Today, we’re going to conclude a short section of Jesus teaching, where he teaches some pretty deep lessons to his closest disciples. They’ve been challenging, but in in my opinion, this today is the most difficult yet. First he told us to rebuke each other and to endlessly forgive each other when we’ve been wronged. Paul Tripp defines forgiveness as a vertical commitment with God, followed by a horizontal transaction with the offending party. In other words,  it’s because I have a commitment to God who graciously forgives me that that gracious forgiveness is the currency that I use to transact with others. Then Jesus told us that our faith is powerful, not because we have a lot of faith, but because God works powerfully through the faith that we have. So if we have Jesus, we have everything we need to see God work powerfully in us and through us. Now, just those two teachings alone, if we were to fully embrace them, fully bring them in and live them out, they would make us into very different sorts of people in this world. And that’s what discipleship with Jesus is. It’s designed to contrast us against the background of a broken world. We should not seem to fit. Okay. If you if you feel like I just don’t really feel like I fit, you’re probably doing it right. We’re not supposed to. If sin saturates everything and it does, then sin is what feels normal. Jesus makes us abnormal with his righteousness, and that’s a good thing.

Now, with that in mind, let me take you to a parable that I would guess is going to sound brand new to many of you. Like Jesus just came out with another album. Okay, so is this his new stuff? No, there is no new stuff. This is just a teaching of Jesus that is very rarely shared and discussed in the church. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that even many of you who are strong Bible readers who have certainly read this parable at some point, I’m going to guess that many of you have never really wrestled with it. Jesus is going to tell us a story to explain the kind of attitude that we are to have as servants within God’s household. He’s going to particularly focus on how we see ourselves, and what should we expect from God in return for being obedient and doing what he commands. And the attitude he tells us to have is so wildly out of sync with the attitude that most of us have, and that our culture celebrates and that feels good to us. It’s no wonder that this teaching is not well remembered. We are conditioned in our minds to be praised and rewarded for accomplishments, aren’t we? We accomplish something. You think I’m going to get praised, I’m going to get rewarded for this. And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating accomplishments. But there’s a big difference between receiving praise for a job well done and doing your job well so that you will receive praise.

You hear that? You hear the difference there. That’s true everywhere, by the way. That’s true at work. That’s true at home. But nowhere does this shift in attitude and motivation do more damage than in our walk with God. Jesus is going to explain that a disciple serves the Lord with a humble heart of a servant, doing his duty, not with an expectation of exaltation. We’re in Luke chapter 17, verses 7 to 10 today. What I’m going to do is I’m going to read the parable in full, because I want you to feel the full weight of Jesus whole argument, and the weight of the humility that he places on us. And then I’m going to go back and I’m going to explain the story. And then finally, I have five attitude adjustments that we should make from this passage. So here’s the parable. Will anyone of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, come at once and recline at table? Will he not rather say to him, prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink? Does he thank the servant, because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, we are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty.

You can hear immediately. Why this parable isn’t very popular, can’t you? It just. You just. You could feel it. You’re like, wow, that is that is not something I like to hear. This teaching presents a direct attack on the tightly held, I would might even say, beloved popular idea that we are all autonomous captains of our lives and deserve the praise for everything that we’ve accomplished because of our personal greatness. It’s directly against that idea. Trading that out for a lifetime of being an unworthy servant for most people, no thank you, I’ll pass. This is why we need to pay such close attention to what Jesus is saying here. If you really want to follow Jesus closely, it’s in areas like this where even mature believers need to grow. Even those of you who’ve walked with Jesus for a really long time, this is an area where most of us need to grow. Jesus asks two rhetorical questions here. Both assume a no answer. So, Jesus is picturing a large farm with many servants who work for the owner. This is a typical part of the economic system of the first century. Servants would work in the household to serve the owner, and then their lives and their families would be sustained by the income of the estate. Jesus puts us in the position of the owner for these rhetorical questions. It’s a little hard for us because our culture is so different from what Jesus is describing here that we would probably say yes to both of these, these questions, but we need to put ourselves into a first century mindset just a little bit, so that we can understand what Jesus is saying about discipleship.

