FOLLOW | Servanthood

you to remain standing for the reading of the word. So this is Matthew 20, 25 through 28. Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them, not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant. And whoever wants to be first must be your slave, just as the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." This is the word of the Lord. You can grab a C. What's up church of the city? Good to see you guys. If we haven't met yet, my name is Keith in, and I'm a pastor on the team here, and I get to oversee all things next generation, future of the church. I lead college NYC, which we have some representation over here, and youth of the city as well. And you ever have those moments where you're like, "I feel like I'm living in a miracle." Has anybody had a living in a miracle moment in their life? A couple of weeks ago, we were at camp, and it's so wild to see all that God has done in the next generation in our church, like it is wild. When I moved here, right in 2021, 2022, our youth ministry was just a handful of students, just a few families that had teenagers, and really not a lot of hope for what God could do in their midst. And what we have seen God do is just breathtaking. Last week, we took 160 teenagers to camp, and with staff, and crew, and everywhere, we took 250 people up to this camp. I brought a photo to show you guys all of what God has been up to. I'll stand to the side here. And you know, I show you this not for numbers, not for hype, not for, like, "Wow, well done, I just show you this to say," like, God heard the desperate prayers of people when nobody had hope. And God heard the prayers of parents, of families, and of people in our church, just like you, that were crying out for God to do something in the next generation.

Now, this moment, I would argue, is the moment to go harder after investment into the future of the church, not take our foot off the gas. And this isn't just in youth, we've seen God be moving in the college students of our city all over the place. College NYC that just started about three years ago is this movement of young people across the city representing all different universities. So if you're here in this room, and maybe you just moved to the city, you're a college student, we would love to get you involved. I brought a photo. We started a college discipleship cohort that's called the Landfear School. And the vision of the Landfear School was to give the same mission formation download that somebody would get if you went to YWAM, or Circuit Riders, or something that was like a gap year program, we were like, what if we could give the same theological and missional download to college students in the city? And so we ran our first cohort right here, and this crew, like, I have never seen the amount of discipleship and acceleration in the mission of God that I got to participate in this last year. And so just know, I don't know how much you're aware of what God is doing, like in the future of the church in our midst, but God is on the move. And so my ask to you is, could you pray for the young people of our church? Could you pray that God continues to sustain what he's doing? Because these, I believe these are like the early days of a move of God, that our secular friends, and a lot of people in the church never even thought what happened. But this is a moment for us to invest and to sow in and to pray. So would you join me in that church of today? Yes? Amazing. Thank you. Today we are going to be teaching out of Matthew 20 in our follow series. If you guys have been with us over the summer, we've been asking this question, is it possible

to be a Christian and not a disciple of Jesus? And as you drill into what are we talking about when we talk about discipleship, it's this concept where Jesus invites people not to just check a box of religious affiliation, but with the entirety of their life become an apprentice of him under his ways. And if you guys have been tracking with the Bible reading plan that we've been doing, You recognize that Jesus doesn't leave your life. He doesn't leave your life unquestioned. He wants to take the entirety of your life and orient you to what he called the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God. And I'm in a text tonight that may be one of the most controversial things that Jesus ever said. And to speak on this passage to a room filled with New Yorkers. This also has a different ring to it because as it turns out, you guys are really competent, excellent, you are achievers, you are go-getters, you have vision for your life, and all of these things are amazing. You are very good at playing the game of the world. But what Jesus invites us to is not to just succeed and play the game of the world, but to play by an entirely different set of instructions all together. And so tonight we're gonna be talking about serving, about humility, and about leadership. 'Cause I believe that there is a destiny on our church and available to our church that we will not step into

if we don't understand this teaching today. If we don't embody what Jesus is inviting us into here, we will waste the potential of our church. And here's why I think that we could miss this teaching entirely. Over the few years of living here, I've been here for about five years. I have noticed one thing, New Yorkers have main character energy. A lot of it, every single person that I meet seems to be the main character of their story. And think about it, I mean, many of us left the place that we grew up in, that wasn't the greatest city in the world, moved to the greatest city in the world. And we've got dreams and vision. We wanna see God do amazing things. We have grit and determination. We have main character energy. Or maybe you were born here. You were born in the greatest city of the world. So then your entire life is proving that this is the greatest city in the world. 8.5 million New Yorkers, all connected by this kind of energy, more than any other city that I know. And I love it. It's what makes our city great. It's why you probably left a lot of things at great cost to be here or to stay here.

