BY WALT ALBRITTON
OPINION —
Jesus told how the Spirit of the Lord came upon him and anointed him to preach. I remember when the same thing happened to me.
During my senior year in Wetumpka High School, I helped to arrange a youth revival that was held in June at my home church, Wetumpka First Methodist. Several friends shared my excitement about Jesus; we wanted to see other teenagers find what we had found – the joy of being saved from their sins.
The revival is a dim memory now; I don’t recall that anyone was saved. All I remember is that one night during that revival the Spirit of the Lord came upon me and called me to the ministry. I can take you to the exact place at the altar rail where I knelt in tears and said yes to the Lord. I went to church praying for others to be saved and I got called to preach. My sweetheart, Dean, who would become my wife two years later, was kneeling by my side. That was the first of many surprises I have experienced in my journey with Jesus.
The reaction of my family and my friends was supportive, quite unlike the response Jesus received from those he had grown up with in Nazareth. My friends did not become angry and try to push me off the Bibb Graves Bridge. Those listening to Jesus describe his call to preach wanted to throw him off a cliff.
While Jesus had no doubt about his mission in life, I did. I struggled with doubt, unsure if my call was real. Who was I, after all, to claim that almighty God had called me to preach? Uncertainty dogged me during my early months in college. Finally, in my sophomore year, I had a breakthrough. My doubt gave way to what the church calls “blessed assurance.” I received that confidence as a gift from God, affirming that my calling was genuine.
God was gracious. He used one person after another to bring light into my darkness. One of those persons was Elton Trueblood, a Quaker preacher and college professor of philosophy, who became my friend and mentor. He helped me grasp the truth that every Christian is a minister in the broader sense of that word. His teaching made sense. “A non-serving Christian is a contradiction in terms,” he said. “To be a disciple of Jesus is to serve others in love, for God calls all Christians to the ministry of servanthood.”
Trueblood did not mean that every Christian is a pastor or a preacher. By minister he meant a servant of Jesus. Every Christian, then, is a ministering servant of Jesus Christ.
This is a concept not fully understood by our generation. Many insist on the separation of the secular and the sacred, with life divided into separate arenas. The truth is, in the eyes of God all of life is sacred.
Embrace this idea and you begin to see that God “calls” schoolteachers to a “ministry” of service to children. Expanding this concept brings the dignity of Christian ministry to other vocations such as medicine, law, social service and other disciplines. Wherever there are people with needs, God calls his disciples to see their work as a calling to the ministry of servanthood. So, the defining mark of a Christian is a servant’s heart!
Work may be gloriously dignified when we see it as a ministry. An attorney, homemaker, doctor, nurse, teacher, carpenter, architect, plumber, electrician – each can see their work as a Christ-honoring ministry that helps people. A “job” can be boring when done simply for money. A “ministry” can be exciting when done with love for the glory of God. The key is in the two words: serving others.
In one of his books Trueblood offered a definition of a Christian that is worth remembering:
“A Christian is a person who, in the midst of many voices clamoring for his attention, hears the Voice of Christ, and that one Voice wins his complete allegiance and he begins to know the dignity of his little life being used for a mighty purpose.”
No matter where our vocation has placed us, when we hear and obey the Voice of Christ, the true Inner Voice, calling us to ministry, we will find joy in knowing that our little lives are being used for God’s mighty purposes. That is a joy that no amount of money can provide! And it all begins when the Spirit of the Lord comes upon you — and you respond with a servant’s heart!