The first question is whether we would invite a servant to come in from the field and put, pull up a chair and have dinner with us. Is that the master himself would have been the one who prepared the meal for the servant, because he says to the servant, come in at once. Sit down for dinner. It’s already prepared for you. Jesus says, who among you would do this? Now the disciples that are listening to Jesus here in this moment, they would have thought none of us, none of us would do this. This is, of course we’re not going to do that. That’s not how things are done. It’s a servant’s job to make sure that the master’s needs are met. Not the other way around. The master would instead instruct the servant to prepare the meal and then dress properly. Take off all those sweaty clothes from the field, put on proper clothes, serve me the meal, and then watch the master have his dinner. And only then would the servant have his own meal. Now, if you’re feeling uncomfortable with this, I want you to remember that this is how their economy worked. This is how a servant would have his livelihood.

And it’s hard to find parallels for us today. But let me just say, every time that you go to a restaurant at dinner time. Okay. And you go to a restaurant at dinner time, you are served by someone who does not get to eat at dinner time. Okay. That that person is that that that server, that waiter, the cooks in the back, the dishwashers, those folks, they have to eat on a break. But they do that because that’s how they make their livelihood. And it’s the same sort of thing here, but in a very different sort of economic arrangement. If that first question about will you allow him to pull up a chair and have dinner with you, if that question makes you squirm just a bit, the second question is only going to increase the discomfort. Jesus asks, does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? Does the does the owner of the estate even? Oh, thank you to the servant who carries out his household duties. Now we are squarely outside of our culture here, right? Because we would all say, well, yes, of course you’d say thank you. Of course you’d say, no matter whether it was their job or not, you’d say thank you to somebody for helping you out and doing what they did. But we need to follow Jesus argument here because he’s making a very technical argument.

He’s not asking whether it would be nice to say thank you. He’s not saying, would it be kind to say thank you. He’s asking whether this thanks is owed as a debt to the servant who is merely doing what he’s been commanded to do. In these two questions, Jesus is asking whether a servant should expect to be celebrated and praised and rewarded, and even in this case served by the master for simply doing what a servant is supposed to do. And the answer is no. No, it’s not owed. If it’s your job, then what is there to praise? Jesus says, even if you do your job exceptionally well, it’s the, it’s to be expected that you would do your job to the best of your ability. This doesn’t mean you can’t be praised and rewarded. It doesn’t even mean that you won’t be praised and rewarded. But if someone does their job with the expectation of being praised and rewarded, then they’re doing it with the wrong motivation. And this is why this is such a hard aspect of discipleship under Jesus for us to grasp. We very often do things for credit. We do it because we want to be seen. We want to be heard. We want to. We crave the praise. We want the raise. We want people to tell us how great we are at what we do, how well we do our job, and it’s because there are very appropriate times and ways to build others up, to encourage people to show love and to show thanks.

There are those times. By the way, we as a staff just received this week our love gift from all of you. And let me just say on behalf of all of our staff, wow. Thank you. What an incredible thank you for all this generosity. We certainly feel the love that you as a congregation have for us as a staff. But let me flip this around. Let me flip this gift around and use it to make Jesus point. I’m going to throw my entire team under the bus here. But the unwritten rule is that I get to use them in illustrations however I like. It’s one of the hazards of the job. Okay, so, imagine if the staff of Calvary, our pastors and support staff here at Calvary, served you and served you well, in order to draw out from you all of the praise and honor and financial gain that we could possibly get from you. You would be right to run from this place and to get away from this place quickly. And I’d love to say that that has never happened in the 2000 years of Jesus church, but Peter in the first century warned the church elders not to do their job for shameful gain. Even in the church you find this. And that’s because there’s a way of serving God that is really serving yourself.