But every time that we come to a teaching where Jesus talks about death to self, humility, and taking the role of least importance in the eyes of man, we think, oh, surely this is like just metaphor, right? Like surely this is just symbolic. Jesus doesn't really want to change my life. He wants to give me like some wisdom and some abstract things to think about. But I got stuff to do. I have ladders to climb. I have things to achieve. And so we can write off this teaching entirely. Carl Truman in his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, writes that he believes that we're living in what he calls the era of expressive individualism. Or this core driving idea of our culture that all of us have the right and should have the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, with whomever we want. And any one or anything, any kind of external authority on our lives trying to hold us back is inherently oppressive and to be thrown off and rejected entirely. So into this culture, into this city that we live in right now and into our church, Jesus doesn't want to just life hack your spirituality. He doesn't want to just tweak a couple of things here

and send you on your way. Jesus wants you to think about the world through entirely different lenses. See, today we are going to be learning how to become a disciple that embodies servanthood in the midst of a culture of expressive individualism. 'Cause Jesus, if he knew this or not, he was born not in a vacuum, not into ideologically neutral territory. Jesus was born at a certain moment in time. He was born in Judea in the first century. He was born as an oppressed person. He was in an oppressed people group under the boot of the most hierarchical, most socially stratified, and oppressive empires of all of human history. The way that Rome functioned, particularly around the advancement of the empire They pressed down with heavy taxation. They granted no citizenship. There was no political power or voice of influence at all. And like many ancient empires, the world that Jesus was born into had a very rigid social hierarchy. It was predictable. This was repeated over and over and over. At the top, you had the emperor. And to the emperor had his then officials in the aristocracy of Rome. You had the military leaders and the soldiers

that would enforce the empire around the known world. You had the citizens of Rome. And then underneath all of that, you had occupied peoples. And then below them, even further, you had slaves. You could think of it like a pyramid with those at the bottom serving the needs and desires of the people at the top. And we can look at a chart like this and we often have a relationship with Jesus like he's the emperor or like he's the most important person. But in the context that God chose to be a man, he actually brought himself in to society at a low level. He was an occupied person with no legal political or societal influence whatsoever. And by Matthew chapter 20, the texts that were in tonight, the disciples had seen all that Jesus could do. They were mind blown at his power, at his words. And even a few chapters before this, Peter has this amazing confession in chapter 16 where he says, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. Now, the Messiah was a prophesied figure throughout the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures that pointed to a future coming king who would reestablish the throne of David in their time and rule over all of the earth from Jerusalem.

So the text of today, Matthew chapter 20 is what happens when people, Jesus' disciples, come to him with the assumptions of empire on their minds. So get this, James, John, and their mother, these are three people that have been following Jesus everywhere, seeing what he can do, hearing his teachings. Yet when they come to him in this situation, it's as if they have more Roman framework in their minds than they do kingdom of God framework, which is such a word to me, it's such a word to us that you can be at church. Like the disciples were at the equivalent of church for them. They were walking with Jesus and still have the wrong cultural framework of your heart. So what happens is James, John, and their mother come to Jesus. And the mother says this in verse 21, she comes to Jesus and says, grant that one of my sons may sit at your right hand and the other at your left hand in your kingdom. So what the mother of James and John does in this moment, you can see the life script playing out. She is running the play of empire and then mapping it onto Jesus. She thinks this is how you are successful in life. They thought that they knew how to become strong and powerful in their day. And it was these three things. It's all about who you know. They had access to Jesus, we know him. So we're going to leverage that for all that it's worth.

