“Don’t do your deed publicly to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward form your Father in heaven.” Mathew 6:1  

Dino Rizzo is author of the book Servolution. He tells about his journey to ministry. After becoming a Christian as a teenager, he started attending this small church. He was enthralled with preaching and knew that was what he wanted to do. He told the pastor, “I want to preach too.” So the pastor told him to come to church on a Saturday morning at 5am. That’s when a prayer group of mostly older women met. He said, “Be here to pray with these women for 6 months, or don’t come back.” It wasn’t the easiest assignment, but he did it. 

After 6 months the pastor gave him another assignment: vacuuming the carpets in the church each week. After several months, the pastor said, “I think you’re ready to preach.” So, he gave him a Sunday when he would preach and gave him the scripture and topic to work on. He said he must have spent 80 hours that week working on that sermon. Sunday came, he got to the church and the pastor took him to a room at the Sunday School hour where there were four teenage boys sitting. The pastor explained, “They need a teacher, so preach to them.” So he did, for another 6 months! 

This all seemed so frustrating until he discovered what he was learning through it all. He said these two lines I find so powerful: “The pastor knew that if I didn’t learn to serve in secret, I’d never be any good in public; if I didn't learn how to serve in the insignificant, in the small, then how would I ever serve in anything else?” 

This Sunday we will examine what it means to serve in great ways (challenging, hard ways) in what seems like insignificant places. The importance of service is not so much what we do, whether it fits our “hard wiring,” or the difference we can see. What matters is the attitude we bring to serving.  

If we don’t serve in secret, how will we ever be good in public? Seems like we’ve heard that from someone before. 

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