For starters
Think of Avenue and any other churches in which you’ve been involved.
- What does the ideal level of involvement and service look like?
- Why is there always more to do?
Into the Bible
Read Ephesians 4v1-16
v1-6
- What does it look like to “live worthy of the calling you received”?
- How should our salvation affect our service?
v7-11
- What is the connection between our effort and our Jesus given gifts?
- How do we know if we are serving in our own effort or in Christ’s grace?
v12-16
- How are we doing at Avenue with identifying/using each other’s gifts?
- How can we encourage each other to grow?
- Is there anything you’d like to do? What training do you need?
Optional group-work
Divide the following passages between you and then report back.
- 2 Thessalonians 1:3 & Colossians 1:9-14
- Romans 12:4-13
- John 13:1-17
- What do each of these passages tell us about serving?
- What is the basis for our serving?
- What encouragements are there to keep going in serving others?
- How can we embed serving like this at Avenue?
Some helpful quotes on service
Have you ever realized that you can give things to God that are of value to Him? Or are you just sitting around daydreaming about the greatness of His redemption, while neglecting all the things you could be doing for Him? I’m not referring to works which could be regarded as divine and miraculous, but ordinary, simple human things – things which would be evidence to God that you are totally surrendered to Him. (Oswald Chambers)
One of the principal rules of religion is, to lose no occasion of serving God. And, since he is invisible to our eyes, we are to serve him in our neighbour; which he receives as if done to himself in person, standing visibly before us. (John Wesley)
“Christ says, ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. … Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.’" (C S Lewis)
(Optional - here is the tongue-in-cheek Gift Profiler from Sunday. You may want to look at together, with a serious side – how do we discover our gifts?)
Discover your gifts
Use the patented Avenue Gift Profiler to help you find how you could be serving at Avenue. Honestly answer these questions and then follow the instructions below. Feel free to answer these questions in discussion with a mature Christian if you would prefer.
- You notice that Avenue is going to start an hour earlier each week. Do you:
- search the scriptures diligently to find out if this is the right course of action.
- think what a great idea and tell everybody so.
- carry on turning up at 10:38 as usual.
- offer to do an early morning alarm call through the entire address book.
- The quality of the doughnuts is decreasing week by week. Do you:
- tell everyone that it doesn’t matter because man doesn’t live on doughnuts alone.
- say “Tally ho! There’s always chocolate brownies!”.
- clear off round the corner to buy your own as soon as we’ve sung the last song.
- get up at 5:30am every Sunday morning to bake enough for everyone else.
- You’ve just come back from visiting friends who go to church at St Keller the Fabulous. Do you:
- lead a bible study on Acts 2:42.
- pick up a few good ideas and share them with the elders, along with a logistics plan, a resource survey, a funding stream and 32 volunteers.
- sit in the Avenue toilets and watch their videocast.
- offer to help out at whatever the next Avenue initiative is.
- Great-aunt Gertrude, a long standing member of Avenue, needs her toe-nails clipped once a fortnight. Do you:
- help your homegroup apply what Jesus meant by washing each other’s feet in this situation.
- Draw up a rota and offer nail-cutting training to everyone.
- Book yourself in for a pedicure, believing that charity begins at home.
- Buy some latex gloves, a face mask, some bolt-croppers and arrange to visit.
- Belleview Home For The Terminally Old, needs some help to clean their solar panels. Do you:
- lead a Sunday evening seminar on the Biblical view of environmentalism.
- help everyone see what a vital role they can have in tea making, water changing or glass scrubbing duties
- Lie in a darkened room hoping that your acute and brutal attack of vertigo goes away
- thank the Lord that those hours spent at the climbing wall will finally have some gospel use.