Next, it was about the position, the positional authority that you had in the hierarchy. So could my sons sit at your right and at your left? If Jesus was the president, this would be the equivalent of asking, could one of my sons be your vice president and one of them be your secretary of defense or whatever the equivalent of the two most important roles would be? And it's all about climbing as close as you can to the top of the pyramid of this hierarchy to have other people serve you and your interests. Now before you dismiss this as just some ancient archaic perspective of a desperate mother, I think that this formula is how New York runs. This is the ecosystem of our city. This is the playbook of how to get ahead. First, get the most connections you can to the most influential people in the city. Second, stack your resume with degrees and accomplishments to sit in significant positions of honor in your life. Next, grind your way up the leadership hierarchy so that other people have to do the jobs that you don't want to do. And A, end up serving you. This is, this sounds like Tuesday in New York. This is just the way that the world functions. So, how does Jesus respond to this? How does he respond to the hierarchical, the top-down leadership mentality

that they try to map on him and then cozy up to his power? How does he respond to them? In verse 25, Jesus calls together his disciples and he says this. You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. This is Jesus essentially saying, I know how the world works. I'm not blind to this. I have lived under the boot of Roman oppression since I was a kid. I am not naive. I know that the world has a certain way that it works, a script of how to be powerful and successful, how to get ahead. But what he does next is he looks them in the eyes. And in verse 26, he says four words that should hit to the center of your being. Jesus says, in light of all of these assumptions that you have, that you're bringing to me, he says, not so with you. Not so with you. See, we can often think that Jesus just wants to make little tweaks to our life and our theology to the way that we see our world and the society that we live in. But this is Jesus saying, you need an entirely different operating system of seeing the world. What you think is right side up is actually upside down. NT Wright writes a ton about this concept

of the upside down kingdom of God. That our hearts and our vision of the world are so distorted and warped by sin that we see the world through certain lenses. And so Jesus comes and introduces the kingdom of God and everything that Jesus talks about sounds like the exact inversion of the system that we know and have gotten good at working within. Listen to this, listen to how backwards this sounds. Jesus says, not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must become your slave. So to embody servanthood is the key to greatness in the kingdom of God. Now, this would have been shocking to his original audience as shocking as this should be to the heart of somebody in a city like New York. What are you talking about? To be great, to be first, to get partner at your company, to land that Broadway performance, whatever it is, you have to become like the most despised in society, like the lowest social rank. See, and this is not just metaphoric or symbolic. Jesus doesn't want to just say things that are abstract theology and good quips of wisdom and sayings, but then he doubles down and throws his entire life into this. And he says in verse 28, for as the son of man, speaking about himself,

he says, for as the son of man, I didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many. And if we are to become like our rabbi, which is the goal of this entire series, this is the path to greatness. Let me say this, New York no longer defines or provides your path to greatness anymore. This is a new era in your life if you truly call Jesus Lord. Now, that's easy to say from a pulpit. That's easy to read and get inspired and think like, yeah, that's true, but this is complicated. Can we be honest? What we're talking about tonight is one of the more complicated dynamics of our life and of our city. you are impressive people with significant responsibility on your shoulders. So you might find yourself in a position where a lot of people are looking to you. And Dallas Willard in the spirit of the disciplines, he wanted to write to address that tension that we feel in a city like New York and roles like you may hold. He said this, the discipline of service is even more important for Christians who find themselves in positions of influence, power and leadership to live as a servant while fulfilling socially important roles

is one of the greatest challenges that any disciple ever faces. To be great and yet to live as a servant is one of the most difficult of spiritual attainments but it is also the pattern of life for which this bruised and aching world is waiting for and without which it will never manage a decent existence. So for us today, like are we just gonna take Jesus in this teaching and just assign it to a quip of ambiguous wisdom that maybe we can bring out here and there? Or is this a different way to see the world? Is this possible, like is this possible for us in our church to embody this way of life especially in a city that is built on the social hierarchies around us, the Darwinian competition of our world and the expressive individualism all around us? And I believe that in this text and Jesus lays out four shifts in our thinking to embody servanthood as the default posture of discipleship. So we're gonna roll through these quickly. Four shifts to take your life from being all about you and turn it into what am I doing to be about the work of God in our city. So the first is this. The first shift is to go from consumption to contribution.

