Service: Shunning Greatness
Scott Lyons
8/6/2010

My seven-year-old daughter recently had tubes put in her ears, and we bought special earplugs for her so that she could swim throughout the summer. We spent a day in one of my favorite places on Lake Michigan. My daughter loved the unusually rough waters but stood with her hands over her ears, not trusting the earplugs to do their job. Eventually she wanted me to simply hold her. And so I held her with her back against my chest and with my back against the incoming waves while she covered her ears with her hands. We rode some waves and pushed through others. And as the waves broke over me, they parted around her. This is a picture of service. It is using our backs to bear others’ burdens, if only for a moment.

Service is not service if it is about self-aggrandizement, if it is about me rather than another. If we have our gain in mind when we serve (looking for some kind of recognition from man, or doing it because people expect it of us), then we have not yet learned how to serve. True service flows out of our communion with Christ. Now someone might say that Christ said that if you want to be first, then you must become the servant of all (Mark 9:33-35), and that Christ said that the path to being great is service. Yes and no. If we’re not careful, if we mishandle the text because we do not understand love, the service becomes the means of our own vainglory (and therefore the means of our own ruin) – this is not what Christ is saying. Service is not paying our dues that we might be great. We do not give (of our money, time, talent, etc.) because we want to be given more, because we want our possessions increased. Jesus is simply saying that those who serve are great in the Kingdom. It is the mark of greatness, the mark of the Kingdom. Christ himself, the primary example of his own words, did not come to serve that he might be the greatest of all. He left behind his greatness, did not consider it something to cling to. And he did so because he is love. Service is love. Service is greatness, but only when it is truly service, only when it is not about my glory, but God’s. I do not seek to become less and less in order to dispense with needing to be less in heaven. I seek to become less and less that Christ might be magnified, to become less and less because he became nothing for me. I want to participate in his life, to find communion with God who lives in love; I cease to be in communion with him when I seek my own glory or greatness. I do not believe that Mother Teresa washed lepers because she wanted to sit on a throne but because she saw Christ in them and was in love with Christ. We serve Christ because Christ serves. We feed the hungry because Christ is there feeding them. We give water to the thirsty because it is Christ who thirsts.

Similarly, I do not change my children’s diapers because I expect something from them in return, some recognition for my service. I take care of them because I love them, and it needs doing. Anonymity is the glory of service. And serving in anonymity, in hiddenness, protects us from serving for our own gain or for the approval of men. Hidden service is a discipline that slowly, through God’s grace, kneads my heart until it produces right and true service—service that is humble and quiet. Hidden service is about God and neighbor and not about me. And we serve others not because they deserve it or have earned it but because, as the Scriptures say, we have the obligation, the ever-outstanding debt to love others (Romans 13:8). But we must practice this service quietly. We must work at doing it unnoticed whenever possible, like a mother nursing her newborn. A nursing mother is so quiet and unassuming, so expected, that she is invisible. Her selflessness is without thanks, without praise, without acclaim. She serves Christ in her child. We serve Christ in our neighbor. And we must serve all people, considering them better than ourselves, because of our love for Christ.