There’s a way to serve God that’s really serving yourself. If you change your view of service from something, you owe God to something that you use to gain from God. You’re not really serving God at all. And that’s why Jesus says here, here’s what you must say as a true servant of the Lord, we are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty. So without that attitude and that perspective, you can’t understand discipleship. You will get discipleship wrong every time if you don’t have that attitude. And we will misunderstand what it means to follow Jesus without it. Jesus is adjusting our attitude in this passage. Here are five attitude adjustments that I see in this passage. And the first is our place within God’s household is right. Our place within God’s household is right. It is correct. This is the first and most important adjustment because without this, there is no discipleship under Jesus. You cannot follow Jesus without owning This. We are servants of the Lord, not the other way around. Okay. We serve him. He does not serve us. God doesn’t exist to honor us. We exist to honor him. We should be servants. We are designed by God to be servants. All. All of God’s creation. His entire created order is designed to reflect the greatness of his glory. And that includes us. It includes humanity. So when Jesus uses an owner of an estate and a servant in the field who now comes in and has to keep serving the master as a way of illustrating our relationship with God, he has picked a correct metaphor.

That’s the right way of seeing it. I call this the first and most important attitude adjustment, because seeing our relationship with God any other way creates a foundational error in which it is impossible to understand the gospel. If you see yourself as over God in authority, you don’t really believe in God at all. Okay? If you see yourself as over him in authority, you’re not really believing in God. You believe in yourself. And for you, God is merely a projection of your own authority. And isn’t it amazing how much God tends to agree with us when we’re focused on what we think, and not really concerned at all about what he’s said? But most of us here this morning probably don’t wrestle too much with thinking that we are the master and that God is our servant. That’s probably not where most of you are at. That’s more of a more of a non-Christian take. What we might wrestle with, though, is the sense that we are a fellow master alongside God in his household. This is far more common in the church. We might be inclined to listen and obey in some areas of discipleship. But were resistant and negligent in others where we don’t think it’s as important to be faithful. We might have our own way of seeing things that’s a little different from God’s Word.

Or we might be faithful to parts of God’s Word that match up well with our preferences, or our political views, or our natural tendencies or things that we tend to enjoy. And then what we do is we ignore, or we explain away the parts of Scripture that are personally challenging and that that call us to deny ourselves and church when we do that, when we when we pick and choose what we want to, to listen to and what we don’t, we are in essence taking off our servant clothes, and we are pulling up a seat at the table next to God and acting as a fellow master alongside of God. There is no place for us at that table. God is our master. His word is our instruction. We are his servants and any other arrangement is simply idolatry. It’s not Christian discipleship when we find that urge within us. The proper response is not argument, it’s repentance. Once we understand that, we are rightly in the servant role. Here’s the next adjustment. God’s commands for us are normal for servants. Now the Bible is filled with instructions for how to properly be God’s people. Let me just say two things about them. First of all, the Bible contains commandments for servants, not suggestions for our benefit. You hear me say this sort of thing all the time, so I won’t spend a lot of time on this.

But do you see the words commanded and duty in verse ten? Look at that scripture again. Commanded and duty. That is not a misprint. We say, well, I don’t like to be commanded. I like to be asked. Yeah, that’s just fine when it comes to your spouse and kids. If I go around at my house barking out orders, I’m probably going to hear about it. That is just not how it works. No one’s going to listen to me if I do that. Scripture does use the metaphor that those of us who follow Jesus are adopted into the family of God to describe the relationship that we have with our Heavenly Father. But it would be a mistake to stretch that metaphor too far, as if it was the only way that we relate to God. Our Heavenly Father’s commands are not like my suggestions to my kids. Okay? When I make suggestions to kids, sometimes they get to speak into it. Sometimes they get to choose differently. We are not just God’s kids; we are also his servants. So. So, when God tells us what to do with perfect holiness and within his ordained will. He’s not inviting us into a negotiation. But there’s a there’s another way that we see this adjustment to we’re not being asked to do anything extraordinary. We’re not, we’re not we’re not being asked to do anything extraordinary in God’s eyes. Faithfulness to God’s commands is an expectation of a disciple.

