Becoming a Player

Photo by Meck Creative

In addition to becoming a disciple – a learner – Jesus desires for those of us who follow Him to become a player—to get into the game. 

We all want to make a difference. We want our lives to stand out and to count for something. We know we are players in a game, and we don’t want to be sitting on the bench.

Making a difference matters—not just in terms of personal fulfillment, but also in regard to spiritual development. The heart of difference-making is the giving away of yourself, the investing of yourself.

According to the math of the Christian life, the more you give, the more you receive. This is why Jesus was simultaneously the most influential figure in all of human history and the ultimate model of spiritual living. For He “did not come to be served, but to serve,” and to give His life away (Mark 10:45).

We, too, are called to be servants, and serving others is essential to our spiritual life. So how does this actually work? In four ways:

First, serving others gets you into spiritual shape by putting you through a spiritual workout. When you serve, you build up your faith. Just like when you do a weightlifting workout you build muscle, serving gives your faith the necessary workout it needs to grow strong. If you’re not serving, your spiritual life will be weak, flabby and undeveloped.

A second benefit of serving is that it gets you into the game. It’s the way you become a player and get involved in what God is doing in the world. This is one of our chief purposes in life, for the Bible says: “We are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (Ephesians 2:10, NLT). You were created to take who God made you to be and put yourself into play.

The third payoff of serving others is that it enables you to make a difference in this world—to do something more than just make money, put together a business deal, buy a dream house, or take a vacation. We want our lives to count; we want to do something with our lives that will matter. And there’s only one way for that to happen: to make the investment of service. All you have to do is see one changed life, hear one thank you, see one brief glimpse of impact from some act of service that you’ve done, and your life will never be the same.

Finally, serving others amplifies your impact. Throughout his presidency of the United States, Ronald Reagan kept a sign on his desk that said, “It’s amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Making a difference does not always mean taking center stage. Serving enables something to take place because you supported it and helped make it happen. 

Our goal should be to serve in light of all that we are, with all we are, in the context of the ministry of the church and for the cause of Christ.

The Bible says, “Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service” (Romans 12:1, GNT). Later that same chapter, it says, “So we are to use our different gifts” (v. 6). In Colossians we read, “Be sure to carry out the ministry the Lord gave you” (4:17 NLT). And in 1 Peter the Bible says, “God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another” (4:10 NLT).

Do you see a theme there?

The goal is to put yourself into play! And when you do that, you will reach a level of spiritual fulfillment, energy and passion that you can’t experience any other way. Holistic spiritual vitality and fulfillment can only come when you use your God-given, supernaturally empowered gift in ministry.

Now, let me anticipate what you might be thinking. You have little doubt serving others would serve your spiritual life well, but you’re also wondering how you’re going to find the time to add one more thing to your already crowded, overflowing life. I understand. So let me share a couple of time-related truths that might be helpful and, in ways we all need, challenging.

First, in our world today, we seem to have an almost compulsive need to automatically fill our schedules. I can take someone’s calendar and remove every community group meeting, every ministry involvement, every weekend service, liberating those hours from a person’s life. But you know what? In six weeks, they’ll just have them filled with something else. It’s as if we can’t stand a gap in our schedules.

This leads to a second truth. We tend to fill our time with things that don’t really matter, creating a life too full for what is important. Most of us make to-do lists, but I once heard a speaker comment that what we really need are “stop doing” lists. We tend to be time spenders, not time investors.

We can spend our lives engaged in a number of activities; however, when we are at the end of our years, we’ll look back and see that our lives didn’t add up to very much. Maybe you were busy, you were active, but yours wasn’t a life of significance. If you invest your life, however, you have given your life to something you believe in, something bigger than yourself.

Many people are heavily spent, and they’re very, very busy. They’re stretched to the limit. But they are not investing in anything. There comes a time when you say to yourself, What do I want my life to be like? What am I going to prioritize? The problem for many of us isn’t a lack of time, but instead how we’re choosing to spend our time.

Developing your spiritual life through the practice of servanthood does not start with your needs, but rather the needs of others. It does not begin with your schedule, but instead with what your schedule must be in order to serve.

We are all busy, and we all have competing time demands. The question is whether we will order our lives around what it will take to pursue the Christ life or marginalize the pursuit of the Christ life.

Mark Twain once told a powerful story of a man who died and met Saint Peter at the gates of heaven. Knowing that Peter was very wise, he asked a question that he had wondered about his whole life.

He said: “I have been interested in military history for many years. Read everything I could, studied it, went to battlefields and walked the grounds. Who was the greatest general of all time?”

Peter said: “Oh, that’s easy. It’s that man right over there.”

The man looked over and he knew him! He said: “You have to be mistaken. I knew that man on Earth. He was just a common, everyday man—he managed a store near my house.”

And Peter said: “That’s right. But he would have been the greatest general of all time, if he had been a general.”

What could you be? Who are you meant to be?

What would be the saddest thing imaginable is to be at the end of your life,

... and wonder what you could have been.

James Emery White

Sources 

Adapted from James Emery White, After “I Believe”: Everyday Practices for a Vibrant Faith (Baker), order from Amazon.

This book was adapted into various resources from a “Pastor’s Package” to a small group study. You can find those resources on Church & Culture HERE.