Serving as a Witness

"What do you think the world needs right now?" Brady Boyd asked the Village Church in Colorado Springs. "Do we need more people who are angry? We need more violence? Do we need more war?"

His answer: "I believe right now in this moment, we need people who are willing to serve like Jesus." Then he added, "I didn't expect a huge applause."

Brady said he went back a chapter, since he thought he was in John 14 the last time he spoke, because John 13 is "a big message for a big moment that we're living in right now." He warned, "When you're reading the Bible, if you're not regularly surprised by what you hear in the scriptures, if you're not regularly surprised by the message of Jesus, then you're not reading it right."

"In fact, it should shock you. It should discombobulate you sometimes when you're reading the Bible," he said. He also reminded the church that he didn't write the Bible and had no part in it, but he is called to interpret it, teach it, and translate it into our modern world. He titled the message Serving as a Witness.

A Meal, a Basin, and the Lowest Servant's Job

Brady set the picture. They are in a room in someone's home, having a meal together. It is kind of a party about to happen, with all the gang back together.

He read John 13:3: "Jesus knew that the father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God." Brady explained that John is saying the idea that Jesus is the Messiah has already been concluded for this group. The rest of the world hasn't believed it yet, but the people in that room completely believe that the man with them is the promised Messiah.

Then he kept reading: "So he got up from the meal." He stopped. "The Messiah gets up. God gets up." Not just some Jewish person from Galilee who was raised in Nazareth and born in Bethlehem. He read on: "took off his outer clothing and wrapped a towel around his waist. And after that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples feet."

"Please don't read this too quickly," he said.

God gets up. God washes feet.

"The Jesus that rescued my life," Brady said, "the all powerful redeemer creator God got up from a table that had been prepared for him and washed feet." Of all the stories John tells, he called this an epic moment, because it turns everything they believed about the Messiah upside down.

"What in the world is happening? Jesus gets up and he says he washes his disciples feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him." Then Brady said, "Can we just stop and pray? Let's just ask the Lord to give us eyes to see and ears to hear."

Pastor Brady Boyd prayed:

Brady admitted this is a message he needs to preach but doesn't like to preach. "You're not born servants. You're born selfish." Put toddlers in a room together and they're not sharing, they're fighting.

"It is counterintuitive in the human condition to sacrificially serve another person especially if that person can't do anything for you," he said.

He asked how many of our friendships are transactional. Would you still be their friend, and still serve them, when they have nothing to give you back? He said that over the last 18 months he and Pam discovered they had a lot of transactional friends. When you're the pastor of the biggest church in town, everybody wants to be around you, but when something else happened, a lot of people who said they were friends disappeared, and they haven't heard from them in 18 months.

"That is not the kingdom of heaven," he said. "The kingdom of heaven says, 'I'm going to wash your feet and serve you even if nothing comes back to me.'" Jesus knelt down, washed their feet, and asked for nothing in return.

He then gave the background. Most of Israel is desert, and around Jerusalem it is just dirt and sand. People wore open toed sandals, so their feet were filthy at the end of the day, and even in those days people did not want that dirt brought into the house.

When a guest arrived, the job of washing feet went to the lowest household servant: the youngest, the one with the least credentials, the lowest of the low. That person bent down with a basin of water, washed your feet, and invited you into the home. So for Jesus, the Messiah, the leader of the group, to bend down and wash their feet was radical.

Brady also pointed to the discussion the disciples had going on as they walked with Jesus to this place, a discussion Jesus was listening to. He put it in today's terms: "I get more likes on Facebook than you do. I have more fans. I have more followers. I'm kind of a big deal." And Jesus says, "Listen, dudes, that's not the kingdom of heaven. This is not the way this whole thing is getting built. I'm not going to build my kingdom on a bunch of celebrities."

Right there Brady called the church New Life, caught it, and said, "See Freudian slip there. Village Church." After 18 years, he said, that's going to come out of him every once in a while. "Hey, we have an edit button."

The kingdom of heaven, he said, is not built on celebrities or on who's popular. "In fact, if they're popular, they're probably not right." We will be shocked at who gets celebrated in heaven: a lot of grandmas, a lot of missionaries, a lot of pastors who traveled 30 miles to their congregation on the back of a mule this morning.

Jesus, Brady said, is saying, "I am the greatest, but I don't have to tell you. In fact, if people tell you they're great, they're not great." Then he shows them what greatness is in the kingdom of heaven by bowing down and washing their feet.

Serving Confronts Our Pride

His first point: serving confronts our pride. "A prideful person will not serve. And a serving person cannot be prideful." We don't talk about pride enough because we all have it, and it needs to be flushed out every single day. The way you flush it out is you go low and serve another person without expecting anything in return.

