A Silent Servant // Little People Used by a Big God, Part 4

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,...