Biblical servitude seeks what’s best for the other person over what the other person wants in the moment. To do this effectively, you need to be confident in your knowledge of God’s Word. You need to be seeking to daily grow in wisdom. It doesn’t need to be a “my will versus your will” situation. You can serve others well to the degree that you are personally submissive to God.

“How do you serve without becoming a doormat?” This question, posed to me during a marriage counseling session, gets to the heart of a common misunderstanding of the biblical call to serve others. The short answer is that Jesus’s call never entails allowing another person to assert their will over you as you passively obey. However, we often struggle to understand key distinctions due to our failure to properly define our words.
Part of the problem is that many of us have never seen biblical servitude modeled faithfully. We hear “serve others” and imagine “be a slave to others.” That misunderstanding is how we end up with Christian parents organizing their lives in obedience to the fickle will of their toddler. We’ve all witnessed the flustered mom desperately trying to placate the selfish desires of her ungrateful teenager as veteran parents from a previous generation look on shaking their heads.
To add to the confusion, trendy parenting philosophies like Gentle Parenting encourage parents to cater their nurturing style to the emotional lives of their children. The experts tell us to stop correcting bad behavior and instead to listen for clues indicating what’s going on in their inner lives. Christians hear “gentle” and immediately think of our gentle and lowly Savior. We fail to recognize that Gentle Parenting and Christianity may be operating under two different definitions of the word. Our Savior was gentle, but he also knew when to be confrontational. Clearly, it’s possible to be both.
Jesus is always the model.
In his excellent book, Authority: How Godly Rule Protects the Vulnerable, Strengthens Communities, and Promotes Human Flourishing, Jonathan Leeman writes, “Never does [Jesus] take orders, as would an actual servant—not even from his mother. Instead, he defied both the religious and civil authorities. He demonstrated authority over people, demons, sickness, the elements, and death.
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The best way to combat the forces of expressive individualism is full frontal attack. By showing up every week to church and to the table, we train ourselves to believe that feelings of authenticity are not our lord. Christ is.

In July 1798, John Leland, elder of Third Baptist Church in Cheshire, Massachusetts, decided that he could not in good conscience continue to administer the Lord’s Supper to his church. Admittedly bothered by the hypocrisy of his church members using harsh language with one another before joining in an ordinance symbolizing unity, Leland’s real problem was that “he had never enjoyed the Lord’s Supper, as he had preaching and baptizing.” He later discontinued his own participation in Christ’s ordinance.
Leland’s refusal initiated a heated controversy within the church that would last more than a decade and result in several members facing excommunication for their criticisms of the esteemed pastor. Eventually, Leland issued a lengthy statement clarifying his views: “For more than thirty years experiment, I have had no evidence that the bread and wine ever assisted my faith to discern the Lord’s body. I have never felt guilty for not communing, but often for doing it.” Interpreting his own feelings, he concluded that “breaking bread is what the Lord does not place on me.” His own attendance at church meetings would be determined by whenever he thought he could “do good, or get good.”
Leland’s biographer, Eric C. Smith summarizes well the implications of his position: “The cascade of personal pronouns, and the conspicuous absence of Scripture references, announced that Leland had unmoored himself from every authority outside of his conscience—his own church, eighteen hundred years of Christian tradition, and even the Bible. Leland saw himself as perfectly capable of arriving at religious truth all by himself.”
John Leland was a strange figure in the context of the 1790s, but his reasoning about the Lord’s Supper would have fit quite comfortably within today’s worldview of “expressive individualism.” Mark Sayers summarizes several tenets of this mindset in his book, Disappearing Church. Expressive individualists believe “the highest good [in society] is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.” Consequently, “traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.” Leland’s approach to the Lord’s Supper has now become the dominant approach to life for many in the modern world.
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Leeman’s book is full of practical wisdom. I won’t illustrate this point other than to say that he writes as an experienced pastor and father. He uses a lot of real-life illustrations to drive his points home. Many times, I found myself impressed by his ability to describe something I’ve experienced but never been able to articulate. There is something for everyone in this book.

