Spiritual disciplines, that's the word that most people use when they discuss this topic. The words that we see in scripture are exercising thyself unto godliness. 1 Timothy 4, 7, but refuse profane and old wise fables and exercise thyself rather unto godliness. So we could say there are certain exercises that we should keep ourselves in that help us or put us on the path for God working out godliness in our lives. We're created for God's glory, but we're saved to be made, turned, changed into the image of Christ, but that doesn't just happen. It's not like we get saved, and then we sit in our house and do nothing, and God changes us into the image of Christ. He gives us things that we can do, and because we're human beings, And we still have a sin nature that's lazy, at least mine is lazy, and selfish, and self-serving. All these things become exercises. And I know there's a few weird people that like exercises, but they didn't start out liking exercises. They do it enough that they can enjoy it. And just in a human sense, God gives us these exercises, these disciplines that we can enjoy, but our base human nature does not enjoy. Even listening to preaching. You say, well, I'm here. I'm not having any problem. Well, you've done it enough. To have somebody get up and tell you how you're wrong and how you don't match up with the Bible is not an enjoyable exercise. And it doesn't happen every time someone gets up and teaches the Bible, but often enough. And so it's an exercise. It's a discipline that we have to do. We have to get ourselves into. So last week we began talking about the discipline of serving, of working. And it's just, to me it's ironic that I'm bringing this up, started last week and then this week and today, we've got NBT going on, on top of, you know, many people aren't here right now because they're out picking up people to bring to church. We are known as a working church. But are you serving? in your church is the question. Just because you attend a working church doesn't mean you're serving. Just because you attend a soul winning church doesn't mean you're a soul winner. Just because you attend a Bible teaching and preaching church doesn't mean that you enjoy Bible teaching and preaching. Just because the congregation gives generously to the Lord's work doesn't mean you are giving generously to the Lord's work. All of these things, are things that churches should do, but we can't just hide behind our church that does it. So I don't know. It's not like I went through the church director and said, oh, this person, they need this lesson. When I think of our church, I think generally of a working church. And I just went through this spring trying to place people in ministry and all the sheets of paper that came back of like, I can do this, I can do this. It's wonderful. It's wonderful to serve the Lord and it's wonderful to work in a church where people want to serve the Lord. At the same time, I'm challenged as I study this lesson, and so I'm sure that the Lord may have a challenge for you also. Are you a serving Christian? We use, and I'm gonna review for a bit, and then try to finish this lesson out this morning. Last week we talked about the Pony Express, and how we've all heard of the Pony Express, and yet it only was in existence for less than a year and a half. And I went through a bunch of stuff about it, but remember how the man, or how the newspaper advertised openings for this job? Wanted, young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18, must be expert writers, willing to risk daily, orphans preferred. So the idea clearly is that this is a hard job, and orphans preferred, you're gonna risk your life, And so we'd rather not have to tell your parents that you died. But they always had plenty of writers. They never had a shortage of writers. Now what about serving God? Well, I don't know that we would say orphans preferred, in an advertisement for serving the Lord, but service for God is not for those that are just casually interested. I'll do it when I feel like it. It is costly service. Jesus asks for your life, your whole life. He wants service to Him to be a priority, not just something that you do whenever. He doesn't want the leftovers of someone's life. He wants the first the first of someone's life, and it isn't short term. It isn't like we can like serve the Lord for five years and say, okay, I got that done, now I can go on with my life. Or put your life off because you only need to serve God for five years of your life, and when the time comes right, then I'll serve God with my life. Serving God isn't short term. And so, this is why some of these aspects of it to us that it needs to be a discipline. If we just serve God whenever we feel like it, we have a human nature and we won't feel like it as often as we should. If we just serve God as much and whenever we feel like it, we will be I don't know what the right word is, but there'll be at least a moment, a very powerful moment when we stand before the Lord Jesus Christ at the judgment seat of Christ and have to give an account for how little we served him that will not be a joy. So with that in mind, serving needs to be a discipline, and that means we need to make ourselves do it. Now, make ourselves do it sounds like, oh, I gotta, You know, I had to beat myself to come to church this morning. Not that, but serving, some of the ways that we make ourselves do something is put ourselves under an obligation to do it. You sign up to teach a Sunday school class, or you sign up, you say, I'd like to help in the bus ministry, or I'd like to minister on Wednesdays with the Jolly 60s, or whatever, I'd like to go to the prison. These are all different ways that our church serves and Once you say, I'd like to do that, then you're put on the schedule. Right? And there's like, OK, oh, man. We really wish I could