This word contribution is an anchor in thinking about discipleship. In verse 20, the mother of James and John comes to Jesus and it says that she asks a favor of him. She's wanting to ask a favor which means there's something in her mind that's already been made up about what Jesus can do to help her out. And her two sons which in that society would have been the gateways to success and influence for a woman in that world. She has her two sons leave their jobs, leave their lives, everything to go and follow Jesus as their rabbi. So there could even be this tone to this asking that sounds a little like this. You know, my sons and our family has really given a lot to you and your ministry and your mission. So here's something that you could do for me. Here's something that you could do for us. And she introduces this transactional relationship with Jesus. The spirit in her heart was this. To use the access that she had to Jesus to elicit success, security and comfort in her life. And I would argue that this is the same spirit that has held much of evangelical Christianity in the West captive for decades. This is the spirit of consumer Christianity.

This is the spirit of wanting to be served by Jesus but not to serve Jesus. See, and we have even been trained up in our language can be tricky around this. So like Maddie was up here and she was saying that we have a 10 a.m. service and we have an 11 a.m. service and we have a 6 p.m. service that you guys are at right now. And if we're just walking around with this word service I go to the service, I wanna be at that service. Did you like the service? We can think that the church exists to serve you and that the dynamic that we should be functioning under is the assumption that pastors worship leaders do the serving and that people that come to church receive the service, okay? But the first time that the word service was used around a religious gathering in the church it was used to refer to our communal service to God. Not about what we could get from the teaching, get from the worship but about what we as a group of people that believe that Jesus is Lord come together to serve God in the worship that we exalt that he's worthy of. So we can get this all twisted in our church. Carl Truman, again in the rise in triumph of the modern self, explains how in previous eras of human history, people established their identity

based on externals. Check this out. He says, "The ancient Athenian was committed to the assembly, the medieval Christian, to his church, the 20th century factory worker to his trade union and working man's club. All of them found their purpose and well-being by being committed to something outside of themselves. However, in the world of the psychological man or the era of expressive individualism, the commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed. Thus the order is reversed. Outward institutions become in effect servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being. And if we're not careful, this perception could cloud the way that we see even a really good thing that you're at like being at church tonight. This has led to a phenomenon that CS Lewis called becoming a connoisseur of churches. And in his book, The Screwtape Letters, which is a satirical work that is two demons having a conversation about how to dissuade somebody from following Jesus. And in this book, the two demons write this. If a man can't be cured of church going, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that suits him until he becomes a taster or a connoisseur of churches. The search for a suitable church makes the man a critic

or the Lord wants to make him a pupil. Here's the truth. The enemy is fine with anything that keeps you from having skin in the game in moving the kingdom of God forward in New York. He's fine with it. Like he's fine if that is blatant sin and rebellion. And he's fine if it's coming to a church gathering like this with all sorts of selfishness in your spirit. And if I was to just as a pastor of this church, I don't think that the primary temptation of our church is to give our lives away into rebellious living and overt sin. I think that the enemy's temptation is that he could keep us so focused on ourselves, that we waste our potential in the kingdom of God in a moment that we're living in. So this is a wake-up call for all of us toward contribution, discipleship from the very beginning involved contribution. See, Jesus, two chapters after the Sermon on the Mount, which was like the download of what to know how to think about the kingdom of God. Two chapters later, he sends these fishermen and his disciples, these unschooled teenage kids around the region to do the things that he was doing. He believed more for them than they believed for themselves. He says, you can heal the sick, cast out demons, proclaim the kingdom has come. You can do all of this stuff and he sends them.