There’s nothing especially heroic about what God has said to us. It might look heroic from a human perspective. I think, especially here, of those all around the world who suffer evil at the hands of others regularly, simply for being a follower of Jesus. It looks heroic, but it isn’t. Especially when this church gave $140,000 to help our church friends in Ukraine. Here, just a few years ago, the newspaper here in town reached out because they wanted to do a story on it and we said no, because responding to a need is just what we’re supposed to do. That’s what we’re called to do. We’re not looking for credit for that. I mean, it was wonderful. It was a great outpouring of love and generosity. It greatly built up my faith to be part of something like that. But caring about the church around the world and doing what we can with a cheerful heart. That’s just standard operating procedure for a follower of Jesus. That’s just who we are. And that’s true of all God’s instructions, all of his commands. God’s commands are our new normal. That’s just how we operate. And if we turn faithfulness into something to be proud of or something extraordinary, we lose sight of what faithfulness is. It’s our duty. And that leads to our third adjustment. We are not in a position to demand or expect. I was talking to a friend of mine about her marriage one time, and she was telling me how her husband didn’t really do all that much to help out around the house, but whenever he would do something like unload the dishwasher or something like that, he would wait expectantly for her to say thank you or good job or something along those lines.

And if she didn’t acknowledge what he did, he’d get upset. And then he’d use this perceived lack of appreciation to give himself an excuse for why he didn’t have to do more things around the house. Um, this was hilarious to me when she was describing this. It probably shouldn’t have been. I probably shouldn’t laugh when people tell me things like this, but that sounds more like the sort of conversation you might have with your toddler than with your spouse. But as I consider how deeply immature that. And wouldn’t you agree, that sounds pretty deeply immature, right? There needs to be some growing there. As I think about how deeply immature that sounds, when you say it out loud, it becomes much more sobering and profound when I realize this is exactly how I sound, when I presume God’s blessing simply for doing what I’m supposed to do. Think about that servant. Think about that servant in the field. The servant comes in from the field, and he doesn’t get a seat at the table. What does he get? He gets more work. The servant does his work like he’s supposed to. Jesus asks, is he owed thanks? No.

There’s no need for reward or recognition because the servant served. That’s what servants do. This, by the way, is another dagger into the heart of the false prosperity gospel. I talked about it at length last week. I’ll just say just. I just want to point out real quickly here that expectations of God’s blessings for faithfulness are the exact opposite of what Jesus teaches here. We don’t obey to receive. That’s false religion. We obey because we already have received. That’s the gospel. Our faithful work doesn’t put us in a position to expect God to give us blessings or recognition. On the contrary, God’s gracious work for us in Christ puts us in a position where God can expect us to respond by serving faithfully. So, there is expectation here, but there is responsibility. But it’s not an expectation on God. It’s on us. Our whole lives from now into eternity are response to the saving mercy of God that’s been given to us through no merit of our own. When Jesus died on the cross for our sins, he didn’t do so out of an obligation to us, but to live with that grace, to receive that from him is to live under obligation to God. Loving. Obligation. Cheerful. Joyful. Far seeing obligation, but obligation nonetheless. If you don’t have a category in your mind for being filled with joy and peace while under the obligation to serve the Lord faithfully, then you won’t understand the call of Christ.

You need that category in your in your mind. You can see that in my fourth adjustment here, that servanthood does not lessen love or value. So, this parable is not intended by Jesus to teach us primarily about how God sees us. But, but, but how we should see ourselves in light of God’s commands. But there is a key detail in this story that prevents us from reading it and plunging into viewing God as some sort of a cold and detached God, as if he doesn’t care about us. Now we know that’s true from the rest of Scripture. Plenty of places. All throughout Jesus talks about all throughout the Bible. We know God loves his kids. God takes good care of us. God. God, the love of Christ is the greatest love of all that’s been showered on us. But while this parable is not primarily about that side of the equation, there’s a detail here that alludes to this deep love and this care for us as servants. Notice that the servant eats, he eats. Now, Jesus main point in saying that the servant eats is the order. Okay, he’s talking about the order here that the servant eats after the master. That’s his reason for this story. But it’s important to see that Jesus isn’t describing a cruel, unattached master. He’s not describing a God who is unconcerned about the needs of his servants. And if you read it that way, you are reading that into the story.