go to this sporting event, but it's my turn to go to the prison. Or I really wish I could do this. Or, honey, let's go on vacation. Well, I can't go this week. We'll have to go that week, because that's when I'm supposed to be doing this or that. Whatever it is, that What should be dawning on us is because we have a church and the church is where we should serve God, the church and its work gives us opportunities to develop a discipline, a habit of service. Could be public, might be preaching or teaching, but it might be in the nursery. Might be visible, but it might not be. And even outside of our church, so the church is a great place and the primary place to serve, but outside of our church we shouldn't be like we serve in church and then at home we're selfish. Or in the community we don't help others, don't help our neighbors, don't help families that are between jobs or something like that or whose mom is in the hospital or something like that. So there's many ways to serve, but we have to exercise our self-tort. We have to grow in our ability and in our desire. We pointed out and we mentioned that two of the deadliest sins that there are, Laziness or sloth and pride hate and despise serving. Laziness says, I want to serve myself. I want to roll over in my bed, not get up and do something for someone else. And pride looks at ourselves as a more important person. And as soon as we start serving, we're saying this other person, this other person is important. And so laziness and pride fight against service. And so we have to remember, we need to learn or remember or remind ourselves that serving isn't an option. It is something that God expects from all of us. Hebrews 9.14, we mentioned this last week, says, the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God, purged our conscience, or purges our conscience from dead works to serve, to serve the living God. There's no such thing in the kingdom of God as unemployment or retirement. We might be reassigned. It might be like, okay, you're not fit for this work anymore, but I have this work for you. Or you've done enough here, now I want you to do this here. It could be reassignment, but no retirements. And then as we moved along through the lesson, we pointed out that in the judgment, we will be judged according to that we have done. There's a key element of the judgment seat of Christ is that God will judge us for our motives. Why did we do what we did? He will, I mean, what we did, what we do will be there as part of the conversation, but he'll wanna know why. And so we began to point out various motives, motivation for service. We might have met or we can imagine, we can imagine ourselves serving so that people see us. Or serving because the preacher says I need to serve him, okay? We could serve out of obligation or out of, but those of course are not the right motives. What are some right motives? One is obedience. This, you know, I hesitate to say it, but I'll use this, this is kind of like foundational, because we might say, well, obedience is you have to do it. But some people like to obey. And you're like, okay, I want to obey the Lord. I want to obey my parents. And sometimes we, so obedience is like, sometimes we would do it just because we have to, or we could obey because we want to. And of course, so obedience in a sense is not, it is a proper motivation to serve. We should serve the Lord because we want to obey him another reason that we mentioned was gratitude 1st Samuel 12 24 says only fear the Lord and serve him in truth with all your heart for consider how great things he has done for you It's not a burden to serve God when we remember consider what he's done for us Just a simple memory or simple remembrance or mental exercise to think about what it's like not to know Christ. And I say it that way because some of us have grown up always knowing about Christ and always knowing the goodness of Christ. We didn't know him personally, but we lived in a home that was blessed by the goodness of God. And it's just so very, I can't think of a time when I had things bad in my life. I had good parents. My parents taught me about the Lord and all of that. So I have to think, well, what would it be like if I didn't have, if God, who gave me those parents though, right? So just remembering, in the end, I know there was a time when I realized that I was a sinner, but that time was very short because my parents told me exactly what to do when I realized that I was a sinner. So I didn't, anyway. So for those of us that have grown up basically all of our lives knowing the Lord, we came to a quick understanding that we were lost, we didn't know him, and we immediately obeyed the gospel and got saved, there's not long periods of time in our lives where we were suffering. But isn't that the goodness of God? And we should serve him because of how good he's been to us. Whether it's that way or in his providence, he allowed you to live a life of hardship and then brought you to himself to be a witness for him. We should serve because we're glad. We're joyful. Psalm 100 verse two says, serve the Lord with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. We talked about Nehemiah here and just the general understanding that you don't mope and sulk when you're serving the king. You don't stand before the king and mope and like, I don't like to do this, I don't wanna do this, why do I have to do this? When you do that, you're saying, you're giving the appearance that you don't want to serve the king. You're making a statement that you think the king's running things the wrong way. So when we, mope and sulk in the Lord's service, well I'm doing this but I don't want to, or I'm doing this but I don't think it's the right way to do it, That's not the way to serve. We should be serving with gladness. Then there's the motivation of forgiveness. Motivation