What's My Next Step, God?: Serving Others | Rev. Vicki Harrison
At New Hope This Sunday
New Hope Church welcomed new members this morning, and they stood on the stage together and read the Commitment to Serve aloud with the whole room, the right opening for a message on serving. It was also New Hope's Hispanic Heritage Celebration, and after worship the congregation went to share a meal made by our Spanish-speaking church family, with the proceeds going to children's camp.
Coming up, and every one of these needs people:
Better Together Job Fair, Tuesday, October 20. New Hope Church is partnering with ECHO, and volunteers are needed as job coaches, resume coaches, and people who'll simply walk alongside applicants and pray with them.
Sleep in Heavenly Peace bed build, Saturday, October 24. Twenty beds for children in our community who are sleeping on the floor. Families can serve together.
Spain mission trip information meeting, Sunday, October 18. For ages 16 to 22, heading out next summer. There's an application process.
Prayer partners. At least 25 more people are needed to pray for a child or teen in our kids and youth ministries.
Group leaders for the new churchwide study starting in January.
What's my next step, God, in serving others?
Too old. Too young. Too busy. Pastor Vicki Harrison names the reasons most of us give for not serving, and answers all three at once.
"Those are just excuses."
Week three of What's My Next Step, God? turns to serving, and the question is the same one we've asked about prayer and worship: where are you now, and what's your next step? The answer won't look the same for everyone.
"Now, the way God calls me to serve others is probably gonna look drastically different from the way God calls you to serve others."
Pastor Vicki Harrison preaches What's My Next Step, God?: Serving Others on October 11, 2026.
The lowest job in the room
John 13 opens at a meal. In that culture, the lowest servant washed everyone's feet before they ate, and it was filthy work. The roads were dust and worse, and sandals left feet exposed to all of it. Some rabbis didn't even want Jewish slaves to do it. At this meal, nobody comes. The disciples certainly aren't going to wash each other's feet. So Jesus gets up, wraps a towel around His waist, fills a basin, and gets down on the floor.
Most of us have clean feet, so Vicki reaches for something closer to home. Years ago, when New Hope ran a busy ministry with homeless neighbors, a retired nurse knelt in the old church kitchen and cleaned a deep, infected wound on a woman's foot while other people had to walk out because of the smell. Later the same nurse gently worked a sock off a man whose skin came away with it.
"I am not squeamish, but I couldn't even look."
That's the level of what Jesus did.
No act of service is beneath you
When He's finished, Jesus asks His disciples if they understand what He's just done, and tells them to wash one another's feet. Vicki is clear this isn't a call to literal foot-washing.
"What he means is that we are called to sacrifice and serve one another. So the real command here from Jesus is to serve one another with humility and that there is no act of service that is beneath us as Christ followers."
She backs it up with four passages: Mark 9:35, Mark 10:45, Matthew 25:37-40 and Galatians 5:13. The first is the one that stings. Whoever wants to be first has to be last and the servant of all.
"I don't know about you, but I like being first."
The early church took this literally. They fed widows. They stayed in plague-struck cities to nurse the sick when everyone else fled. In a Roman world that threw unwanted newborns on the trash heap, they sent people to wait there and took those babies home to raise as their own.
"It was what it meant to join the church. You were going to serve."
Six marks of Christ-centered service
Rather than define service, Vicki describes it, and gives each mark a question to ask the person next to you, and yourself.
Others-centered. Do we serve others, or do we expect others to serve us?
Grounded in humility. Are there some tasks you think are beneath you? Jesus, who was God, made Himself nothing and humbled Himself all the way to the cross.
Flows from our love for Jesus. What is our core motivation when we serve? Plenty of people do good things. We serve because of who we are in Jesus Christ.
Relies on the Holy Spirit. Do I serve in my own strength, or do I do things that force me to rely on the Holy Spirit?
Brings God glory. Does what I'm doing bring God glory, or does it bring me glory?
A lifestyle. Is service an occasional thing, or a regular part of how I do life?
That last one comes with an honest word about the calls New Hope gets every November.
"We don't need people serving on Thanksgiving. … We need people serving all throughout the year."
Loved and served into the kingdom
Jesus' new command in John 13:34-35 is to love one another, and that's how everyone will know we're His disciples. Vicki's application is blunt.
"People are not gonna be argued into the kingdom. … People are not gonna be shamed into the kingdom. … They will only be loved and served into the kingdom."
Find yourself on the stairs
The back of the sermon notes has a stair step:
I have never served inside or outside the church.
I serve others inside or outside the church occasionally, when it's convenient.
I serve others on a fairly regular basis.
I regularly serve others, at least weekly, either inside or outside the church.
I am a foot-washer. I serve other people all the time with great joy.
Find where you are. Then find the next step up, wherever that is.
"Because I promise you, God is calling you to do something more than what you're doing now."
Nobody has arrived, Vicki says. Not even Mother Teresa would have said she had.
"If you're not dead, you're not done. We are not done. There's much more work to do for the kingdom."
Pick one step this week. The list at the top of this page is a good place to start.
Pastor Vicki Harrison — What's my next step, God, in serving others? — October 11, 2026
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