March 5, 2006 – Pastor Matt Kronberg
Sermon Series: Against the Grain
Week I: “The Countercultural Jesus” - Matthew 20:17-28
“Service that is duty-motivated breathes death. Service that flows out of our inward person is life, and joy and peace.” – Richard Foster
Jesus lived a countercultural life of service and calls his followers to do the same. Over the next 6 weeks, while we’re working our way through this sermon series in Lent, I challenge you to be intentional about serving God and and others in concrete ways. Here are a few practical ideas as to how we could live counterculturally in the way of Jesus today*:
- Serving through “small” acts—i.e. words of kindness, sending a note to a friend, buying someone coffee or lunch, doing chores around the house without having to be asked, etc.
- Serving through hospitality
- Serving through “protecting the reputation of others”—i.e. refusing to say anything bad about anyone, not gossiping, etc.
- Serving through listening attentively
- Serving in secrecy, or “hidden service”—one of the most powerful and effective ways of developing humility
- Serving through the giving of your time and presence
- Serving ALL, not just whom we choose—friend and enemy, rich and poor.
- Serving through being available and vulnerable
- Serving through bearing one another’s burdens
This is our challenge: to begin to foster service as a discipline—not out of duty, but out of love for God and your fellow human being.
If you would like to share a story of what you have learned or what you are learning about the discipline of service, please share it in the comments—and it might just make its way into one of the upcoming sermons.
*Several of the above ideas came from Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (Harper, 1978).
