Our Bible verse for today: “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.” Acts 20:28 (NIV)
Our thought for today: “Just do your part”
This past Friday I had the privilege of preaching the funeral for my friend Dick Foster. As is true of all of us, Dick lived a life of contradictions. He was strong in some ways and weak in others. He excelled in some areas of his life and he struggled in other ways. He had his share of rough edges to his character, but he could also be a very kind and helpful person.
Dick will be remembered in many ways and for many things, but the thing that many of us will remember most about him will be his love for Oak Hill Baptist Church (and his fierce determination to protect and care for the church). Dick served as the Chairman of the Deacons for decades, including during some tough years when there were difficult problems and storms of controversy. At those times Dick led the church through the storms. It was during those times that his strong, tough, no-nonsense personality was exactly what was needed.
The point I wish to make with this story is that Dick invested a major part of his life into caring for the church, some of it in tough times when the church was in peril. In this way in particular, Dick’s life was well spent. God used his faithful service to help make sure there would still be an Oak Hill Baptist Church here today for you and for me.
That’s a story I’ve seen again and again, in church after church, over the course of my ministry years – faithful servants of God, diligently and with great love, caring for God’s church. Often their actual ministry activities are low-profile and therefore don’t get a lot of attention, but their service is vital and extremely important none-the-less.
In Psalm 84:10 the Psalmist wrote, “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” I once heard a church custodian paraphrase and personalize that verse when he said to me, “Pastor, I would rather clean toilets in the house of the Lord than to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”
You don’t have to be a Christian rock star, or a world-famous evangelist, or even a pastor or a deacon, in order to perform important service for the sake of the Kingdom. If you simply embrace the ministry activities the Lord has called you to and equipped you for, and then you faithfully spend your years humbly serving in, and caring for, the church God has placed you in, yours will have been a life well spent.
Oak Hill Baptist Church