Serving the Church

[AI translation] The past week has been a blessed time in the life of our congregation, when, with God's help, we have been able to spend evening after evening on the journey of our Hungarian Reformed Church. As you know, we did not arbitrarily select the appropriate Word to be shared, but based on our Bible reading guideline, we took the upcoming passages as a basis, joining together in regular study of the Word. The divinely ordained way of our Church cannot be understood or walked in any other way than by reading and studying the Word regularly. His Word alone can teach us to accept all the blessings and opportunities which His grace gives us today. Have we understood what we are bound to do by what we have received from God? Do we understand God's will better now than we did before?If I were to summarise briefly the lessons of the past week, I would say, humbly but firmly, that the power of the Word has moved us forward in obedience to the Lord. The churches of Christ around the world, including our Reformed Church, have in recent years come to understand more and more clearly from the Word the will of God to lead us to an understanding of the church that serves.
1) The church must be a servant church because it has a servant Lord. The service of the Church is the result of the service which her Lord Jesus Christ does for her, in her and through her, and even without her, for the world. In the kingdom of God, greatness, true greatness, is not in direct proportion to climbing the ladder of power, but to a humble descent into the depths of service. He is greater and stronger who stoops deeper in service. This principle of the order of the kingdom of God was a poignant example of the whole life of his disciples. To give us a better understanding of who He is, at the Last Supper He did what was the duty of slaves: He washed the feet of His disciples. None of the apostles thought of offering this service to the others: none of them wanted to be last, to be seen as less than the others. And then all at once the One to whom the Father had given all things, the One who knew that He came from God and was going to God, came to the sweaty, dusty feet of haughty, proud, conceited men and began to wash them and then to wipe them with the cloth he had with him. Jesus, the second person of the Trinitarian God, through whom God created the world, who is the reflection of the glory of God, the image of the reality of God: kneels down before men to do the most servile work for them. But it is only a symbol of the great service of Jesus, the very service for which He humbled Himself - for which He became man as God - for which He took on the form of a servant: a symbol of the service of redeeming the world, the great service of going to the breaking of His body, the shedding of His blood. The death of Jesus is not a heroic tragedy, but the proof that He does not only want to serve with His word, not only on terms that please Him, but that He serves to the death, with total devotion, and that even His life is not precious to Him if the devotion of His life is required by His service for the world. Therefore He is the greatest and the mightiest, because in service to others He has descended to the lowest, the lowest point of the created world, the most humble place, the cross.
And that is not the end of His service. By His Spirit and His Word, He is still serving. In fact, the Church is nothing more than a prolongation, a continuation of Christ's ministry, a continual happening of the reality that Jesus Christ lives and ministers! He bends down to us and carries out his ministry among us through his Word, through the sacraments, through the presence and work of his Holy Spirit among us. In fact, when we speak of the Church serving: we are actually witnessing the actions of Jesus Christ serving in the Church. Jesus is, as it were, sharing his own in his ministerial activity, in his life - he is involving his Church in his ministry. The Church, then, is the more truly Church the more real, the more obedient the instrument of Christ's service. The Church is therefore not only an organisation which must ensure that a certain ecclesial life is maintained, that services, baptisms, christenings, baptisms, funerals are celebrated, that is, that it frames the religious life of those who are registered and enables them not to be shortened in their religious feelings. Its activities cannot be limited to promoting the individual faith of certain people.
For by becoming believers in the truest sense of the word, by coming to Christ, we have found our salvation: all is not yet finished. Even if we rest and are content in this: God is not satisfied. There is no doubt that the acceptance of Christ's ministry, the forgiveness of sins received in Christ, makes us children of God, but this is only the beginning of what God wants us to do, it is only the prerequisite of the Christian life. To want only to be saved, to be satisfied with our conversion, is in essence to refuse to obey God, for God has called us through the ministry of Christ and received us into his grace so that he may now place us fully at his service, making us into people who can become his servants and ambassadors. We must turn to Him so that we can then truly go where He wants to lead us. Repentance and conversion are a prerequisite, a preparation for service. But now we must also do the ministry itself, the starting out, the readiness. Christ wants a church that is fully surrendered to Him, at His disposal. The church is the assembly of those called in Christ who are prepared by the redeeming grace of Christ for the service for which the servant Lord of the church wants to use them. The church can therefore never be a dominant, powerful factor in the world, but only a servant church!
2) It also follows that there are no conditions for the Church's ministries. The question cannot be asked under what conditions the Church is willing and obliged to serve. For if we were to make this subject to certain conditions, it would no longer be true service, but a kind of domination. Jesus did not make ministry conditional. If he had imposed any condition, he would have said: 'I am willing to serve you, I am willing to humble myself to the point of death, if you promise to appreciate my service. But He did not. He served unconditionally and left the rest to the Father. That is the only true service. And if in us, if in our church, the living Christ truly ministers, then the only condition of that ministry is that that ministry be truly ministry. The church of Christ does not serve in order to gain some profit or advantage by it, nor in order to secure its own existence, but because it is animated by the Spirit of the Christ who, while he walked among us in the flesh, was as one who serves. The main question for the Church - and for each member of the Church - is not how to be validated, but how to serve! And if this question: how can I serve, is really a serious question, then Jesus does not leave us without a concrete answer. For to be in service, according to the New Testament, is always to obey someone, someone with whom one is in contact, someone who gives orders, someone at one's disposal.
Unknown to the New Testament is the expression, so common to us, of being at the service of a cause or an idea. He who lives for an ideal chooses the means and determines the way of its realisation. One can be enthusiastic about Christian ideals and principles, but this is not service. The apostles were the servants of Christ, the living Lord, not because they followed Christian principles, but because they received a clear and definite direction and commission from Christ himself. Jesus gives a definite direction to his servants. Not in such a way that they knew everything, of course, but in such a way that at every moment and before every task they could see clearly what they had to do. The servants of Christ stand here before their Lord as He stands before His Father. "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you." (Jn 20,21) He always, in everything, followed His Father's command. That is why He was never hurried, hurried, hurried, agitated or overwhelmed. Yet he served constantly, often without even having time to eat. But there was always time for the person, the misery, the problem that came his way. The different things at the same time did not shatter his will. His attention was focused at each moment on what was timely at the time.
The service of the disciples was also always a timely service. Obedience freed them from hastiness, from hesitation. To whom they were in the service, they gave over the assignment of specific tasks. Our service can also be directed to the performance of specific tasks, for otherwise, in general, it is not service. Today, the reality in which we live, is the place for the Church's ministry. In the concrete problems that our people are struggling with in their daily lives, in the villages and in the cities, in the fields and in the factories; in the new order of life in our country in which we live, in the great aspiration of the peoples of the world to seek a peaceful way out of tension; in the ecumenical endeavour of the churches of the world to help in the peaceful coexistence of peoples - in the problems of life today, the church of Christ must find and carry out the ministry of its Lord. The Church cannot brood over the past, nor can she dream of an imagined future, for she must serve here and now, in the time in which we live, in the history of which we are contemporaries. A Church that is truly ready to obey will not be left at a loss by her Lord. So let us listen very humbly to His word of guidance, even in the problems of life today.
Jesus Christ, the living Lord, is not in need of our service. He can do His work without us and even against us. But let us pray with humble hearts that He may, through His Word and His Holy Spirit, give us, His Church, a share in His ministry, so that we may serve Him for the good of human life:
Thou shalt shew thy servants thy works,
Thy glory be upon the children of these.
Give us to understand your majestic power,
Our gracious Lord, O merciful God!
Judge all our works, turn them round,
guide the work of our hands.
Amen
Date: 9 May 1954.