It would have been wild for them to conceptualize being a disciple and not a contributor. But then you get into the early church and you read the letters of Paul, particularly one Corinthians and Romans. There's these sections where Paul talks about how worship should function and it's so foreign to us because everyone would come to church not to be served but to literally contribute something. It was people would come with a prophetic word, people would come with a song in their heart to share, people would come with an encouragement to the group, people would come with food and resources to care for those who were in need. So it was less like a lecture hall and more like we're all in the game of contribution here. Like a consumer Christian would have been a foreign concept to early discipleship in the way of Jesus. And I mean, think about this in your own life. Like anything that you actually get roped into contributing and investing in, that's what you are really believing for. That's what you're really about. Man, if you just pop into something, pop out, it's like that probably didn't mean that much to you. But the things where you get some skin in the game, it can change everything. And I just believe that for church of the city, for each of us here today, I think that we have so much to do. and in this moment in history.

But the potential is kind of like an underground water table that's just flowing that is, there's water under there, there's resource under there. But what Jesus is trying to do is to drill down through the way that our culture functions through self-preservation and the elevation of the self. He's trying to drill down through layers of the way that we see the world so that he can access and tap in like a well to the underground water that is there that will come gushing forth to bring life. And I just think that for us in a moment like this that our church can step in and receive the invitation from Jesus to contribute. 'Cause you guys know this, the things that you care about, you want skin in the game. And it's no different in the kingdom of God. I think about Jordan Francis. Jordan, can you wave your hand at the back of the room right there, he's wearing the red hat. He is mixing tonight. Jordan Francis was a 13 year old kid in Canada just going to church, kind of going through the motions. And somebody in his church comes up to this 13 year old kid and says, "I see something on your life and I bought you a guitar." And what I want you to do is take this guitar and use this for the kingdom of God. Use this for worship. I'd see incredible potential on your life.

And he took that invitation and poured his life into music, into sound, and it unlocked his destiny. Jordan Francis, would you be in this room? Had you not been given that guitar at 13? No, this is what can happen. There is potential, and it's not just to be on staff at a church, there's potential for you to step into your calling in the city if we will step into our contribution in this moment in time. The second shift is to go from criticism and critique to compassion. The second shift is toward compassion. In Matthew 20, 22, Jesus says to these disciples who come to him and they're really fired up about getting the best seats in the house and in his government. And he says, "You don't know what you're asking." Jesus said to them, "Can you drink from the cup "that I'm going to drink from?" Essentially, Jesus is saying, "The cross is coming "in Jerusalem. "Are you up for following me if it looks like the cross?" And James and John just not even having a clue what they're saying, they step forward and they're like, "Yes, we can. "Yes, we will. "Give me that cup. "Give me two cups. "I'm in. "I could do whatever it takes, I'll do it."

And Jesus in verse 23, he says to them, 'cause he knows that both of them in the future will give their lives as martyrs for the kingdom. He looks at them and he says, "You will indeed drink from my cup, "but to sit at my right and my left hand "is not for me to grant. "These places have belonged to those "for whom they've been prepared by my father." And when the 10 heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. The other 10 hear word of this and they are ticked. They can't believe that this happened. Now, why were they so upset here? I believe they were upset because of the comparative nature of what just went down. For James and John to step forward and say, we are the ones, put us in the position, was to step into self-righteousness and critique of all of the other disciples. Say, we have it together, we know how to help you, we've given the most, therefore we are justified in having the most important positions. Their self-focus turned them self-righteous and critical rather than more humble and aligned with the heart of God. And I think that this spirit can rest on the church as well. We can spend so much time in the mode of criticism and critique. All of the things in a church like this, any organization of people, you're gonna notice things that are calling your attention

