How to Be a Good Servant of God<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
by Walter Martin
What does it take to be a good servant, a good minister, a good witness for Jesus Christ?  Are there any guidelines that God has given us?
Yes, but you can give marvelous sermons and tremendous illustrations; you can spellbind audiences, thump your Bible, pound the pulpit, manipulate vocabulary-and miss the whole point.  Simplicity.  God wants us to translate our theology, our doctrine and our faith into our walk, our witness, and our life.
The Pharisees were renowned for having the epitome of sound doctrine.  The Scribes were cited by Christ as having great righteousness that came from their observance of the letter of the Law.  In fact, Jesus said unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees and the Scribes, you can't enter the Kingdom of God.  And yet with all of their knowledge, all of their zeal, and all of their religiosity, they had missed the point: the translation of the Law of Moses from the letter to the spirit-and the living of that in one's life.
If you tried to live the Law of Moses by the letter, you had 622 laws to live by and you would have needed a pocket calculator to keep up with all of them.  That's why they had the morning and evening sacrifices: the morning sacrifices for the things you missed during the night, and the evening sacrifices for the things you missed during the day.  God knew the impossibility of perfection on the part of men.  The purpose of the law was to reveal your imperfection, so that you would trust the grace of God and have faith in his goodness to redeem you.
So Paul, writing in a pastoral epistle to young Timothy says, "You know, doctrine is very important.  If you pursue it and are consistent in it, you save yourself and others by the teachings."  But, says Paul, if you really want to accomplish that goal, then you've got to effect translation of that doctrine into living.  And so he gets down to the nitty gritty and tells young Timothy what he has to do to be a good minister of Christ, a good witness, a good servant.
How do you become an effective voice for Christ?  How do you excel as a servant of the Lord Jesus?  The first thing you should do is to recognize the times in which you live.  Don't live in a fool's paradise.  The Church is not going to usher in the Kingdom of God.  The Church is going to be rescued by the coming of the Kingdom of God.  That's what's going to save us-and we're going to need saving at that particular point in history because the Scripture says the whole world will be dominated by the forces of darkness.
The last days are with us.  They've been here for almost nineteen hundred years.  If you want to be a good servant of Jesus Christ, you must tell the Church what the true condition of the world is; you must tell the Church what her own true condition is.  In effect, Paul says to Timothy, tell it like it is and let the chips fall where they may.  You are not responsible for the falling of the chips; you are only responsible for telling people the truth.
The task of every pastor, every evangelist, every person in leadership in the Christian Church, and every witness for the Lord Jesus is not to float along with the tide of the world, but to vigorously resist it, because the world is under the dominion of satanic power.  The proof of your Christian pudding and your nourishment in the words of faith and good teaching is that you vigorously-and without compromise-state the truth.  If you do that, the truth will set you free.
No matter what type of witnessing strategy you come up with-no matter how forensic your presentation or how brilliant the apologetic-when you're finally finished men are still going to be either skeptics, procrastinators or believers.  These are the three categories we find repeatedly in the ministry of our Lord and in the ministries of the apostles and disciples.
We should, therefore, not be discouraged when people turn away from the good news of the Resurrection.  What we ought to do is just be sure that we do a good job in answering the objections.  One plants, another waters, and the Lord gives the increase.  We are planting and watering.  Be sure you do a good job of it.