Child and Servant

SUPPOSE you are a teacher in a high school and your son or daughter is one of your students. Let’s say that your son or daughter is misbehaving in class. They are “cutting up” and so you tell them to leave the classroom and assign them to a detention. You judge your child not as your child but as a student.

When they come home that afternoon from detention, they will still be your child, but even so, that would not have taken away their responsibility to be a good student. By punishing your son or daughter, you will have judged their behavior as a student. Let’s say that you have a son in business with you and he is handling the cash register. You find out that your kid is “taking from the till” and putting money in his pocket.

You discover it and fire him. Did you fire him from being your son? No. You cannot judge him as your son because he is your son by birth.

However, you can fire him as your servant because he was not performing the work that he was supposed to perform in the way it is supposed to be done. So he is penalized and judged as a servant. All Christians bear two relationships to God. They bear a family relationship and they bear a relationship of service.

At the judgment seat of Christ, you are going to be there because you belong to God as a child, but He’s going to judge you by how you honored Christ as a servant.