The willingness to be a humble servant of the heavenly Father

What should be our attitude and what should be the way in which we relate to God from day to day? What should be that self-image that we have when we relate to the Father, when we develop our life of service to the Lord, and when we do all the things we do within the Kingdom of God?

In the next meditations I want to use a text as a starting point, it is found in the Gospel according to Saint John in chapter 17, beginning with verse 7 to verse 10, a well-known parable of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And the parable says: "Who of you, having a servant who plows or grazes cattle, when he returns from the field then says to him:" come and sit at the table "? "Serve me until I have eaten and drunk, and after that, you eat and drink? Does he thank the servant because he did what he was commanded? I think not."

"So also you, when you have done everything that has been ordered, say: we are useless servants, for what we should have done, we did."

This passage invites us to see ourselves as people who are totally submitted to the Will of God, people who are at the total service of the Father and who consider themselves as having no rights, ultimately, before God because God is totally sovereign and He can do whatever He wants with our lives.

And I believe that is what the Lord was trying to instigate and how to instill in the minds of the disciples, and by extension, in our own mentality. It is that idea that God has total right to our lives and that we have to assign the Lord that place of total privilege, and that this position is essential for the life of the Christian, and that it is the essential platform that allows us to have a fruitful life, powerful and lasting and influential ministries, and that we can please the Father when we live our life before Him, when we develop our service before Him, that God wants to see that posture of total humility and total subjection to the rights of God and His absolute Lordship. I believe that is explained and exposed throughout all the pages of Scripture.

And in this parable the Lord begins with an illustration of a servant, and we have to understand, the first key to understanding this passage, and I hope we will develop it later, is that word that the Lord uses: "servant", which is a English translation of the word: "doulos", doulos, in the original Greek in which this passage was written, and the word doulos actually means: slave. It is the word that was used in the Greek to indicate that character from the ancient world who belonged to a lord, to an owner, had no rights, had no personal dignity.

His life was completely subject to the will of his owner, he did not rule himself and did not even have the privilege of deciding whether he was going to stay with his owner or not, if he was going to move elsewhere, with whom he I was going to get married, whether I was going to study or not; none of those decisions that are common for a normal human being were owned by this type of people who were slaves in the ancient world. This person belonged entirely to the will of his lord and did not govern himself, and to make any decision he had to first consult his owner.

And so what the Lord invites us to understand in this passage is that that's our condition as well. Faced with the sovereignty and total greatness of the God we serve, we are merely slaves. And then I am going to clarify that a bit, because in another way we are not slaves, and we are going to see that later, and that is the complexity of this parable.

But, what the Lord wants us to always understand is that yes, at a fundamental level, we have to consider ourselves so surrendered, so subject to God's Will, that it is as if we are slaves to Him, and our spiritual greatness depends specifically that in our heart, in our mind, in our subconscious there is always that recognition: I am a servant of God, I am a slave of God, God has total right over my life, He has the power to do whatever He wants to do. me and my role in life is to please Him, to live to glorify Him, and my greatness lies in being totally obedient, totally subject to His Will.

When there is that disposition in the believer, many things then become possible, including the dignity of that believer which, paradoxically, depends on his disposition to be a humble servant of the heavenly Father.

In our next meditation we will continue to develop this thought a little more. God bless you, until our next session and I hope you continue with me to develop this beautiful truth of the Gospel and of the Christian life. God bless you.