TEEN TREE 
OF LIFE
SERVING GOD
September 3, 2017
Part 1
BEFORE we begin, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, take a moment to name your sins to God the Father. This will allow you to be filled with the power of The Holy Spirit as you read this booklet (EPH 5:18 & 1JO 1:9). IF YOU HAVE never believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you have that opportunity right now. Simply tell God the Father that you are believing on His Son Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you make that decision, you are now a believer and will always be a child of God! When you die, you will spend eternity with Him forever in heaven! (JOH 3:16 & ACT 16:31).
In ROM 1:9-12 (The Message Bible), Paul tells the Romans something about himself and his relationship with God: I thank God through Jesus for every one of you. That’s first. People everywhere keep telling me about your lives of faith, and every time I hear them, I thank him. And God, whom I so love to worship and serve by spreading the good news of his Son—the Message!—knows that every time I think of you in my prayers, which is practically all the time, I ask him to clear the way for me to come and see you. The longer this waiting goes on, the deeper the ache. I so want to be there to deliver God’s gift in person and watch you grow stronger right before my eyes! But don’t think I’m not expecting to get something out of this, too! You have as much to give me as I do to you. On the surface he is simply saying, “I tell everyone, with whom I come into contact, about you.” But don’t think that that’s all he’s saying. What Paul is teaching – gracing us with – is a blueprint to follow that will lead us to a close and personal relationship with God. And he’s teaching that the only way you can get there is through SERVICE.
Now, Christian service is much more than spending a lot of time doing good works. Christian service is a result of fulfilling God’s Plan. But it’s not how you fulfill God’s Plan. What motivates you, and your mental attitude, are the real issues in Christian service. Christian service should always come out of spiritual growth. You have to be motivated by the goodness produced through learning and applying Bible doctrine.
Doing divine good can only be achieved by the Filling of the Holy Spirit. This is the first spiritual skill. As you grow spiritually, doing good work must be motivated by knowing Bible doctrine. That’s the second spiritual skill. Christian service must never be performed with your eyes on people. You have to learn the principle of not putting the cart before the horse. Without Bible doctrine, there is no true Christian service. Understanding the principle of not putting the cart before the horse means that you understand that your spiritual skills must come before your production skills for the performance of Divine good or good works.
Now let’s look at a cool thing. Did you know that there are six answers to any question? When a question is asked, it is asked to answer: Who, What, When, Where, Why or How. In ROM 1:9 above, the Who, What, and How of service are answered. Whom do we serve? How do we serve? What is our service? As we answer these questions, we will compare Scripture with Scripture.
In answering the first question – Whom do we serve? – Paul says “For God, whom I serve”. First off, there is no one else we are to serve other than God. In every aspect of our lives, we are to serve God. Not just at church, in study, or in prayer, but in all aspects of our lives: on the job, at school, at home, in our marriage, in our relationships with our parents and others, on the sports field, and in recreation. Paul said in COL 3:24: …knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve. He said in MAT 6:24: “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
If you want to have great relationships in all things, have a tremendous time in all things, then do all things, enjoy all things, and participate in all things as unto God. When you do, you will live a tremendous and full life. When you do not, you will ultimately have misery and distress (being worried about holding on to your stuff) and will have no relationship with God. Look at MAT 4:10: Then Jesus said to him, “Go, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.’” How many of us fall down and worship Satan and what he is offering every day? YIKES!
Let’s look at the second question: How do we serve? The way to serve is through the Human Spirit. Everyone who has believed in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has a regenerated Human Spirit. The human spirit is the immaterial part of man designed by God and imputed to the believer by means of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation. It is given to convert, to store, and to utilize spiritual phenomena. The human spirit receives spiritual information that the Holy Spirit converts into gnosis (knowledge). The Human Spirit is a perfect spirit, without corruption and is the place of contact with God Who is also Perfect and Without Corruption. The Human Spirit constantly battles with your Sin Nature for influence over your soul. Because of this, we must rebound (name our sins to God in His Son’s Name) in order to serve properly.
PHIL 3:3 says: for we … worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh… Here we see the other side of the equation in our service to God. Here we see the role of The Holy Spirit. God The Holy Spirit communicates to and through our Human Spirit so we can know and understand the things of God, fellowship with Him, and serve Him. Here we apply the first and second Problem-Solving Devices: Rebound and the Filling of The Holy Spirit. But in order for all of this to be possible, God did something fantastic for us and has caused fantastic things in us so that we can serve. First and foremost, Christ came to serve the Father, and as a result we are saved and now have the opportunity for service: For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” (MARK 10:45)
We learn from this verse that Jesus Christ set a pattern for us to follow: serve God and everything else falls into place. As a result of Christ’s service, we received many things. One is that we are no longer under the Law which we learn in ROM 7:6: But now we have been released from the Law of Sin, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the spirit and not in oldness of the letter.
Paul wrote in ROM 6:14: For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. Paul used the analogy of slavery to show that we will not sin under grace because we have become enslaved to God and righteousness. In Paul’s mind, there was a direct correlation between sin and the law. In 1COR 15:56 he wrote: The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. We have been freed from sin and we are released from the law. We walk in newness of life and we serve in newness of the Spirit. Our victory over sin is tied to our union with Christ in His Death and Resurrection. Our release from the law and its sin-arousing power is because we are now joined to The Crucified and Risen Lord. All of this is so because of Christ’s Service.
Also because of Christ’s Service, we are cleansed from sin and its bondage: How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (HEB 9:14)
We also have freedom in our souls to serve without guilt or condemnation because of Christ’s Service, according to GAL 5:13: For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. Our Lord and Savior’s Service serves as an amazing example of what can be accomplished when we serve God!
The thing we need most in order to serve is Faith: trusting in everything that God Is and Has for us. That is our foundation! It is also the third Problem-Solving Device – Faith Rest. Faith is a system of perception based on confident trust in the Authority and Veracity of God, Jehovah Elohim, the Lord God! The Faith-Rest Drill is one of the Ten Problem Solving-Devices. There are three categories related to the Faith-Rest Drill: claiming God’s promises (faith mechanics), applying a doctrinal rationale to support the promise (faith functions), and resting in the Lord by leaving the problem in the Supreme Court of Heaven (faith execution). Service comes in to the equation because you have to have faith in God and trust in Him in order to serve Him.
{to be continued}