In Colossians 1:21-23, the Apostle Paul writes:<\/p>\n\n\n
“Once you were alienated from God and were hostile in your minds because of your evil deeds.\u00a0But now He has reconciled you by Christ\u2019s physical body through death to present you holy, unblemished, and blameless in His presence\u2014\u00a0<\/span>if indeed you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope of the gospel you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature<\/span><\/i>\u00a0under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.<\/i>“<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n There’s a lot going on in these 3 verses, but let’s focus on one aspect easy to overlook: Paul frames himself as a “servant” of the Gospel.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n It’s funny how certain infrequent images from Scripture – e.g. “born again”, “the blind leading the blind”, or “fight the good fight” – gain prominence in the church’s lexicon (and even the broader culture) while others are entirely overlooked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n I am sure the imagery of servanthood was more striking to Paul’s original audience, but it is sort of lost on us. A servant subjugates his or her own desires and needs in order to tend to the interests of one who is much greater in rank and power.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n Have you ever heard talk of Christians being “servants of the Gospel”? I haven’t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n You have to wonder … is it only famous 1st century apostles who are called to consider themselves “servants of the Gospel”?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n Or is it every believer?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Colossians 1:21-23, the Apostle Paul writes: “Once you were alienated from God and were hostile in your minds because of your evil deeds.\u00a0But now He has reconciled you by Christ\u2019s physical body through death to present you holy, unblemished, and blameless in His presence\u2014\u00a0if indeed you continue in your faith, established and firm, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9783,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9782\/revisions\/9783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}