to pain in our community, calling attention to frustration. You may see people that don't have a friend that don't seem to be connected with, all of these things. And you can, in your spirit, just click into critique, to be critical, to say, oh, well, that's all churches burn people. All churches don't really take care of people. I know how this worked. And this is in my own heart. I'm like, if I was leading this thing, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do this. We can become so critical of what's happening. you notice pain or frustration or injustice around you, that maybe, just maybe, that could be the Holy Spirit trying to get your attention, trying to say, "Hey, look, you noticed this thing. I've brought this to your attention now. What are we going to do about this?" And there is this invitation to have greater agency to contribute, but this comes from a heart of compassion. We see this in the life of Jesus in Matthew chapter 9. There's this moment where Jesus has been giving everything. Like literally pouring out, he's been healing the sick, he's been proclaiming the kingdom, he is exhausted, and tired, and he just needs a moment. He just needs a moment to himself. He just sees like, "If I could just get up into the Hudson Valley for one night, just have a little bit of rest, I can come back to New York." And so, essentially, that's the equivalent. And he gets in a boat, and he goes to the other side of the lake.

And you know that feeling when you get off a work Friday and you're just cooked, and you're like, "I just need a moment here." Jesus is in that moment, and he looks to where they're about to dock the boat on the other side of the lake, and thousands of people are coming together, because they hear that that's where he's going to land. And these people have needs from him. Okay, so what Jesus has in this moment is a decision to make about the narrative in his heart around what's happening. One side, Jesus could have stepped into critique and criticism. He could have pointed the finger at all of the issues. Rome is the issue, Caesar's the issue, these people are hungry, they need to be cared for, no medical attention, point the finger at institutions. He could have pointed the finger at the people that were coming to him for help, saying, "Man, I just can't believe that they won't give me a break. Their people are so needy. They have so many things that they want from me." And he could complain about them. What does Jesus do? He sees the crowds. And Matthew chapter 9 says this, it's incredible. It says that Jesus saw the crowds and he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. And so the heart of compassion, we see Jesus develop these sacrificial instincts around him. And then he steps in and believes that God wants to use him in that moment to pour his blessing out on these people. And I have found this in my life over the past few months in a sharper and sharper way than I ever have before.

I just became a father of two. So I have a two and a half year old named Powell, and I just had another son, his name is Sonny, and he is about four months old. And if you would have told me, as I was a bachelor, before I married Celeste, before we started our life together, if you would have told me that I would be as sacrificial as I am in my life right now, I'd probably say you're crazy. I'm not a by default sacrificial person. And if you would have told me that it's like, oh yeah, you're going to have a wife one day, which is going to be its own commitment and responsibility, and then you're going to have two sons that will take all of your money, and they'll take all of your time. And guess what? They're going to take all your sleep, and they're going to take most of your sanity. I don't know if I would have been like, all right, I'm going to opt in for whatever that is. But over the course of my life, the instincts towards sacrifice actually have grown within me. So like watching the other day, Powell was riding his little toddler bike, and he falls over. And in that moment, my heart doesn't go to, gosh, Powell, I mean, geez, if you could just keep it together a little bit, like stay up on the bike. It's not that hard. I need to get home. I got stuff to do. My mind doesn't go there at all.

My mind goes to, I've compassion for my son. I'm invested in this situation, and I'm stepping in. I think about my son, Sonny, who literally just cries in the middle of the night, and there's not a second that I'm not like jumping in to be about helping him. And this has developed over time. Why I bring this up is not because I'm some amazing father and husband. I'm work in progress. But this can develop in a person over time. And so you might be here tonight and you're like, I'm not a naturally compassionate person. That's okay, because filled with the Holy Spirit of God, and on the mission of God, he will form instincts of sacrifice within you to help the world around you. The third shift is moving from main character energy to a life of consecration. Here's the wild thing. You can be a contributor to the church. You could be on a serve team. You could have a heart of compassion and step in to care for the needs of people around you. You could do both of those things and still live as the queen or the king of your own life. And that's dangerous. Jesus in Matthew chapter 20 invites us into a way that we are so deeply secure in who we are before God that we can give our life away. We can make our life not about ourself.

