Acting as a Right Kind of Minister

JEHOVAH God is the great Master. Ever since he began to create he has made use of various instrumentalities, both animate and inanimate, both visible and invisible, for the carrying out of his purposes. He delights to have intelligent creatures to serve him voluntarily as his ministers, and the first one of these was and is his only-begotten Son, known also as Michael and the Word, apart from whom “not even one thing came into existence.”—John 1:1-3, NW; Dan. 12:1.a

From the time of Abel onward Jehovah has had faithful ministers on earth who have rendered him unwavering obedience. In his due time he sent his Son to earth, the greatest of all his ministers. After fully preparing himself by his forty-day study and fast in the wilderness, Jesus went forward in the ministry Jehovah had sent him to earth to accomplish, and that against great odds. Acting as a right kind of minister, Jesus bore witness to the truth, kept integrity in spite of persecution and finally laid down his life as a ransom and in vindication of his Father’s name. During the three and a half years of his ministry he trained others, even as we read that when going “from city to city and from village to village, preaching and declaring the good news of the kingdom of God . . . the twelve were with him.”—Luke 8:1, NW.

While at any time since Abel’s day it has been a grand privilege to act as one of God’s ministers, witnessing to his supremacy, it is particularly so now, because the Kingdom has been established and the new world is at the doors. The ministry of Jehovah today requires our taking the good news of the Kingdom to the homes of the people, searching out the sheep and then feeding them, as well as the public proclamation of it from the speaker’s platform and on the streets. To all Christian ministers today the words of Paul to Timothy are fitting admonition: “Be a right kind of minister of Christ Jesus.”—1 Tim. 4:6, NW.

As at all previous times, acting as a right kind of minister requires faith and obedience. It also requires study and preparation, even as Jesus and the apostle Paul, in particular, prepared for their ministries. We must make use of the helps God has provided, studying them both privately and in association with others, by which coming together at congregation meetings and the various assemblies we receive increased understanding and mutual encouragement.

Acting as a right kind of minister further means trying to remember what we have learned and putting it into practice. Yes, you must “become doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves with false reasoning.” And as we make progress we have the obligation to extend a helping hand to others, training them to become ministers, and that requires both aptness to teach and a real unselfish desire to be of help.—Jas. 1:22, NW.

Even those aged and infirm can act as right kind of ministers by preaching to those who come to their homes and by means of letter writing. And they, together with all others, can show their interest in the ministry by praying Jehovah’s blessing upon it.

So let all servants of Jehovah act as the right kind of ministers, ever bearing in mind the fourfold fruitage of their work, the vindication of Jehovah’s name, the bringing of life to men of good will, the warning of the wicked, and for themselves the blessings of everlasting life in Jehovah’s new world.

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