“I hope you leave Sunday morning deeply encouraged by the gospel — and I also hope you leave kind of tired.”

I’ve had more than a few puzzled looks come my way as I’ve said that sentence in my church’s prospective-members class. Many Christians understand corporate worship according to the gas-station illustration — church is where you go to “fill up your spiritual tank” for the week ahead. We go to church expecting it to serve my needs and leave me with a certain feeling or energy level. But the gas-station approach is essentially a consumeristic one.

True, corporate worship indeed will fill us up as we freshly encounter the goodness and glory of God. In that sense, wise Christians come to church to get. But as I explain in our prospective-members class, corporate worship should leave us feeling both encouraged and a little tired. Because, like other areas of church life, corporate worship also is an opportunity to serve.

From Service, for Service

God designed the church’s life together and its worship to include acts of service to others. We sing praises to God to encourage others with the lyrics of the gospel (Ephesians 5:19). We labor to pay attention to the preaching of the word so that we can tend not just to our own souls but also to the spiritual well-being of others (Ephesians 4:11–12). We pray together for the sake of the unity and holiness of the whole body. Even the act of gathering is itself an act of serving others (Hebrews 10:24–25).

All of this service takes energy, of course. And it can be tiring. It forces us to shed our consumerism and adopt the position of a servant. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that God designed church life this way.

For the church was born out of service. It exists only because “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The suffering servant didn’t lower himself to die under the torment of God’s wrath for our sin so that he could make for himself a community of consumers. He died to make us like him — he died so that we too might be “servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16).

Jesus himself made this point plainly throughout his teaching ministry. When the disciples argued about which of them was the greatest, Jesus responded, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). And when James and John asked to sit at Jesus’s right and left in glory, he said,

You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. (Mark 10:42–44)

Two Ways to Engage

Jesus’s teaching offers a stark contrast to the assumptions of the world and our own consumeristic inclinations. In Jesus’s upside-down kingdom, citizens race each other to the bottom. They shove their way to the back of the line. They make investments that generate returns for others. They go for the assist record rather than the scoring crown. They operate out of the seemingly preposterous idea that it really is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).

Of course, this call to serve challenges the notion that the blessed life is all about personal fulfillment. It’s also a homing missile fired against the consumerism deeply entrenched in our hearts — a consumerism that often rears its head even in how we approach our relationship with the local church. Instead of going to church like a restaurant critic, appraising the vibe and asking whether the music fits our taste, Jesus teaches us to show up like waiters, ready to clear tables, wash dishes, and get drinks for others — even as our own souls feast on God’s all-satisfying glory in the elements of worship.

Sadly, our consumerism can be so pernicious that it warps even our ambition to serve into more consumerism. We can make service about getting to do the activity we want and expressing ourselves in the ways we find fulfilling. We may ask about how we can serve, but we angle for the service that brings us most joy. We can jockey for our fantasy ministry positions, or we can even expect the church to run enough programs so that our gift can be platformed. Catechized by the gospel of expressive individualism, modern Christians can make even serving in the church more about personal fulfillment than meeting needs. Even in service, we may want to get more than we give.

Our Pattern and Power

How do we respond to such deeply entrenched self-absorption? To start, we recognize that at the heart of our consumerism is pride. We think more highly of ourselves than we ought. Like James and John, who wanted to sit at Jesus’s right and left in the kingdom, we baptize our pride with the language of spiritual ambition.

The only solution to that pride is seeing and savoring afresh the humility of the Son of Man, who came not to be served but to serve — the one who, “though he was in the form of God . . . emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). As Paul makes clear, Christ’s humility is both the pattern for our service as well as the power for our service. We are to “have this mind” of Christlike service, even while recognizing that it’s already ours by faith (Philippians 2:5).

Only by seeing in the gospel the depth of Christ’s own humility can we begin to put away pride and the consumerism that flows from it. We can stop pursuing our own glory when, by faith, we grasp that Christ laid down his glory for us. We’re freed from pursuing selfish ambitions for our future when we believe that the Son of God himself was ambitious for our future, so ambitious that he was willing to suffer God’s wrath to purchase that glorious future for us. We don’t have to pursue mere personal fulfillment once we realize he “emptied himself” (Philippians 2:7) in order that we might be “filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).

Leave Tired — and Christlike

Embracing truths like these can break consumerism’s stranglehold over our approach to church life and corporate worship. We’ll stop looking only for programs where we can express our gifts, and we’ll start looking for people, fellow members, with real needs that we can meet. We’ll recognize the church isn’t a catering company; it’s a covenant body where each member has the Spirit for the “common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7).

We’ll begin to see that church membership isn’t merely an opportunity to get something, but an opportunity to commit to a certain group of Christians in order to give them something. We’ll embrace that life in the local church entails caring just as much about the holiness of fellow members as we do our own. In the end, we’ll discover that serving, not consuming, is one of the deepest ways God fills up our spiritual tank. Because in his kingdom, you save your life by losing it (Luke 9:24).

The next time you gather with God’s people, I hope you leave strengthened and spiritually fed, I hope you’re built up by the gospel, and I also hope you leave a little tired. I hope you leave looking a little more like the Son of Man, who gave his life to serve.