How We See the Lord Determines How We Respond to Him
How do we see the Lord? Because the way we see Him determines how we respond to Him. This is a look at Ephesians 4, set beside John 13, and at why there are no spectators in the body of Christ.
What Did Last Sunday Night Leave Unfinished?
Pastor Jonathan began by looking back to the Sunday evening before, when the church talked about the body of Christ. God has placed every member in His body according to His wisdom. Nobody who belongs to Christ is insignificant, and every believer has a purpose.
They had closed with Isaiah 6: Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on His throne, high and lifted up, the train of His robe filling the temple, the seraphim crying, “Holy, holy, holy,” the foundations shaking, and smoke filling the air. The question then, and again this night, was simple: How do you see the Lord? The way you see Him will determine how you respond to Him and how you live for Him.
If He is only Someone you visit on Sunday, you will only give Him Sunday. If He is only Someone you turn to when life gets difficult, you will only give Him your problems. But if He is Lord of your life, seated on the throne, worthy of every breath He has given you, then our response ought to look a lot like Isaiah’s: “Here am I. Send me.”
Something happened after that service that encouraged him as much as the altar filling. Four families reached out during the week and said they did not want to wait another three weeks to start serving. They wanted to do something now. Last Sunday was never supposed to end at the altar or at the dismissal. What God began in their hearts was supposed to follow them out the doors, and he was glad to see that it had.
Tonight he wanted to take it a step further. If we see God for who He truly is, we will want to serve Him. He will not need a motivational talk to get us to do it. And that is where Ephesians 4 comes in, beginning with a picture that ought to humble all of us.
What Did Jesus Do with His Last Day?
He said the best illustration for this passage is John 13. Jesus is approaching the cross. He asked the church, if you only had one day left to live, what would you do? Jesus knew this was His last day on earth, and John 13 shows us exactly what He did with it.
Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into His hands. This is God manifested in flesh, the One who spoke creation into existence, who commanded the wind and the waves and they obeyed, who stood outside Lazarus’s tomb and called him out. He knows who He is, where He came from, and where He is going. And with all that authority, “rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.” – John 13:4–5, NKJV
Their feet were dirty from dusty roads. Instead of them kneeling before Him, the Son of God knelt before them. If anyone in that room had the right to demand that somebody else serve Him, it was Jesus. He could have commanded it. And yet the One who possessed all power and authority took the place of a servant. In their day, the person who washed feet was the lowest servant.
Peter could not understand it, and protested. Pastor Jonathan said we would have the same questions if Jesus walked in and started washing feet. Jesus explained that Peter needed the cleansing only He could give. Before we can serve Christ rightly, we must receive what only Christ can give. Our works cannot cleanse us from sin. Only His grace can. We have to be drawing near to Christ and becoming like Him because we are walking with Him.
Then Jesus told His disciples, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” – John 13:14–17, NKJV
He put a question before the church to sit with through the rest of the message: if the Lord we worship was willing to pick up a towel, what has convinced us that we are too important to pick one up? What title or position places us above the Lord of lords? There is none. After 40 years as a Christian, we ought to be more willing to serve than when we first believed, not less.
He warned against treating spiritual maturity like retirement — thinking we have served long enough, learned enough, and attended enough, and now somebody else ought to take over. There are legitimate seasons when responsibilities and physical abilities change. Scripture does not demand that an 80-year-old serve in the nursery, or that a 60-year-old serve in the same way as a 20-year-old. The form of our service may change. The call to faithfulness does not. We are called, young and old, to serve Christ while we are here.
And Jesus did not pick up the towel because His disciples were impressive. They were struggling with pride, fear, and misunderstanding. Judas was still there. If we are only willing to serve people who appreciate us, or only when someone recognizes our effort, we are going to have a difficult time following Jesus. Sometimes ministry looks like doing something nobody notices — a clean church, a cleaned bus, the lights coming on, the bills being paid — and it still matters. Sometimes it is praying with a person who never tells anyone you were there, or visiting someone who is sick. If we are following Jesus, we should expect to live as He did. The Lord we saw high and lifted up is the same Lord who knelt and washed feet. Majesty and humility. Authority and service. If we truly see Him as Lord, we cannot keep believing that serving others is beneath us.
Why Did Christ Give Pastors and Teachers?
With that foundation, he turned to Ephesians 4:11–12. “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” – Ephesians 4:11–12, NKJV
Christ did not give these gifts so the church could listen for a little while on Sunday and then go about the week in peace. He gave leaders to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Beneath that is the heart of a God who came to earth to serve, to save sinners, and to set an example. The same God has given leaders in the church to train the church to do the same thing.
Somewhere, he said, we have flipped the script, as if the saints were here to get the leaders where they need to be, and as if pastors, evangelists, and teachers are supposed to do it all. But if Scripture says otherwise, we do not get to change Scripture. We have to change our thinking.
He was honest about his own training years ago: he was told he would preach in six months, to learn Greek and Hebrew and a long list of other things, and to turn in a sermon a few days beforehand. He said he was not good. He was not faithful to Scripture. He was winging it, starting with an idea and then looking for a verse to support it. That is not training or equipping. His job as a pastor is to equip and train the church for the work of the ministry.