He read from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:1: "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men to be seen by them." Then he asked, "Isn't that the whole point of living right now? Everything you do has to be seen." He added, "I don't care what you had for lunch. I honestly really don't care." Can we just be a little more anonymous, a little more under the radar?

Continuing the verse, he read, "If you do, you will have no reward from your father in heaven," and added, "And by the way, that's the whole reason we should be doing anything. Not for rewards now."

Reading on in Matthew 6, he continued: "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they've received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. So that your giving may be in secret. Then your father, listen to this, the father who sees what is done in secret will reward you."

Then he asked the church to answer honestly: "Do you believe that God sees your heart when no one else does?" Believing that God sees what you're doing and your motivation for doing it, he said, will help you stay out of so much trouble in your life.

Neither Boast Nor Hide

Brady named the obvious pushback. He had just announced that the church is building churches in Nigeria. And in Matthew 5, in the same sermon, Jesus said, "Let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and praise your father in heaven." "Well, which one is it, Jesus?"

There's a delicate balance at work, he said, and most of us get it wrong. "We are either self-promoting or self-deprecating when in fact we should be neither." Telling the church that four churches are being built in Nigeria, that the roof just went on one, and that a dedication service is coming in about a week is not promoting. It is saying, look what happens when the body of Christ is unified with our brothers in Africa who have been pillaged by terrorists.

"That's informational, but it's also not right for me to get up and say, 'Hey, you know, we're doing a lot of big things, but I really can't tell you about it because it'll be wrong and Jesus would be mad at me.' That's self-deprecating."

His summary of what Jesus taught: "Our lives should be lived with pure motives so others will see our good deeds without us promoting ourselves." He asked whether someone who had never been in church, walking through the double doors and listening to our conversations, would find anything compelling enough to come back a second time. Church, he said, is a preview of what it's going to be if Jesus was king, with joy, unity, serving, and blessing, and no more sin, death, sickness, war, murder, rape, or stealing.

He simplified it: "We should neither boast nor hide." If someone asks how the Lord is blessing him, he is happy to tell them, because God has been faithful to everyone in the room.

Then he gave three ways to serve. Number one, we can serve to be seen by others. "If you wait until someone's watching to serve, you've already messed up."

"I used to do this in front of my kids a lot. And I guess I should not even be telling you, but I'm just telling you this." When his kids were little, the family would pick out someone in the restaurant and buy their meal, because he wanted them to see that dad has his eyes open to possibilities of being a blessing. After 20 years, he figured, you can tell the story.

Number two, we can serve in secrecy but be proud about it: "I'm the best secret server on the planet." He called it the churchy religious pride that builds up inside of you: "I'm better at this than you are. I just wish everybody was as holy as me."

"I just don't hang around people like that. Okay? If that's you, we're not going to be friends."

Number three, we can serve in secrecy as worship to God alone. God is always proud of us when we give and serve, but he is happier when he sees the pure motives of doing it to glorify him and not ourselves.

It takes faith to serve in obscurity.

The enemy will tell you God's not good at holding your accounts, he said. So he gave the church a prayer he prays all the time. His son Abram, who does the slides, put it on the screen so people could take a photo of it.

The prayer Pastor Brady Boyd read for the church:

He suggested saying "Come, Holy Spirit" and praying it every day for a while. Reading it a second time, he stopped at "He's going to be with me" and called it a massive confession: "If you believe that, listen, the gates of hell will not prevail against your home."

"Motivation for what you do is very important to the Lord. Why are you doing this? And you have to keep that in check. You have to constantly bring that under the power of the Holy Spirit."

"So we must believe that God sees us and will reward us either in this life or the life to come," he said. His conclusion: "So why we serve is just as important as how we serve."

Would the People Who Know Us Best Call Us Servants?

His second point: serving is a witness to the world. He returned to John 13 and read verse 34: "A new command I give you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." About 20 years ago, he said, people asked his life verse, and he named John 13:35: "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another." He doesn't live up to it every day, but he aspires to it.

People don't care how much Bible you know, he said; they care about how much Bible you live. "I'm talking about Bible followers, not Bible knowers."

"In fact, Jesus said, 'I'd rather you do the things than know the things. Go try out a few of these things. Go do it. Know it and do it. Be hearers of the word and doers of the word.'"

Then he noted that this whole conversation in John 13 happens among people who know Jesus well, and said he was about to step on some toes. He and Pam have been married 37 years and are working on 38, "because every year it's work."

"And listen, I know this is going to shock you, but we fuss. We disagree. We clash. Men and women are different." Like storms when the seasons change, about four times a year there's going to be a storm at his house, and that's normal.

"In fact, I don't trust couples who say we never fuss. Then one of you is lying."

