"Jesus responded to the temptation of power with the words, 'You must worship the Lord your God and serve God alone.' These words remind us that only undivided attention to God can make a powerless ministry possible. As long as we divide our time and energy between God and others, we forget that service outside of God becomes self-seeking, and self-seeking service leads to manipulation, and manipulation to power games, and power games to violence, and violence to destruction — even when it falls under the name of ministry.
"The true challenge is to make service to our neighbor the manifestation and celebration of our total and undivided service to God. Only when all of our service finds its source and goal in God can we be free from the desire for power and proceed to serve our neighbors for their sake and not our own.
"This is the great mystery of servanthood. It is expressed by Jesus when he said to his disciples, 'I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master's business. I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my father' (John 15:15). Here we see that servanthood and friendship are no longer distinct and that in serving God we find our true self which no longer needs social affirmations but is free to offer a powerless ministry.
"The temptations of being relevant, spectacular, and powerful are real temptations and stay with us all of our lives. They are strong because they play directly on our desire to join others on the upwardly mobile road.
"But when we are able to recognize these temptations as seductive attempts to cling to the illusions of the false self, they can become instead invitations to claim our true self, which is hidden in God alone. When we find ourselves able to continue to serve our fellow human beings even when our lives remain the same, even when few people offer us praise, and even when we have little or no power, we come to know ourselves as God knows us, as sons and daughters hidden in God's love.
"We do not belong to the world. We belong to God. We always will be tempted in one way or another to reclaim the old self, to return to Egypt, and to reject the foolish way of the cross. But we become true followers of Jesus Christ each time we take his words on our lips and say to the tempter, 'Be off, Satan . . . you must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone.' "
