…Making Your Life Count with Dr. Humphrey Mutiti
TO make your life count is to become useful by adding value to people’s lives. It is to become a subway of blessing for others. It is to transform people’s lives for the best. It also means to leave imprints in the lives and hearts of people.
Humility and service are the keys to doing all the above. Jesus Christ once contended, “But it shall not be so among you: but whoever will be great among you, let him be your minister.” Matthew 20:26 KJV.
When you minister to someone, you take care of them, you protect them and build them up in some way. All these meanings of the minister – both as a noun and as a verb – contain an atom of the original Latin meaning, “servant.” A minister serves and adds value to the people’s lives. He is a plus. He is an upswing and not a minus.
One of the most profitable things we can share in this life is ourselves: our time, our talents, and our energies in serving others. True greatness encompasses not in position or authority but in serving one another. Serving one another is a practical and tangible way to honour one another.
By serving, I simply imply doing helpful deeds for one another. We are to honour one another above ourselves. In the Bible, Jesus washed His disciples’ feet. Paul, shipwrecked on the island of Malta, gathered a pile of brushwood to put on the fire built for his fellow passengers.
Each of these acts was incredibly simple and prosaic in and of itself. Nevertheless, this is what making your life count is about: being alert to the little things that need to be done, and doing them. Making your life count requires no special talent or special gifts. All that is employed is a servant’s attitude. It is a heart of wanting to leave people better than you found them.
My philosophy in life is that the greater serves the lesser. No one must feel they have become too important to serve others in the ordinary tasks of life. Thus, the best way to make your life count is by serving downward, that is, to those who by the world’s standards are beneath him in position or station in life. It is reasonably easy to serve those above us.
Even the world expects this but we must serve downward. Nevertheless, Jesus served downward. Quite apart from His deity, He was, on a precisely human plane, the leader of the band of twelve apostles. He could have asked one of the disciples to wash all their feet but He chose to do it Himself. Those with much have much to offer. We must never forget that we are blessed to be a blessing.
In the Bible, King Solomon’s son, King Rehoboam, did not learn the lesson of serving downward. Shortly, after ascending the throne of Israel he was approached by some people, asking that the heavy yoke of taxation and forced labor be lightened.
Upon consulting, the elders who had advised his father to speak well to these people and serve them. (1 Kings 12:7). Rehoboam, nonetheless, did not listen; he did not learn to serve downward.
As a result, he lost ten of the twelve tribes from his kingdom and created an unredeemable rift within the nation of God’s people. Every time we refuse to serve downward, we open ourselves to leadership failure and many other failures in life.
Some years back I read about the owner of a large and successful car dealership who has learned to serve downward. When asked on a radio interview what his number one priority was in running his business, he said it was to serve his employees. What a surprising answer! We would not have been surprised at an answer such as, “To serve my customers.”
Everyone would say that. After all, that is the way to maximize profits, and, besides, it sounds very noble-or-religious if one happens to be a Christian. Nevertheless, this man runs his business to serve his employees. He believes his first priority is to provide for his employees a descent and fair place in which to work and earn their livelihood. This man has learned to serve downward.
Is your company (organisation) serving your employees? Are the investors in our country providing a descent and fair place in which to earn a livelihood for their employees?
In closing, anyone who wants to become great in this life must become a servant because the pathway to greatness is through service. It is servants who become masters. Ask Joseph in the Bible. A servant (leader) must add value to people’s lives.
He must make sacrifices for others. He must create opportunities for others. He must live for others. Likewise, Jesus our master came to serve and not to be served. It was about others and not Him. Anyone who serves others, his deeds outlives him.
Even when he is gone, his service and impact lives on. In the end, the nicest way to judge a man is not by what he has amassed (the car he drives, the mansion he has, the name brand of clothes he has, the job he has or even the size of his phone), but it is by how much value he has added to people and society.
Good men and leaders are those who have lifted others. Good men use their influence to better other people’s lives. Good men are always looking out for who to lift and empower. Good men will never die because their good works live on.
Look out for next MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT on Kalemba.news on Thursday.
Author: Dr. Humphrey Mutiti is a missionary and church planter in South Africa, called into the ministry of prayer, a conference speaker, with a Diploma is missions, two Ph.Ds. – one in Ministry and the other in Theology. He is serving as a national overseer and an instructor (South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia for the Great Commission Bible Institute), an author of several books, writes his monthly articles in “The Christ Tabloid” Newspaper in Durban and runs a daily ‘MOMENT OF REFRESHING’ program on Facebook, Instagram, and on WhatsApp.
On the YouTube channel he is running a program ‘Making Your Life Count’, and is currently studying for another Ph.D. in the school of Law. Until now he is the founder and presiding pastor of Covenant Church International.
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