The Lord's Servant
A. Gray. Psalm 116:16 O LORD, truly I am your servant; I am your servant, and the son of your handmaid: you have loosed my bonds. A servant is one who obeys the will of another. The will of a person may be obeyed consciously or unconsciously. Hence servants are of two kinds , — those that obey consciously, and those that obey unconsciously. The latter — such as obey unconsciously — may be called instruments of the master's will; and the former — such as obey consciously — may be called agents of it. All believers are God's servants in the best and noblest sense of the word. They do His will because they know it, and because it is their delight; they obey His law, because they know it, and because they have it within their heart. They are not the blind instruments of His power; they are the conscious and willing agents of a service in which they glory. I. HOW THE BELIEVER BECOMES A SERVANT OF THE LORD. 1. By birth. It must not be confounded with that birth which the believer has experienced in common with all the race, and which brought him into a world of sin, and sorrow, and death. This is his second birth. This is his new birth. It is a birth which is peculiar to the believer. He is born of water, figuratively, symbolically; of the Word, instrumentally; of the Spirit, efficiently. 2. By purchase. Christ gave Himself for you, that He might redeem you from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. 3. By conquest. 4. By voluntary engagement. He will have nothing more to do with his old master. He desires that his ears may be bored, and that he may be the servant of Christ for ever. II. THE STATE OF MIND WHICH THE BELIEVER, AS A SERVANT OF GOD, SHOULD CULTIVATE. 1. He ought to remember that he is a servant of God. It will be easy to do this in heaven. The difficulty would be to forget it for an instant amid the fellowships of that glorious place. But there are strong temptations to forget it here. The service of God is unpopular. It is unfashionable. And it is inconsistent with many practices which are pleasant to the flesh. 2. He should remember how he became the Lord's servant. 3. He should keep his duty as a servant of God always in view. We conjoin these two — the obeying of God's commandments with the doing of God's work — because it is not enough, and does not come up to the full idea of what a servant should be, that he be zealous in his master's cause, and devote himself to his master's interests; for it is necessary also that he be guided implicitly by the master's will, and that he do God's work in God's way. (A. Gray.) Parallel Verses KJV: O LORD, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds. WEB: Yahweh, truly I am your servant. I am your servant, the son of your handmaid. You have freed me from my chains.