your servant flesh some servant bones.

And finally, we need to come into the servant form, the form of a servant in terms of our relationship with those devastated souls outside the body, outside the kingdom of God, who don't get service from anybody except their spiritual pimp, the devil, the forgotten ones, the rejected ones. Then the householder, in anger, said to his servant, go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame. Now if we're going to be that servant, if we're going to be identified with him, this is going to mean for all of us that we are going to make ourselves do some things that just don't come naturally.

We are going to train ourselves to get close to those forgotten ones and we're going to force ourselves to be their servants and be their servants and continue to be their servants until it becomes our nature. Oh, I hear somebody saying, but wait a minute. I'm waiting to be led by the spirit.

No, you're not. Spirit already told you to do that. You know it.

You're waiting for the spirit to make it easy. If Jesus had waited for the spirit to make it easy, he would never have gone to the cross. It's never easy starting out.

Never. It always begins with disruption and pain. Only when you begin to fit into that servant image, only when you start to do it, does it become easy.

The yoke of the Lord is hard, just terribly hard, as long as you stand there and look at it. It only becomes easy when you get under it and begin to pull with him and serve. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.

All right. So God foreknows. Who of us in here is going to be conformed to the image of his Son? Who of us in here is going to submit to the yoke and become like Jesus? But notice God predestines only those whom he foreknows, which simply means that right now we indeed have a choice.

Don't say I predestined so it doesn't make any difference. Right now our choice is, are we going to submit to the hands of the Father and let him mold us into servants and give our servant flesh from servant bones, or are we going to degenerate into formless masses of spiritual flab? Right now, in all our circumstances, God is giving us ample opportunity to get into the form of his despised and rejected Son. All kinds of opportunities.

May God help us to grab those things and use them to the full. Let's wait upon him now in prayer. Lord God, we just ask that you'd show us what these things mean in terms of our own lives.

And we ask especially that during the remainder of this service, should there be any here who are standing at the door of the kingdom and longing to find the liberty that you've promised and the healing that you've offered and the deliverance which is found only in you, Lord Jesus, that your Spirit, Lord, would just move on these souls and help them through the door. Whatever, in whatever way it pleases you. Lord, we pray that you will indeed work miracles in every one of our lives and deal with those rebellious, hard, self-righteous, self-satisfied things in us that have destroyed and have twisted and have warped your nature that you've given us.

Bring us back into shape. Even this day, Lord, show us the steps we need to take. We ask it for your mercy sake.

Amen.