PRÉCIS ON OUR HIGHEST HONOR: A DEEPLY PERSONAL REFLECTION

SCRIPTURE. “O Lord, truly I am Your servant; I am Your servant, the son of Your handmaid; You have loosed my bonds.” – PSALM 116:16, AMPC

KEY TERM: “YOUR SERVANT.” ‘Ebed’ [עֶבֶד]: “‘A bondsman, slave.” A masculine noun meaning vassal though a slave in Biblical times was not the same as we understand today. The period of slavery was limited to six years (Exod. 21:2). They had rights and protection under The Law (Exod. 21-20). Also, it was possible for slaves to attain positions of power and honour (cf. Gen. 24:2; 41:12). In this context, the term refers to those who sincerely worship, minister to or serve God. This is the very essence of The Messiah’s Mission on the Earth – ‘To Serve Mankind’ as the Royal Emissary of the Father who shall also come to Rule the Earth and its peoples, His True Bondservants ruling and serving with Him.”

QUOTATION. “To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. ‘Thus, if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to Obey Him.’ But trying in a New Way, a less worried Way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.” ― C.S. LEWIS, Mere Christianity, 1952; edited

COMMENTARY. “‘O Lord, truly I am Thy servant’ — This is a thankful acknowledgment of his great obligations to God, whereby he was in duty bound to be his perpetual servant. ‘The son of Thy handmaid’ —The son of a mother who was devoted, and did devote me to thy service. ‘Thou hast loosed my bonds’ — Thou hast rescued me from my enemies, whose captive and vassal I was, and therefore hast a just right to me and to my service.” – JOSEPH BENSON, Notes on the Holy Bible, 5 vols., 1811-1818; edited

DK’S TAKE. Permit me to share with you why this is such a profoundly personal and lovely Promise to me and to all of you, beloved. Point by Scriptural point, this is My Story in Brief.

• HIS SERVANT. For most of my 44 years as a servant of the King, I have never once felt that I deserved such privilege. Even Paul the Apostle lamented on one occasion: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). But now, in this glorious passage, God assures this old man – and us all who truly follow Him – that we fully belong to Him and to Him alone!

• GOD’S HANDMAID. I come from the womb of a mother who was a spiritual giant, Daris Elizabeth (Rodriguez) Kelly, who personally led her entire Hispanic Clan to the Lord before she passed. Her ancestry derived from the Spanish Sephardim of Catalonia (and the small island of Ibiza). She and several other women (my personal “God Squad”) ‘birthed me to life in Christ’ in prayer for nine straight months from January 1979 through October 1979, just before I was to take my life on Halloween of that year.

• LOOSED BONDS! Here are the happiest parts of all this Story, beloved. Not only did the Lord set me free from an otherwise inescapable addiction to alcohol and an early death, but from a second malediction that was slowly killing me even as a believer. That somehow this rotted out wretch of a man could become acceptable in His sight by Two Events: First of course, by the Blood of Jesus at the Cross at Calvary. But, also by my final willingness to Die to Self and serve Him – no matter what. ‘No. Matter. What!’

CODA. The verse just above the one under study today says this: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116:15). Do you see it, beloved? Not until I told the Lord that I was quite literally willing to lay down my life for Him, was I to become fully, completely, Unbonded to the World, and fused into the very Flesh of our Messiah as nothing less than, ‘His bondservant,’ and no others’!

Both now in this humbler yet exhilarating life, there shall yet be vastly more, in the unimaginable, incandescent, and thrilling and now soon ‘Supernatural Life to Come.’