See, consecration is the complete devotion of your life and story to his. Former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Jennifer Crocker, she wrote extensively on this concept, the difference between an ecosystem and an ecosystem. An ecosystem is your ego being at the center, like you being at the center of your life and everything else is revolving around you versus an ecosystem of contribution without you at the center. And what she noticed in her clinical psychology practice is that she was having major breakthrough in people's lives when she got them out of functioning in an ecosystem and functioning in an ecosystem where the world would tell you if you put you at the center, that leads to flourishing. But what she's saying is that putting you at the center makes you miserable. And the way that she saw major breakthrough with her clients was actually de-centering them from their world and seeing them as a larger part of an ecosystem to participate in. Now, when Jesus, the God of the universe, steps into human flesh, when Jesus is on the earth, what is the ecosystem of the kingdom of God? How does Jesus function? Because we know this from Revelation 4 and 5. At the center of the universe, there is a throne. And on that throne, there is the lamb who was slain.

Jesus himself is on that throne. So when you think about the ecosystem of Jesus' life on the earth, wouldn't it have looked like everything revolved around him? Everything was serving his needs. He's at the top of the hierarchy of the cosmos. But what we see is a very different picture. This is from John 13, verses 3 through 5. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power that he had come from God, and he was returning to God. I want you to notice here. Jesus' identity is so secure. It's secure because he knows who he is. He knows the story that he's living in. And so from that place of infinite security in God, no insecurity in his spirit whatsoever, he gets up from the meal, he took off his outer clothing, and he wrapped a towel around his waist. His outer clothing would have been the garments that distinguished him as a rabbi or a teacher. He takes them off. He wraps a towel around his waist, which would have been the slave's uniform. And after that, he pours water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with a towel that was wrapped around him. This is how Jesus functions on the earth. It's so different than you think it would be. It's so different than what he's worth. But what he does is he serves,

he takes the lowest position of servitude in that culture. It would have been humiliating to do what he did in that world and in that culture. He dressed like a slave, and in his moment of greatest fear, the imminent danger of the crucifixion, the impending abandonment by all of his disciples, he washes his disciples' feet. See, to Jesus, his life was not his own. It was fully surrendered to the will of the father. There was nothing beneath him. There was nothing beneath him. And here's the danger. If we think about our life in Jesus, like an ego system, we can come to Jesus. And this is so dangerous. If we think about church and Jesus in an ego system, we think like this. Well, the church is really, I mean, it's a place where all of my friends go. It's kind of like a social thing that I do every now and then because I like the friends that are there. Church is where I can find a spouse, where I try to date people, to find someone that's halfway decent, where I come and there's a gathering that I like, there's music that I like, there's teaching that I like. And in this framework, Jesus can just be our buddy. Jesus is just the one, our little sidekick in our life's mission. Jesus is our life coach that he's gonna help us

to achieve the goals that we've set out for our life. Jesus is there if we hit like a desperate moment of need or we really, really want something, maybe we'll pray. But this isn't how Jesus shows us how to live. This isn't how Jesus invites us into relationship with himself. See Jesus with the slave towel around his waist, washing feet. This is him saying, "Nothing is beneath me." Nothing is beneath the Son of God. And I think often we're in churches and institutions and moments in our city and we think that we're above serving. We think that we're too good, we're too important to serve. If the people at work saw me serving in this way, I mean, it would be laughed at, it would be mocked. Bonhoeffer in his book, "Life Together," he wrote this, "We must not spare our hand where it can perform a service that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God only where hands are not too good for deeds of love and mercy and everyday helpfulness can the mouth joyfully and convincingly proclaim the message of God's love and mercy. Do you see yourself as above serving ecosystem? Do you see yourself as participating in the serving of Jesus ecosystem? And the last shift, this is the shift toward crucifixion, moving from extracting from the world and from our city to laying our life down for the people of our city.

This is the principle, this is the epitome, the pinnacle of a life of servanthood is the crucified life. And what do you picture God to be like? God in human flesh, on the cross, he gives us the picture of what God is like. God is infinite love. He loves you. He wants relationship with you. He wants to do life with you. He created you for a purpose. But yet, because of all of the rebellion of our heart and our life, we deserve separation from God. We deserve death. But Jesus comes in the cross to take the full weight of our sin, the consequences of our sin upon himself. The heart of God is deeply sacrificial. Philippians two puts it this way. Being in very nature, God, Jesus didn't consider equality with God, something to be leveraged to his own advantage. But rather, he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. See, God is desperate to rescue you and to reconcile you to himself. God sees the sin of your life, the sin and destruction of our world.

