Workers in the Lord’s Vineyard are called to Serve?

The First Chosen Race: The Jewish people were God’s first chosen people and power, and might walked with them as they won battles, which they should have lost, even to this day.
They, however, down along the line departed from the Lord and had to pay dearly for that. They fell from grace to grass a number of times, and they became slaves to nations which should have been serving in their courts and households.
God wanted the religious to lead His people, and so He used prophets to speak to them. As time went on, these religious leaders compromised themselves and misled the people. Blinded with the lust for power, they failed to see that Jesus the Messiah was in their midst and went ahead to kill their God. Over three decades later, Jerusalem fell and most of the Jewish people went into exile, to return almost 1,880 years later to form the State of Israel, which still remains blessed.
The Second Chosen Race: The Lord God has opportunities available to Him at His beck and call, so after His first born He created the second, through His only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who became known as Christians.
God, in His Second Person, came to live among men and exhibited to mankind, by His Words and Deeds, the way to gain salvation and lead people to it, just as originally planned by God, as in the case of the First Chosen race, until it insisted it wanted political leadership, the new Chosen Race was to be led to God by people He calls into the priesthood and into the service of shepherds or labourers in His vineyard.
Qualities of those called to Serve:
Not everyone is called to serve as a priest and shepherd of the flock of God’s people. They must have qualities, which are of divine nature in them. They must be Christ-like. And what are the qualities of Christ? Humility: Christ is humility personified. The Creator of all things, yet He chose to born in an animal kraal, and made a manger His baby cot (St Luke 2:7). Simple Life: He owned no property, and neither did He ever crave for anything materialistic. Care for People: He rather used what He had to satisfy the immediate needs of people, feeding the multitude (St. Matthew 14:13-21; St Mark 6: 30-44; St Luke 9: 10-17 and St John 6: 11), and giving the little He had to the poor and needy (St John 13:29). Does not Boast or Brag: Jesus endeavours to, as much as possible, let His deeds be on low key (St Matthew 9: 27-30) & St Mark 1: 40-44). Does not want to be Honoured: Even though He deserves honour, Jesus made sure He rejected any form of honour being done Him (St Luke 11: 27-28 & St. John 6: 14-15). Does not want to be Served: Jesus made it clear that He came to serve mankind (St Matthew 20:28).
Humility is the foundation of all virtues, and it is this virtue that smells like sweet fragrance or incense to the Lord God of Hosts. All who are to follow Christ’s footsteps, as workers in the Lord’s vineyard, are to have great humility in them. They must have all the virtues of Christ, and that is the only way to draw people to the Lord.
All priests and other shepherds of the Lord’s flock should be aware that Christianity, and all that it portrays, is their responsibility. How others perceive Christianity today would be seen through their words and deeds.
The lack of humility among some of these workers in the Lord’s vineyard makes most people, especially non-Christians, not to take this religion serious. A strong man of another faith was quoted as saying that if he had not read the Bible, he would have thought Christianity was a bad religion.
We have such servants of God who consider themselves highly place above all men, and so they want to be served, very much against what Christ instructed them to be (St Matthew 20: 25-27).
Wealth and Power
We have men and women of God who view wealth as a necessity and go all out to use any means possible to grab riches. It is now a competition among some of these leaders in the Church, engaging themselves in contests of who has what. Rev Fr Blessed of Catholic Meditation had this to say about wealth in his exhortation on St Matthew 1: 23-30: We must not allow riches to send us to hell. When one is rich but not generous to give to the poor; when the temptation of wanting more grows, one will steal from the poor and hoard what he has.
It is not bad to be rich, since God created everything, including riches. So long as the riches are genuine and are fruits of hard work and success, they are blessings. It is not bad to be rich, so long as one uses his wealth to help others.
But when one is rich and becomes arrogant, proud and insensitive to the needs of others, and at the same time when one attaches riches to himself, one will then allow his riches to pull him from God. And one thing, riches can be material wealth, talents and skills, land and estates, intelligence and initiatives, beauty and good looks. When one has any of these and attaches them to himself, he draws away from God.
Incidentally, we see some servants in the Lord’s vineyard amazingly showing off what they have, and even contest among themselves as to who has more. To these servants in the Lord’s vineyard, the Beatitudes, especially, “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit,” (St Matthew 5: 3), means nothing to them. The first of the Beatitudes calls for humility and submissiveness to God. Emptying oneself and being totally dependent on God and acknowledging that one is nothing before God, comes with lots of blessings, irrespective of the person’s social or financial status.
These days, most servants in the Lord’s vineyard think that, with their position as shepherds of the flock of the Lord, they are mandated to lord it over their followers and consider them inferior.
The true servants of God in the Sacred Scriptures never took that stand, since they know that it was by the will of God that they were given that position to lead God’s people. Some feel so proud that they will not accept any counter opinion, drumming it down the throats of Church members that they have the final say. This can put some worshipers off, since there are certain aspects of life, socially and academic, that they know more about and are more experienced than the priest or pastor.
Driving the Flocks Away
Because of these deeds and more, there are lots of people from good Christian homes and backgrounds who have abandoned the faith, temporarily or for good. The latter care nothing about the Church and Christianity. And as things stand, almost two thousand years after the Church was founded and Christ gave that commission to all believers to go out and make disciples of all nations, Christianity forms only 31.2% or 2.334 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people. Catholics are about 17.5% of the world’s population or 1.4 billion people, and Islam forms 24.5% or 1.9 billion of the world’s population.
Why the world has not yet achieved 50% of the world’s population is, perhaps, due to the turning away of the true values of Christianity by some church leaders. For it is in recent times that Islam is moving at its fastest to be the largest religion before the middle of this century. In Europe today, Christianity is fast losing grounds, not that Islam has started making wild gains, but that most people there are no longer interested in worshipping Christ the way they should.
When Islamic fundamentalists started killing Christians for their faith, good Christian leaders around the world pretended all was due to some radical fanatics and speak out softy on the matter without taking the necessary steps to put a halt to this. Some Christians have been forced to denounce Christ to become Muslims.
Such is life, if some labourers in the Lord’s vineyard abandon their core duty to serve, and rather compete for the desires of this world. These are Christians who are leading Christianity into the Diaspora and ridiculing the Name of Christ. We shall discuss them in the future, however, before I sign off, I have an apology to render.

Apology to GPCC
In my last two feature columns, I classified the likes of Obinim and Nigel Gaisie as members of the Ghana Pentecostal Churches Council (GPCC). My attention was drawn to the fact that the two, and many others like them, are not under any Christian organisation. This means they are freelance; doing what pleases them without any association to monitor and correct them when they go wrong. This cannot be accepted, and I will tackle this issue in my next feature.
Once again, I apologise to the GPCC and all churches under this Council for associating them with these so-called men and women of God. As a Catholic, trying hard to be a good one, I whole heartedly apologies without assigning any reasons to support what I wrote. All I can say is that I am sorry.

The post Workers in the Lord’s Vineyard are called to Serve? appeared first on The Chronicle Online.

Read Full Story