of forgiveness, not guilt. Isaiah six. And verses six through eight says, Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar, and laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I, send me. He wanted to serve. Why? Because he was guilty? No, at that moment, his sins were purged. He wasn't guilty. It wasn't like, I gotta serve, I gotta work off this guilt. He'd been forgiven, and he wanted to serve. So now we'll get to the next one, and this one we didn't spend time on last week. So the next motivation is humility. Motivation served by humility. And we see this, I did mention this verse last week because it just keeps coming to my mind. But Jesus was the perfect servant. He came not to serve. He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. And we see this. Most clearly, and we see it throughout his life, but I think we see this most clearly in John 13, verse, in John 13, when he laid aside his garments and washed his disciples' feet. After that, he said, after he had washed their feet in verse 12, of John 13 and taking his garments back up, he was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done unto you? Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say, well. So let's just point out, he said, you call me Master and Lord, and that's good, because I, why is that? Because I am. He is Master and Lord, he's Master of the universe. He's Lord of Lords. There's no one who is not in, who would not be in subjection to him, And so, ye say, well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I've given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the servant is not greater than his Lord, neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him. Again, we can't really, the more we think about it, the harder it is to comprehend what happened in that room that night. We can on a basic sense, okay, Jesus, he made himself a man, he did these things. We can understand the physical, what happened, but what really happened, that the God of the universe washed the dust off of sinner's feet, who he knew were about to deny him and abandon him, is incomprehensible. So that's humility. And we should serve with humility. Often we don't. We kind of think, well, if I'm gonna serve, Would there be some way that people could notice? I wanna get something for it. If I could be rewarded or get a reputation for being humble, if I could somehow turn it to my advantage, that's not Christ-like, that's hypocrisy. But self-righteous service requires external rewards. And we'll just mention this because, I mean, as I was studying this, I'm thinking, okay, well, I don't do that, but then it's like, ah, you know, I don't know. We're all human. Self-righteous service likes applause, as long as there's the proper amount of religious modesty in it. Self-righteous service is concerned about the results, like the people I serve, will they be serving me back sometime? Is there some way that this can be reciprocated? Can I be served sometime now that I've done a certain amount of service? Our flesh whines against service and it screams against hidden service. Okay, we're lazy and we're prideful. We whine against service and you combine that with not being able to get anything out of it, we hate it. Our flesh hates it. But by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can reject that. We can serve others. helping them to succeed and be happy about it. It's not a fleshly thing, but through the Holy Spirit we can. We can work and make other people look good. Or can you? I'm saying this in a positive, but then there's the question. Can you work? Can you help others succeed and be happy about it? Can you work to make others look good and not be envious of them Can we help others when we are feeling neglected ourselves? These are just these questions that challenge our motivation in service. The world can serve others if it leads to profit of some sort. I'll do this, I'll put myself down because in the end I'll be lifted up. Christians serve with humility. And yet, when we serve with humility, what does the Bible say? He will lift up those that humble themselves. So, we should be motivated by humility, and then the last one to mention is love. We'll be motivated, the last motivation to mention is love. For brethren, Galatians 5.13 says, for brethren, ye have been called unto liberty, only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. There's no better fuel for service than love. There was a missionary, I read this, there was a missionary in Africa who was asked if he really liked what he was doing. I suppose he was reporting and telling about the work there and he was asked, do you like that work? And his response was shocking. He said, do I like this work? No, my wife and I do not like dirt. We have reasonably refined sensibilities. We do not like crawling into vile huts through goat refuse. But is a man to do nothing for Christ that he does not like? God pity him if not. Liking or disliking has nothing to do with it. We have orders to go and we go. Love constrains us. Now, I'll say that knowing people through experience, we can work, serve people that at first we think, oh, I'm doing this because God wants me to. But after a while, you start loving the people, even if you don't love their conditions. But it is true that love drives us to do much more. And it's not, it doesn't start out, for sure, as love for those conditions or love for those people. It's the love of Christ, right? 