In a healthy church, everybody knows how to do their part — not that everybody is a pastor or an elder, but teachers know how to teach, preachers know how to rightly divide the Word, singers know how to lift up Christ. If we are going to serve God, we have to be willing to be trained. This is not a job where you are handed a target and told, good luck. If we are serious about serving God, we have to be serious about learning and about being trainable. Training means you will make mistakes, and that is okay. We have to give grace to people who are figuring it out, and we have to give room for correction. He said that after decades in ministry, writing, preaching, pastoring, and planting churches, he is still figuring it out. Nobody comes into this with it all figured out.
How Long Does This Work Continue?
Verse 13 says this continues “till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” – Ephesians 4:13, NKJV
He asked when we will be in the fullness of Christ, and the answer from the congregation was heaven. So the work continues until then. There is no retirement from ministry. If God gave you breath, use it for Him. And we are to be reaching unity in the faith — fellowship, agreement, and how we talk to one another. It is okay to disagree and still have fellowship. Iron sharpens iron. What is not okay is being so passionate about our disagreements that we cannot treat each other with respect and love.
The training, the discipleship, and the accountability continue until we get to heaven. The privilege is to serve God with the whole life He gave us, so that when we stand before Him we can say we gave Him our life, not only our prime or our thirties.
What Happens If We Stay Infants in the Faith?
Then Paul gives the point. “that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.” – Ephesians 4:14, NKJV
He connected that warning with the one in Hebrews: by this time you ought to be teachers, able to eat solid food, but you still need milk. It is one thing for a new believer to be an infant in Christ. The problem is staying there — talking about the same first things 40 years later and never moving on to how to live like Christ.
He said we will not be able to move on to solid food until we start serving. It is one thing to know about God. It is another thing to live like Him. We are not truly going to know these things in our hearts until we start living them. The danger of remaining infants is being tossed around by every teaching — opinions, commentators, and preachers saying different things. Study the Word for yourself. Know it. Live it. Serve. False teaching is more available today than it has ever been. He has seen people who never took that next step drift, and he warned that those who stay infants are the easiest to devour.
Instead, “but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” – Ephesians 4:15–16, NKJV
Instead of remaining infants, we can grow up into a mature body. The heart of this is service. Some of us think that because we have been a Christian for 10, 20, or 30 years, we are mature. If we are not serving, we are not mature.
What If Every Part Does Its Work?
He asked a question he did not need answered out loud: if God grew His church based on my service, or your service, how would the church grow? Would it grow? Or would we be letting somebody else do their part and ours? Are we a part that works, or a part that drains the work from everybody else?
He pointed to the Gospel account of the four friends who carried a paralyzed man to Jesus. It is a beautiful story. But what if one friend had said, I’ll let somebody else do it, and another had said, If he’s not doing it, I’m not either, until the last friend was left trying to drag the man alone and burned out? That story would not be in our Bibles if they had not all done their part to get that man to Christ. We talk about the miracle so much we can forget the work those four friends had to do to get him there.
What is God going to do in this church when we do our part? Paul connects the work of the ministry with truth, love, unity, and maturity. The body grows as every part does its share — not just the pastor, the deacons, or the Sunday School teachers, but every single part. We have responsibilities toward one another. If we want to see a brother grow in Christ, we need to be growing in Christ too.
Doing our part is not only a formal job. Sometimes it is praying with someone at the altar, sitting beside a person who is alone, helping a new believer understand what it means to follow Jesus, or reaching out to someone who is drifting. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” – Galatians 6:2, NKJV. And “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” – James 1:22, NKJV.
He wondered whether we have become so accustomed to hearing sermons that we have forgotten we were supposed to be living them. A sermon that convicts us on Sunday but never changes how we live on Monday has not produced obedience. It may have given us a little more knowledge, but it has not produced obedience.
This is not about building a volunteer sign-up list. It is about establishing a culture of biblical discipleship, and that has to go both ways. If the church is going to go forward, it has to take as much from the people as it does from the pastor. We have to be trainable. We have to be willing. And all of that should come from the heart of Jesus, who knelt down with a basin of water and washed His disciples’ feet.
Life Application
This week, do not leave this as something you only heard. See the Lord for who He is, and let that change how you respond to Him. There are no spectators in the body.
Ask yourself these questions as you go into this week:
- How do I actually see the Lord — as Someone I visit on Sunday, Someone I call when life is hard, or as Lord of my life?
- If Jesus was willing to pick up a towel, what has convinced me that I am too important to pick one up?
- Am I waiting to be served, or am I looking for ways to serve, even in things nobody notices?
- Have I been willing to be trained, corrected, and used, or have I flipped the script and left the work of the ministry to a few leaders?
- If God grew this church based on my part in the body, what would grow?
- What is one concrete way I can be a doer of the Word this week, not a hearer only?
The Lord who is high and lifted up is the same Lord who knelt and washed feet. The body grows as every part does its share. Be willing. Be trainable. And let it come from His heart.