Jonathan Leeman’s latest book, Authority: How Godly Rule Protects the Vulnerable, Strengthens Communities, and Promotes Human Flourishing, comes at a pivotal time in Western culture. Plagued by angry partisanship, a recent worldwide pandemic, public exposes of abuse from well-known authority figures, and the internet’s assault on expertise, the very concept of authority has fallen on hard times. Public trust in the people in charge has eroded as the general public defaults to suspicion.
Leeman keenly illustrates the contemporary mood by pointing to the everyday experience of his readers. From popular culture, he observes that our movie heroes follow a predictable pattern: they tend to be individuals who stand up to evil authorities. Pointing to such figures as Luke Skywalker, Jason Bourne, and Disney princesses, Leeman writes, “It’s as if our moral imaginations cannot conceive of a different kind of hero, so saturated isn the Western soul with anti-authority-ism. The hero we cheer on is the person who resists the leadership, the system, the powers-that-be” (5). Leeman doesn’t delve into the content of contemporary pop music, but he would most certainly find more of the same there.
And who hasn’t noticed troubling trends in modern parenting? Leeman recounts a scene from a trendy coffee shop in Washington DC in which a “well-heeled DC power couple” desperately tries to placate an unruly three-year-old—a scene we’ve all witnessed in one context or another. In our world of “gentle parenting,” the tone of authority is missing and even seen by some reluctant parents as abusive. Leeman writes, “The husband pleads softly. The wife desperately offers toys and more treats. They reason with him as if he were an adult. It’s as if no one has ever explained that they’re the parents. That they can draw lines and impose consequences. That they don’t need the child’s consent, if it comes to it.” He concludes, “They don’t know how to exercise authority.” I would add that even if they knew how, many lack the moral courage to follow through with it.
Authority has never been easy. Whether you’re a parent or someone’s boss or a Little League coach or an exhausted teacher, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the pressure of having to make decisions and enforce rules within a domain in which not everyone is happy to comply. If you’re going to develop the moral courage to follow through, you first need to understand the nature of authority, why God has entrusted you with it, and how to use it responsibly. Enter Leeman’s book. While the book is full of practical wisdom, I want to focus on four strengths and one small weakness. But let me say this up front: I wish everyone would read this book. In fact, I’m so high on it that I’m planning to lead our church through it in the fall.
First, Leeman distinguishes between good authority and bad authority. Human beings tend to overreact. So often in history we have sought to right wrongs by overcorrecting out of one ditch into the another ditch on the other side of the road.
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Genuine repentance always ends in renewal of worship. God created us to worship, and we are always worshiping something or someone. Repentant people have concluded that only God is worthy of worship, and they will long to gather with other likeminded worshipers to ascribe glory to Christ alone. 

It’s not always easy to tell the difference between appearance and reality.
The other week I decided to change the oil in our cars. After tuning my headphones to a long Grateful Dead jam, I drove the first car up onto the ramps and began the process. The first step requires draining the old oil into an oil pan underneath the car—a process that takes several minutes to complete. As I laid in the grass underneath the front of my car jamming out to a classic Jerry Garcia guitar solo, I entered a state of motionless relaxation as I watched the oil drain slowly into the pan.
I had no idea my daughter was watching me out the window of our house. She saw motionless legs protruding from underneath the front of a three-ton vehicle and a father who would not respond to her calling my name because I couldn’t hear her due to my headphones. She thought I was dead. The brief saga ended with my wife walking out to get my attention.
We misinterpret reality more than we care to admit. However, as hard as it is to interpret accurately what’s going on with other people, it may be even more challenging to interpret what’s going on within ourselves. As the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed over 2600 years ago, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17:9)?
When it comes to following Christ, believers often make the mistake of confusing feeling bad with actual change, falsely concluding that being emotionally moved by the word of God is sufficient. We accept remorse but stop short of repentance. We tell ourselves that if we agree with the sentiment of the preached word, we have obeyed without anything changing in our lives. The Bible warns against this. To be a hearer of the word but not a doer, James says, is to deceive ourselves (James 1:22).
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