The Secret to a Confident Faith (Santosh Poonen)

When God puts up job postings for His Church, He doesn’t look at qualifications or experience; He looks at character. This is God’s job description for servants in His Church: a man/woman of dignity and worthy of respect; a man of your word who doesn’t love money; a woman who is self-controlled and dependable, and doesn’t gossip; a man who is committed to his wife and whose home-life is in order; someone who won’t use his position to try to run things (I Timothy 3:8-12). Most Christians are content to let others do the work in the church because they: (i) exalt the worker because of his gift (preaching, music, etc.); and (ii) divide God’s work into spiritual and non-spiritual. There are no “un-spiritual” gifts or functions in the Body of Christ. If you think that in order to serve the food at a church gathering you don’t have to be full of the Holy Spirit, then you haven’t understood what it means to be a servant in the church (Acts 6:3). Everything we bring into the Church must be out of the fullness of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. It’s significant that the Church’s first martyr was someone with a hidden practical ministry – serving food to widows (Acts 6:1-5). Someone with a bondslave mentality will not be able to casually stay home during a gathering of the church, thinking that the work can go on without them. Unfortunately, many churches today are plagued by hidden organs that are deadweight — simply “tagging along” wherever the body goes, but never fulfilling their function in the body. The fact that God has incorporated you into the Body of Christ does not leave you off the hook; you still have to fulfill the purpose for which God placed you in the Body. Eternal life is a free gift of God (Romans 6:23), but it is for those who have been set free from bondage to sin and become bondslaves of Jesus (v22). The only life of freedom from bondage to sin is the life of being a bondslave to Jesus Christ. The reason many Christians slip back into bondage to sin and never experience sanctification that leads to eternal life is that they aren’t bondslaves of Jesus. If you are truly a bondslave of Jesus (the Head), you will be a bondslave of the Church (His Body on earth). It was on his being a bondslave of Jesus Christ that Paul based his preaching (II Corinthians 4:5) and teaching (Romans 1:1, Philippians 1:1). God will not grab you by the neck and force you to be His bondslave. You must deliberately choose that life. “The passion of Christianity is that I deliberately sign away my own rights and become a bondslave of Jesus Christ. Until I do that, I do not begin to be a saint” (Oswald Chambers). One mustard seed is stronger than a 1000 pebbles of stone — because it has life! So also, it’s not the quantity of faith, but the quality of it — it must be real faith (Luke 17:6)! To be a true disciple is to be a bondslave of Jesus, someone with no right to anything — not payment, not honor, not reputation, nor anything else. After you have done all the things which Jesus commanded, finish by saying, “I am an unworthy slave; I have done only that which I ought to have done” (Luke 17:10).