Okay, we have to be very careful not to read into the Bible, but to read out from the Bible a proper understanding of our servanthood and our obligation to God doesn’t make God a careless tyrant who doesn’t love or value us. On the contrary, to be a servant in the household of God requires his tremendous grace to us in Christ. We can’t even have that position in God’s household without him showering his love and grace on us. And one of the ways we grow closer to God is by becoming, day by day, more and more dependent on his provision. We are designed to be dependent on God. Our desire to be independent, that that thing in you that makes you want to be independent from God, that’s a product of sin. That’s not a product of God’s design. So, when Jesus describes our service to God as an obligation and the servant serves without expectation, and then he eats after the master, we shouldn’t read that God is putting us under his shoe right there. We should read that God is restoring us to the proper place within his creation. And the last adjustment to our attitude that we have to make is maybe the most obvious. We must own our unworthiness to understand the gospel. Don’t miss how this parable ends. It ends with a verbal profession. We shouldn’t just know it. We shouldn’t just begrudgingly acknowledge it.

We shouldn’t just sort of assume it but leave it far in the background of our Christian walk. We should say Jesus says this. You should say it. Say it out loud. We are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty. Unworthy. That’s how we should feel about ourselves. Not unloved, not uncherished, but unworthy. And it should be such a part of our identity that we have no problem saying it out loud to anyone who will hear it. It’s how we should carry ourselves here at church. It’s. It’s how we should be with our family. It’s how we should work around the people who don’t even know Jesus. If everything we do is done for the glory of God, then there’s really no place for us to be serving for the glory of ourselves, is there? There’s no place for us within that call. You know who this is really hard for Successful people. This teaching is really, really hard for successful people, people who are really good at what they do. People who get a lot of accolades, have a hard time with seeing themselves as a servant of God. And it’s very hard for them to understand the gospel, because the good news of the gracious, undeserved forgiveness of Christ requires you to admit that you’re not adequate. And then once you come to the end of yourself and you realize that to be saved, you must receive God’s undeserved forgiveness of Christ, you know what happens then? You start to realize that everything that you have is an undeserved gift, like all of it is undeserved.

All that talent, all that knowledge. Who gave it to you? Who gave it, who? Who designed the brain that can hold all that knowledge? Who opened the door for success in your life. We’d be fools if we thought we were independently great on our own, somehow we did it all. One of the reasons people reject the gospel is because they have to admit that everything they have comes from the hand of God, and so they’d rather live a foolish life of lies than own the truth that every good and perfect gift comes from above. As James tells us, a true disciple of Jesus, a true disciple of Jesus, serves with the humble heart of a servant doing his duty. It was all that we were ever designed to be. Now, let me conclude by addressing what might be a bit of a nagging feeling that you have inside. Doesn’t God celebrate us? Doesn’t he celebrate us? Doesn’t God tell us that he will shower accolades on his faithful people? Doesn’t he commend the servant who worked hard with the pronouncement, well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master. Doesn’t Jesus say that we should store up treasure in heaven? Doesn’t Paul tell us that he’s pressing on toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus? That all sounds like accolades and rewards, doesn’t it? The scripture sounds very much like God is very excited about his faithful servants and is excited to celebrate and reward us.

So how do we reconcile what Jesus teaches us here in Luke 17, with all of the celebrations of faithfulness that we find elsewhere in the Bible? Well, let’s remember this morning that this parable that we’re reading here, is about what’s going on inside of our hearts as servants. It’s not what’s going on in God’s heart toward us. There is going to be a day when all of us close our eyes for the last time here, and we open them in eternity. And the Bible’s description of that is a homecoming celebration. It is a party. It is a party in heaven for God’s people who have clung to Christ, who have lived with him faithfully through this world of sin. There is going to be joy, and God is going to be at the center of that party. He is overjoyed at the faithfulness of his people. He is filled with pride and joy when his kids do well. But remember what he says when we step into that eternal party. Well done, good and faithful servant. We don’t receive a hero’s welcome because we’re not the hero. Jesus is the hero. We are merely Jesus servants. So someday, someday, we will receive a servant’s welcome and enjoy the prize of an eternity with our creator, Jesus. Jesus is our reward. Let’s pray.