2 Corinthians 5, 14, for the love of Christ constraineth us. Because we thus judge that if one died for all, then we're all dead, and that he died for all, that they which live should, what? Should not henceforth live unto themselves. But unto him which died for them and rose again. Service motivated by love. Jesus said, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. If we love the Lord and we love our neighbor, the more we love the Lord, the more we'll serve him. The more we love our neighbor, the more we'll serve them. So those are the motivations for service. Now I'd like to just mention, this truth. And this is an area I'm not as well versed in, let's say, but every Christian is gifted, let's say, to serve. Spiritual gifts. There are some places that As soon as you say, hi, my name is this, they say, well, what's your spiritual gift? Our church is not one that just talks about spiritual gifts a lot, but it is something that's in the Bible. I think one of the reasons we don't talk about it a lot is because there's a lot in the Bible, but it's not all neatly tied together, and there's a lot of varying opinions about what they are and how they work in a believer and something. But let's just at least start by saying they're in the Bible, And they're also, so it must be true. And each one of us has a gift from God. There are differences of gifts, but they all come from the Holy Spirit. That's 1 Corinthians 12, 4. And the same Holy Spirit in verse 11 of 1 Corinthians 12 says, all these works, the one in the same spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. A little bit more specific is 1 Peter 4.10. I like this passage. I understand it a little bit better. Or more clearly, I guess I would say. And that says, as every man hath received the gift. And the word hath, I point this out once in a while, means has. So as every man has received the gift. So that means every believer has received the gift. The gift. So, as every man has received the gift, even so minister the same one to another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. So, the manifold grace of God is seen in many, many different ways, the manifold grace of God. But each of us has received a gift, and since we have, as, because each of us has received a gift, we are to minister that gift, the same one to another. Remember, the Lord said, freely ye have received, freely give. So we've received a lot of things, but one of the things we've received in salvation is a spiritual gift. We should be serving that to others. The ministries God gives us are gifts from God, and as we minister that, the fruit that it affects and that the Holy Spirit works in others is a gift to them. There are lots of passages, I say lots. There are several, let's say 1 Corinthians 12 addresses this, 1 Corinthians 14, 1 Peter 4, I believe Romans 12, Romans 12 also. So there's a lot there that we could study. We could probably take several weeks, maybe the whole summer just studying spiritual gifts, but we won't. The two most important things I've already pointed out can be seen in 1 Peter 4, verse 10. And that is, if you're a Christian, you have a gift. And second, that God's purpose in giving you that gift is for you to serve with it for him. So I've said, studying spiritual gifts can be fruitful, but there are probably, I think there's a lot of, well, I know this, there's a lot of men saying good things in different ways. It's an area with a lot of discussion, let's say. but you don't need to wait until you can study it all out. All of that say it's fruitful to study it, but you don't need to study it and have a complete understanding and be able to name your gift before you serve God. I bring this up, this idea of gifts, because it is important and it relates to this, but we don't have to say, oh, I'm trying to figure out what my gift is. I think many people, maybe most in history, had fruitful lives of service without knowing which spiritual gift that was theirs. They didn't have a certificate of authentication on their wall saying this is, it's hereby declared that you have the gift of this. They served the Lord and God used them. So it can be a fruitful study, but it can also be so much discussion there that we use it as a way to skip out on serving. I'm studying the gifts of service so that until I die, that way I won't have to serve. One man, very knowledgeable man who'd studied scriptures a lot said, the most significant gifts in the church's life in every era are the ordinary natural abilities of those that are saved. So God's given you abilities, use them for the Lord. He may have gifted you with a spiritual gift that's not your natural ability, but many times we start to find our spiritual gift by using what God has made us useful with. A natural talent rightly sanctified for God's use often points us toward figuring out what he wants us to do. The best way to discover what your spiritual gift is is to start serving the Lord. You might say, well, I think I'd like to teach. You won't know if you can teach until you put yourself in a position of service where you get the opportunity to teach. I might like to teach. I sit there and I have so much positive criticism of everybody else who teaches, maybe I'm a teacher. Well, put yourself in there, sign up to say, I can help in this class, and do the yeoman's work that's needed, and maybe you'll be asked to tell the story. And you'll find out whether you have the gift of teaching or not. I'm not saying that everybody that's critical doesn't have it, but it's very easy to criticize when you haven't actually done it. And I'm not thinking of anybody there. Let's see here. So. in service, trying to learn what is it that God's gifted us to, we can find that out by serving in the church, and we should discipline ourselves to serve in regular, ongoing ministry of our church. I mean, I think our church is built in such a way that nobody's signing up to teach for neighborhood Bible time who isn't already teaching in other ministries throughout the year. But if that was the case, since it's this week. Well, I'm going to teach for neighborhood bio time, but I don't do anything the rest of the year. That's not disciplined service. And even then, your disciplined service doesn't have to be