And he knows that this is all headed toward destruction and separation from God. And he throws his life into the mix and pays the penalty for our sin. And this is available to you. If you've never followed Jesus, tonight could be the night that you say, I'm gonna step from all of these things of the world. And I just, I wanna believe that this is true. I wanna give my life to Jesus. But the Evangelical Church often stops there with this kind of line of thinking that man, I'm so grateful that Jesus lived a crucified life because then I don't have to live a crucified life. But Galatians 2, the Apostle Paul, inviting, He says this in Galatians 2, 20, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. In the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. This was such a gut check for me as I was doing this teaching this weekend and prepping this because there are just things that were getting exposed in my heart, motivations of my life. Why did I come to New York? Why did I say yes to do what I did five years ago in moving here?

And the Holy Spirit in His gentle confrontation brought these questions into my spirit that I want to put before us all today. Did you come to be served by New York or to serve the people of New York? Do you see yourself and your role here as primarily extracting things from the city, extracting capital, extracting opportunity, extracting networks and connection or giving your life for the city? Do you want to see your fame and your deeds? Known in our time. Or are we willing to take the path of the crucified life to die to ourselves that we would see his fame and his deeds renewed and known in our time? So I don't know how this teaching is hitting you today. I don't know where you're coming in at this, but wherever you are, there is a step of invitation for you. There is a step deeper into the things of God. There is a step for you to move from consumption and consumerism to a life of contribution. There is a step for you from a cynical and a spirit of critique on your life to having a heart of compassion like Jesus. There is an invitation for you to move from, life is about me and my story to life consecrated to the purposes of God in our city. And you can move from just extracting from New York and you can lay down your life for the good of this city to see lost New Yorkers far from him

come into relationship with him. There is a Scottish revivalist by the name of John Knox who had this dangerous prayer that he would pray. He would look into the throne room of God and he would say, "God, give me Scotland or take my life." And I just wonder if church of the city has a spirit of martyrdom that's meant to be released on us, that we would say, Lord, we're here, we're available. We wanna be used by you, we want to serve the purposes of the kingdom of God in our time. God, would you give us New York or take our life? Are we willing to lay our lives down for this? This is the crucified life. So we're gonna go into an extended moment of response. I don't know how this hit you today. This could be a day where you were like, I need to get on a serve team. I need to see with the heart of compassion the people around, whatever it is. This is a moment for you to step in. And so right now, all across the room, could you stand to your feet? I'm gonna invite our prayer team to come to the front. If you're on our prayer team, please come. We'd love to launch right into response here. (gentle music) And the invitation is made available to you. This invitation is for you. Any of those four shifts, you feel the Holy Spirit, speaking to you, drawing you deeper, calling you.

This is the moment where you come forward to receive prayer, not because there's something mystical or magical that happens, but just because we want to speak the words of God over you to affirm what he's doing in your spirit. So I'm gonna pray for us and then we're just gonna open the altar to come and to give our life deeper into servanthood in the kingdom of God. Jesus, you are worthy of our lives. You're worthy of our yes to you. You are so much better than anything that the world offers us. We say we want to look like you. Jesus, would you pour our lives out like a drink offering? As David prayed, he said, I don't want to give the Lord Jesus today, we give you a costly sacrifice of our lives. Everything that we've got. Jesus, would you move in our church? Would you move us and motivate us by love, not the flesh, by the power of the Spirit, not the inertia of our own willpower? We say, "Come, Holy Spirit, fill us. Draw people into the mission of God in New York City." In this moment in history that we're living through, Lord, call people deeper. In Jesus' name, we pray, amen. So wherever you are across the room, come forward, receive prayer. We're going to go into an extended window of worship and prayer together. So let's go into this. [MUSIC PLAYING]