We are all the servants portrayed in this parable; all people are servants. We are made to be servants of the living God. That is how we are designed; we are made to serve him willingly and to love him. But then the parable turns it around, as the lord girds himself, and comes forth and serves his servants. What an astonishing thing that the Creator of the world undertakes in a sense to serve us in his kindness and in his amazing love! We are made by him and we are made for him. He has given us consciences. He has given us an instinctive awareness of his presence. He has sent his word into this world, and the name of Christ is known everywhere to varying degrees of detail. The message is known to millions of people and has been for many centuries. So we are a race of servants and we should be his servants, but we neglect him and ignore him so often, and therefore this parable is for us.
What are the kind of things we serve? If we do not serve God, if we do not serve Christ, what do we serve? It is easy to answer that. Most people, a lot of the time, serve their pride. You are a servant to your own pride. Your own pride dictates so much of the time what you do. You have to do certain things, because otherwise you would look small or you wouldn't be thought well of, and you are therefore bound to do those things. There is a sort of processor in your mind all the time which says, ‘If I do this or if I do that, what will people think of me? How shall I be regarded?’ That drives many people. ‘I want to make great progress. I want to be popular or famous.’ We don't often think of it like that – that pride dictates what we do, and how we do it so much of the time.
Then there are those who are servants to their ambition. ‘I must get on.’ It is no bad thing to have a good and a reasonable ambition, but often it's entirely selfish ambition. ‘I must get on. I must achieve this and build a fortune.’ Ambition commands us. We are made to be servants of God but, poor pathetic things that we are, we end up serving our ambitions and ambition is a very hard taskmaster. It really does bully us and punish us, and it costs no end.
Some people are servants to flattery. They do anything to get a bit of flattery. All people to a degree are servants to conformity. You must conform. You cannot be out of line. You cannot possibly be seen doing something which not everybody does. You must fit in, follow the fashion, follow the crowd.
Then of course we may be servants to pleasure. I must just be having fun all the time. I must be doing the things I want to do most of the time, no matter what it costs me. We are servants of course to our appetites and our sinful drives. These things call the shots, give the commands and we just serve them. ‘I won't serve God. In fact I won't serve anyone’, we may say, ‘except my employer – because I've got to eat – and all the time we are actually serving all these other things in a most pitiful way. You are made to serve, but to serve God. That is noble service; that is real fulfilment; that is the meaning of life. If you won't serve him your life kind of fragments into serving all kinds of other things and sometimes you don't even know it or see it.
Some people serve movements, ideas and become slaves to those things. Many people serve possessions, acquisitions which they must have. Then some people serve people. They admire people and they will serve them rather than God. Some people serve their professions. They are highly intelligent people often, but they are serving their professions exclusively, doing whatever is demanded of them. People come to serve their business. They set up their business, and they own it, but very soon it owns them, and it determines what they do, and they are sold out to their business; it completely controls their lives. If you won't serve the Lord you will certainly be serving other things.
We are all servants, or slaves as the original Greek says, and we're slaves in so many ways. The extraordinary thing is we will not think in this way. We will not accept this. We think we are free. We say to ourselves I am free in my judgments. I am free in the holding of opinions. I can form whatever opinions I wish. I am free in my ambitions. I may be curbed by circumstances, but I am free to hope and desire whatever I like, but we're not. We were made not to be in bondage, but to be in voluntary and happy service. We are constituted as men and women to be in the service of our Creator, the living God, but we won't have it.