"One of you is a doormat. I'm just telling you. Somebody's wearing the pants."

Then he added, "Our pants at our house have four legs. We both wear them."

Then the question that takes the air out of the room, including at his house: "Would the people who know us best call us servants?" Not the people you're trying to impress, but the people who see you tired, hungry, and hangry.

"Before we can ever reach the world, we must first become a congregation and a home that cares for one another." He went on: "The only impact you will ever have on the world is what spills out of your home and it overflows out of your church." The Village Church will never be any greater than what's happening at our house. "You can't come here on Sunday and fake it."

If your marriage is struggling, he said, get into a serving contest with one another. Turn off the scoreboard, and in about three to six months you'll find you like this person. He said Jim Daly told him Focus on the Family just did its most exhaustive marriage research ever, and Jim said, "Brady, this is going to shock you, but in homes where men and women hold hands and pray together, there's like a 2% divorce rate." Brady added, "I just saved you tens of thousands of dollars of therapy."

But not a cursing prayer, he warned: "Oh, God of heaven, you see the sin and unrighteousness in their heart. Lord, if there was ever a person that deserves your judgment, I'm holding their hand right now. That's not the prayer."

Here is the prayer Pastor Brady Boyd gave couples to pray:

"Pray that prayer every night, every morning. And I just promise you, you're going to save a ton of money on marriage counseling."

"It's really hard to hate someone that really loves you and serves you," he said. "I mean, honestly, think about the people you despise, okay? Yeah, I know you got a list." If they honestly loved you and served you without manipulation, how can you hate someone like that?

If you're struggling to make friends, he said, love them, serve them, pray over them, call them, and check on them with no motivation other than to be a blessing. "You will have a crowded funeral at the end of your days."

One of the most effective strategies for evangelism, he said, is to live out the teachings of Jesus among ourselves. The outside world will argue with us about our doctrine. "They're always going to believe there's 12 genders when there's only two." But what they cannot argue with is how much we love one another, which is why church starts at 9:30 and the service starts at 10:00.

It's the house of calm that attracts those living in chaos.

He said he has been praying that over the Village Church. Chaos is waiting outside, but there's calm in this house. He came in at peace that morning: "My LSU Tigers won yesterday. I slept really good last night." Whether here or at the Marriott, he wants people to walk in with no fussing, no complaining, and no gossiping, saying, "I'm here to be a blessing."

Holding the Cup: He Made Himself Nothing

Brady asked everyone to hold their communion cup while he read Scripture. The cups cost 50 cents or a dollar and get delivered to his house from Amazon, he said, but they symbolize something that changed the world.

He read Philippians 2, starting at verse 5, adding his own words as he went: "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, humbled himself, bathed dirty feet, blessed them, died for them, went to the cross for them. He made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, listen to this, he humbled himself, and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. And therefore God exalted him to the highest place, and gave him the name that is above every name. And at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess, Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."

He called verse 11 the prayer of salvation. At some point, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you recognize you need saving because you can't save yourself. "And all of us in this room, most of us in this room gave up a long time ago trying to be God and trying to save ourselves."

So, he said, we humbled ourselves and said, "Father in heaven, I need a savior. I'm lost. My life is a mess. I can't repair it on my own. So Jesus, would you come and be Lord of my life?"

Whether following the Lord for 40 years like him or for 40 minutes, he asked the church to say verse 11 out loud as a confession before coming to the table: "And every tongue confess Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." Then he pushed them: "Come on. You can do better than that. Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."

Breaking the bread, he said, reminds him that he is living in a very broken world and Christ's body was broken to repair it. Jesus is returning: "He will return and he's coming for a not a perfect church, but he's coming for a humble church. He's coming for a church that serves."

Over the bread, Pastor Brady Boyd prayed:

Over the cup, he said: "The cup of grace, I call it. I want you to receive this. Can't do good works today to earn it. Can't go out and be a good person to earn God's favor. He's already given you his favor. He's already given you forgiveness."

He said he wants to bless the church more often and sometimes forgets. He asked everyone to hold out their hands and receive it.

Pastor Brady Boyd closed the service with a blessing:

Questions for the Week From John 13

1. How many of your friendships are transactional? Would you still serve those people if they had nothing to give you back?
2. Do you believe that God sees your heart when no one else does? How would that change what you do this week?
3. When you talk about what God is doing in your life, do you lean toward self-promoting or self-deprecating? What would it look like to neither boast nor hide?
4. Of the three ways to serve, to be seen, in secret but proud, or in secret as worship to God alone, which describes you most often?
5. Would the people who know you best, when you're tired and hangry, call you a servant?
6. What would a serving contest with the scoreboard turned off look like in your home?
7. Is your home a house of calm that could attract those living in chaos?

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