something that somebody recognizes or anything like that. We should find a way to defeat the temptation only to serve when it's convenient or exciting. And it's OK to feel overlooked. Some people, and I know there are some, I don't know that we have as many in our church right now, but there's some people who have a hard time, you know, being there every, well, we have some of our public servants, you know, they're, Municipalities have the weirdest work schedules, four on, four off, or something like that. They're seven days in a week, but you gotta have police available every day of the week. So they have these weird schedules. So sometimes people can't serve regularly. But there's a way in any church to serve the Lord, even if your work schedule keeps you from doing that. Ladies maybe say, I just, I can't. It just doesn't work out for this. You can serve others in the church through hospitality. We don't always have this happen, but sometimes it happens at the hardest times. A mother gets sick, and that family needs, you know, dad is working and mom's sick, that family needs some help, or maybe there'd be, anyway. There's a lot of different ways that we can serve that through our church, and some of it isn't, like every Sunday or something like that, and some of those might be ways that somebody who has an odd work schedule can help. Anyway, moving along, just to remind us, spiritual gifts, whatever they are, and we didn't even list them, but they're in the scriptures. All those spiritual gifts are for using to serve God. If God didn't intend for us to serve with it, to serve him and serve others with it, he wouldn't have given it to us. He wouldn't have left us here to exist with it. So the point of this is to remind us to be disciplined in our service. And again, we're a working church. But as I mentioned last week, Pastor Olson, had some lessons on ministry. Pastor Mitchell had some, and the Lord knew all the way along that this was coming along in my schedule of things. So whether it's just encouragement to us, or a challenge to somebody, or just a reminder to stay faithful and joyful in the service, I don't know how the Lord will use this, but I'm just gonna keep going, because it's what he's given us to do. The next point about service, well, some people think, well, if I have this spiritual gift, if it's a gift from the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will just like, when I'm doing this service, he will just like lift me up, and I will be able to work, and I won't get tired, and it won't get, discouraged or anything like that. And that's just not true. Most times, many times, serving is often nothing less than just plain hard work. Paul said in Ephesians 4.12, in the midst of a list here, it says, but for the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. And Paul typically starts his letters, remember the letter to Romans and many of the other ones, he calls himself the servant of God, right? The servant of God. Well, that word, our translators kind of lightened up a little bit. The word he used there is the slave. Servant or slave, either one. Servants, slaves, they work. Every Christian is a slave of God and slaves work. So I don't like that word. Well, that's a Bible word. So, now God doesn't treat us like we think in our minds about how many slaves were treated, but the relationship is he's the master, right? I know our world today doesn't like the master-slave terminology and all that, but he's the master, we're the slave, and slaves work. Colossians 129, whereunto I also labor, striving. Those words are full of extreme effort. Agonize, I think is the word. Agonizing to the point of exhaustion. This Paul is relating how, you know, at least certain times, whereunto I also labor, striving according to his working, so there's this balance there, according to his working which worketh in me mightily. We can't think so much that God does this that I don't strive and agonize, but while I'm striving and agonizing and working hard, God is working. So I'm not working on my own, God is working with me, through me. It wasn't miserable toil. Have you ever done something really, really hard that was a joy to accomplish? Hopefully. because there's just tremendous joy. There's a lot more joy in accomplishing something that took hard work to do than something that just worked out. You went to put something, I need to remind myself, my wife wants to remind me of this, because I have the hardest time working around the house. But I will say, when I finally get something done, it's like, ah, I got that done. If it was easy, if it was easy, anyway, Come back, Pastor Voegelin. It's not miserable toil. There's joy in serving Jesus, and it is a song, but it's not just a song, it's a truth. And another time, Paul talks about the good fight, and I just make the same analogy. Fighting is not fun, but sometimes it's good. And the struggle, the fight, is a good fight. It's for a noble cause, and you win. That's a good fight. And work, it's hard, but it's for a good cause. It accomplishes a great thing, and you do accomplish something. And so it's good. At the same time, it's work. So that means when we serve in our church, often it will be hard, sometimes agonizing, maybe exhausting, whether it's physically exhausting or mentally exhausting. Maybe you're just helping somebody at their house or whatever. There's so many different ways you could imagine this happening. It will take time. There will be more entertaining things that we could be doing. but the service, we should remember that service that costs nothing accomplishes nothing. Then, let's remember that serving God is work, but there's no work that's so rewarding. It's the most fulfilling and rewarding kind of work. It is fulfilling to accomplish something, but it's not more fulfilling than accomplishing something for the Lord. Jesus was exhausted, He was tired, he was hungry, he sat down by the well of Sychar, right? Sent his disciples in to get food, the woman comes, the woman at the well, he ministers to her, talks to her, long conversation, John chapter four. Comes back, the disciples say, do you want to eat? He says, my meat, my food is to do the will of him that sent me. So Jesus got satisfaction, tremendous satisfaction, enough that he would say, well, I'm not really hungry anymore out of doing God's work. And when we serve, we can get satisfaction like that from that also. Also, we should remember that it is not in vain. 1 Corinthians 15, 58. Oh, I'm sorry. So it's rewarding and it's enduring. It lasts. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord for as much as you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. We don't have to serve God long to be tempted to think, why am I doing this? I don't see any results. There's nothing happening. Results are often hard to find. I will point out that if this, if, if, Since, let's put it this way, since service is a discipline, sometimes the result is in us. It's not necessarily in what we're doing. We're doing this, we're looking for a result, but if we're serving so that God can change us to be like his son, sometimes that, we don't see any result there, but God is doing the work in us. So, But anyway, but results are hard to find, but service is for godliness. He does give results, and he does use us to produce effects in other people's lives, but he also uses our service to change us to be like his son. God promises us that our work is never in vain. And we read that verse, 1 Corinthians 15, 58. He also says that he sees our work and knows of our work and he will not forget it. For God is not unrighteous, Hebrews 6.10, God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love which you've showed toward his name. So he's not the type to just forget about things. He knows and sees what we've done. So disciplined service to God is work, it's hard and costly sometimes, but it will last for eternity. All right, then as I wrap this up, I want to just point something out. So a few weeks back, we talked about worship. And sometimes we might think there's a contrast, and there is a little bit of a contrast between worship and service. But we should remember that worship empowers our service, and service expresses our worship. Godliness requires a balance, a discipline balance between the two. If we serve without regularly, personally, and corporately worshiping the Lord, then we're serving in the flesh. When we worship God, we find fresh reasons and renewed desire to serve. Back to Isaiah. He didn't say, here am I, send me, until after his vision of God. And that's the order. Worship and then worship empowered service. But real worship results in a desire to serve. So again, we need a balance. We can say, I just work, work, work, work, work. We'll just work, work, work, work, work without worshiping God, without knowing and expressing to God who He is and how great He is. You're working for some reason other than God. But if you say, well, I just wanna worship. And if some kind of worship for God, any kind of worship for God doesn't drive you to do something for Him, to serve Him with the things He's given you, that's not in balance either. And Isaiah, again, is the classic example. He saw the Lord. In his greatness, he was forgiven by the Lord, his sins were purged, and he said, I wanna go. The Lord said, I need somebody. He said, here am I, send me. So real worship results in a desire to serve. So then, we should discipline ourselves for both worship and service. Then, in conclusion, we are expected to serve We are gifted to serve, but are you willing to serve? Are we willing to serve? Do you serve somewhere? Do you find a way to serve, to get yourself in a habit under an obligation where that obligation gives you the opportunity to serve? The Lord Jesus was a servant, he was a servant of all, he was a servant of servants, he said, whether it's greater, he that sits at meat, or he that serves. Is not he that sitteth at meat, but I am among you, as he that serveth, or he that serves. If we're gonna be like Christ, we must discipline ourselves to serve as Jesus served. And so let's take that wanted advertisement in the newspaper. It's not in San Francisco anymore, it's in the local church bulletin. Wanted. Gifted volunteers for difficult service in the local church. Motivation should be obedience, gratitude, gladness, forgiveness, humility, and love. Service will rarely be glorious. Temptation to quit will sometimes be strong. Volunteers must be faithful in spite of long hours, little or no visible results, and possibly no recognition, except from God in eternity. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for these truths that we can glean from it. And Lord, thank you that we are a church where people work. As I look out and think through the congregation, so many people are serving you, and I know others are serving you in ways that I don't even see. even as one of the pastors of our church. Lord, sometimes even if we are a place that serves, we need to be reminded why we serve, we need to check our motives for service, and we pray that these lessons would help us to serve you in a way that would please you, that we would look at our lives and put ourselves into positions so that we can be disciplined in serving you, and that we would allow the service to do a work in our own lives and not just look for, Lord, we do want you to work in other people's lives, and we know you use people to do that, but Lord, allow our service to change us to be more like Christ, your son, our savior, who we were saved to become like, and we pray that you would work this in our lives through his power, through the Holy Spirit's power, and in his name we pray, amen.