Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2449
“If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me, and where I am there My servant will be also: if anyone serves Me, him will My Father honor.” John 12:26.
THIS verse is all about serving and service. Three times over you get the word, “serve,” or, “servant.” Each clause of our text has in it a part of the verb, “to serve.” You cannot have Christ if you will not serve Him! If you take Christ, you must take Him in all His Characters, not only as Friend, but also as Master. And if you are to become His disciple, you must also become His servant. I hope that no one here kicks against that Truth of God! Surely it is one of our highest delights on earth to serve our Lord and this is to be our blessed employment even in Heaven, itself—“His servants shall serve Him: and they shall see His face.”
This thought also enters into our idea of salvation. To be saved means that we are rescued from the slavery of sin and brought into the delightful liberty of the servants of God. O Master, You are such a glorious Lord that serving You is perfect freedom and sweetest rest! You have told us that it would be so and we have found it so. “Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls.” We do find it so and it is not as though rest were a separate thing from service—the very service, itself, becomes rest to our souls! I know not how some of us would have any rest on earth if we could not employ our daily lives in the service of Christ! And the rest of Heaven is never to be pictured as idleness, but as constantly being permitted the high privilege of serving the Lord.
Learn, then, all of you who would have Christ as your Savior, that you must be willing to serve Him. We are not saved by service, but we are saved to service. When we are once saved, from then on we live in the service of our Lord. If we refuse to be His servants, we are not saved, for we still remain evidently the servants of self and the servants of Satan. Holiness is another name for salvation—to be delivered from the power of self-will, the domination of evil lusts and the tyranny of Satan—this is salvation. Those who would be saved must know that they will have to serve Christ—and those who are saved rejoice that they are serving Him and that thus they are giving evidence of a change of heart and renewal of mind! Come, Beloved, and when the text says, “If anyone serves Me,” let each of us read his own name, there, and let us say, “Yes, I would serve the Lord Jesus Christ.”
If we cannot read our own name there as yet, let us pray God that we may first believe in Jesus unto eternal life and then, receiving that eternal life, may spend the full force and strength of it in His service! I hope that I am addressing a large number of those who are working together with God, who have said concerning their great King as Ittai said to David, “Surely in what place my lord the king shall be, whether in death or life, even there, also, will your servant be.” You have taken up Christ’s Cross—it has become a delightful burden to you—and you wish to bear it after Jesus as long as you live. May you be helped in that desire by the consideration of the passage before us!
First, here is the rule of service—“If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me.” Secondly, here is the fellowship of service—“Where I am, there My servant will be also.” And thirdly, here is the reward of service—“If anyone serves Me, him will my Father honor.”
I. First, dear Friends, here is THE RULE OF SERVICE—“If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me.”
So you are proposing to yourself that you will serve Christ, are you? You are a young man. As yet you have plenty of vigor and strength and you say to yourself, “I will serve Christ in some remarkable way! I will seek to make myself a scholar. I will try to learn the art of oratory and I will, in some way or other, glorify my Lord’s name by the splendor of my language.” Will you, dear Friend? Is it not better, if you are going to serve Christ, to ask Him what He would like you to do? If you wished to do a kindness for a friend, you certainly would desire to know what would best please that friend, or else your kindness might be mistaken and you might be doing that which would grieve rather than gratify! Now listen. Your Lord and Master does not bid you become either a scholar or an orator in order to serve Him. Both of those things may happen to fall to your lot in that path of duty which He would have you to take, but first of all He says, “If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me.”
This is what Christ prefers beyond anything else—that His servants should follow Him. If we do that, we shall serve Him in the way which is according to His own choice. I notice that many good friends desire to serve Christ by standing on the top rung of the ladder. You cannot get there at one step, young man! Your better way will be to serve Christ by following Him, by, “doing the next thing,” the thing you can do—that little simple business which lies within your capacity which will bring you no special honor, but which, nevertheless, is what your Lord desires of you. In effect, you can hear Him say to you, “If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me, not by aiming at great things, but by doing just that piece of work that I put before Him at the time.” “Do you seek great things for yourself?” said the Prophet Jeremiah to Ba-ruch, “seek them not.” So say I to you.