Every now and then you meet someone who just has this knack of serving you in the most incredible way. They're not some great superstar but this wonderful, silent, servant. We all, absolutely love that quiet achiever. Every now and then in life you meet a person, someone who has a particular gift to serve you. You can probably think of just a handful of people in your life, who, you know, just serve you. They're the sort of person who if you put them in a customer service role, in a large department store, or in a call centre, well, they'd stand out head and shoulders to the customers, above everybody else. Their gift is to serve. These people are not only rare but are worth their weight in gold. And as much as we value them, we don't recognise them in society. They are not superstars, in terms of our superstar syndrome mentality, but we value them in our hearts. Silent servants! I met one on the 22nd June 1997, and I married her. On the 21st June 1997, I was a very sick little puppy dog. I had a temperature of around forty degrees Celsius, which makes you really sick. It was a Saturday and I was scheduled to preach and lead worship at my Church on the following morning. Now that means about an hour and a half on your feet, singing and speaking. Well, I have to tell you, I was in no shape at all to be able to do that. On the Saturday, I wrote the sermon, about a minute or two at a time, because that's all I could sit up. The next morning, I woke up and I was still so sick. I still had a high temperature, but I just felt that God wanted me to get up and go to the Church and lead the worship and preach. And so I had a shower and hopped in the car and very slowly I drove the mile and a bit up to the Church. I went inside and I just knew that couldn't stand up in this state, so we went into the Pastor's office and a few friends laid their hands on me and prayed for me. Nothing happened … nothing happened. Then all of a sudden, one of the women, her name was Kim, she's English, laid her hand on me, and she prayed for me and I felt the temperature drain out of my body, from my head to my feet. Now, I wasn't perfectly well, I still had a cough, but I felt I could stand up and do what I needed to do. I did, I led worship. I began to preach and about half way through the message, in the middle of a sentence, I looked out and there was this beautiful woman and I just felt God say to me, 'That's her! She is going to be your wife', and unbeknown to me, she was having exactly the same God experience from the other side, saying, 'He is the guy that you are going to marry.' Well, one thing led to another. It's all history now. In six months we became engaged, and about a year and a bit later, we were married. And before we were married, someone said to me, a wonderful Christian woman, she said, 'This woman, Jacqui, whom you are about to marry, will be able to help you in your ministry, in ways you can never imagine.' Now, I wasn't even involved in full time ministry then. I had no idea what God had before me. Jacqui's worked in all sorts of different rolls. She's worked as a personal carer in aged care. Now those people have a tough job and they get paid peanuts. You know, there's heavy lifting, it's messy, it's smelly, people with dementia who try to take a swipe at them, and hit them. It is a really tough job. And when she left her job, all the elderly people in the home were so sad to see her go, because she just has a gift for working for the elderly, loving them and caring for them and being gentle with them. She went on to a role as a rehabilitation assistant, where she was again dealing with older people, who had hip replacements and were doing rehab. And it was the same, she was dealing with people in pain, and she just had this ability to love them and care for them and walk them from their bed up to the rehabilitation unit and back again. When she left that job they were so sad to see her go. From there she moved on to a large department store, where she ran the bridal register. You know, when people get married they have a bridal register at a store and then you can buy the gifts from that store. Now it all looks really wonderful and romantic, but the truth of the jobs is, it's a tough job. It's complex administratively, it's about bringing gifts together from right around the country, and getting them there on the day. It's a tough job and she had this real client focus, of looking after the couple that was getting married. Making sure that everything went well on the bride's special day. There is a pattern emerging here – this gift. Here is a little person. Now, you will never see Jacqui up on a platform speaking. You will never hear Jacqui behind a microphone speaking. That is not her gift. Wild horses could not get her to do what I do, and I have to tell you, wild horses could not get me to do what she does. And here we are in this great ministry, Christianityworks, where we are sending radio programs right around the world, we are building internet sites, that tens of thousands of people come to each month. And if you happen to call our ministry, on one of our toll-free numbers, in Australia or New Zealand, chances are, you'll end up speaking to Jacqui. She handles the data bases, she is so passionate about getting peoples names right, she's passionate about getting the radio program CDs to the stations before the due date, and making sure that when someone gives to the ministry the thank you letters get sent out on the same day. She remembers people's names and their situations, she cares so much, she gets back to people quickly when they ring and they get the answering service. Everything you'd expect if you called a Christian Ministry. That's what she does; she works long hours, she loves it, her satisfaction is not in external recognition, because nobody notices outside. Her satisfaction is in meeting the needs and expectations of listeners, supporters and prayer partners. She's got it figured out – I'm really good at this, I really enjoy this, I don't need to be a superstar. I love one on one, just to touch people in the way that God made me to be. You know something; I reckon we've been duped. We've been duped by society into thinking that money and recognition and fame is where it's at. Yet when we exercise our gifts, the simple everyday gifts and motivations that God has given us, it is such a joy, it is so fulfilling. When we put those gifts and abilities and resources and time into God's hands, God takes little people like you, like me, like Jacqui, and like Max that we talked about yesterday and like Joseph, that we talked about the day before, and He has this amazing plan. You would not believe the number of people walking on this planet thinking, 'I'm not good at anything, I'll never succeed,' yet they have this incredible ability, this incredible gift locked inside them. And when we look at ourselves sometimes, we think, yeah but, my abilities are so ordinary. Of course we think they are ordinary, because we live with them all the time. You look at someone else's ability and I look at Jacqui's ability to do what she does in our ministry, I think it's amazing because I certainly couldn't do what she does. But to her it's ordinary. Our own gifts always appear ordinary. To me getting up and speaking to two or three thousand people, getting up behind a radio microphone and speaking to you, to me that's ordinary. Because that's who I am, it's a joy for me. Just because we think our gifts are ordinary doesn't mean that they're not a gift. It doesn't mean that when we put them in God's hands for Him to use, for Him to touch the hearts of other people, that He won't do that. That's what He wants to do. Not just bless us but use us to bless other people. God see us with the abilities that He has wired into our DNA. The Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians Chapter 2 and verse 10, that: We have been created in Christ Jesus to do the good things that God planned beforehand for us to do. So we kind of walk into them, bump into them because God's already put them in our path. Jesus picked disciples that were fishermen and tax collectors, they were bumpkins, they were uneducated. He took the ordinary and with them He did the extraordinary. You and I have gifts and when we let Him take them the ordinary, He will take those and do extraordinary things with them.

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