Let's focus on the various and interesting looks at this man Caleb.  In every translation one word stands out to me and that one word is different.  He was a different kind of man.  He had a different attitude about things and a different spirit lived in him, so we could say he was not run of the mill, neither was he ordinary.  It goes on to say that he had a different spirit about him.  In one place it said he had a different attitude and another translation says he was a different kind of guy.  Not like everyone else.  I like that, so I would say to you today, be this kind of a Christian.  Not like everyone else.  Have a different spirit about you, a different attitude, a different kind of a person than just everybody else.  If you were able this morning to name someone who, in your opinion, is or was an outstanding believer, what are the traits or qualities of that person's life that have caused you to admire them so?  Then I would say to you, be that kind of Christian.  If you admired that quality in someone else, others will admire that quality in you.

Let's talk about some things that make a Christian outstanding. I'm only going to give you little tiny snippets of things, but in my opinion, these are what I call brainteasers.

1. Be faithful. Be the faithful kind of Christian. In the book of Daniel it says that the Presidents and Governors sought to find some charge against Daniel and the Bible says they could find no charge or fault against him because he was faithful and there was no error or fault found in him (Daniel 6:4).  When the committee was formed and said, "Let's dig into this man's life, no stone to be unturned, but look at every little thing, childhood, parents, home, education, finances, marriage, look at all these things and bring us a report because we want to get this guy," they found nothing to charge him with.  They finally decided, "The only way we are going to get this guy is through his religion.  We will have to call him a radical.   We will have to come up with a decree that goes against his religion, then we will have something with which to fault him.
2. Be consistent.  This is a daily walk, not a hundred yard dash, or marathon, but a daily walk.  The thing I would ask of you is this, dedicate yourself to just walk on with Jesus a step at a time through the wind, through the rain, through the storm, through the sunshine, up hill and down, through the water, through the fiery test, just keep on walking with Jesus.  He knows the trail.  He chose the path for your feet.  What I want you to avoid is this business of hit and miss, hot and cold, up and down, in and out, off and on.  Be consistent.  Let people say of you, "What you see is what you get."
3. Be trustworthy.  I can name any number of believers today that I cannot trust.  If you say to someone, I'm going to be there, you be there.  If you say I'm going to do this, that or the other, you do this, that or the other.  Some of the saddest things that I hear about Christians is, you can't trust them.  They say I'm going to meet you someplace and they don't show up.  They say we are going to do so and so and they never do.  They say, but they don't do, so you can't trust them.  It's sad, but true.
4. Be likeable.  Don't be stand-offish.  Don't be the kind that isn't approachable.  Be yourself and be genuine, but be likeable.  Scripture says be kindly affectioned one to another.
5. Be teachable.  Some people are not; they think they know it all.  They have been around for a while and think they have all the answers.  Let me tell you something, if you are still housed in this flesh, you don't know it all because we see through a glass darkly and don't understand it all yet.  As you go along and as revelation comes to you, learn to assimilate or take instruction, but be careful who you are taking instruction from.

This is what I want you to consider more than anything else from this message – the kind of Christian that I am jealous for you to become is, I want you to have a servant's heart.  Jesus said He came to serve, not to be served.  He came to minister, not to be ministered to.  He came to do the doing, not to be waited upon until someone else did everything.  Be the first up to do it.  Be ready always to jump in and do without being asked or begged or bartered with.  In Matthew 20:26 it says, "Yet it shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you let him be your servant."  In the Living Bible it says, "Anyone wanting to be a leader among you, must be your servant."  In 23:11 it reads, "But he who is greatest among you shall be your servant and whosoever exalts himself shall be humbled and he who humbles himself shall be exalted."  You humble yourself before God, He will exalt you, but you exalt yourself and He will humble you.  You think more highly of yourself that you ought to and He will put you in your place.  He is famous at doing that.  We want to hear the same words some day that Jesus talked about when He talked about the man who gave certain servants talents and he took his leave and went away.  To one he gave five, to another he gave two and to another one.  When he came back again to the one he gave five he said these words, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of your Lord."

Becoming a servant or having a servant's mentality requires of each of us a mind shift.  A change of attitude.  Remember, God is always more interested in why we do what we do than He is in what we do.  Why we do what we do rather than just what we do.  What was the motivation?  What was behind what you did?  Was it for the right reason?  Attitude counts a whole lot more than achievement.  In the Bible it says King Amaziah lost favor with God because, "He did what was right in the sight of the Lord, yet not with a true heart."  He did it for the wrong reason and he lost favor with God.

Let's look at five attitudes a real servant of God will have.

(1) He forgets about himself.  He focuses on others.  Forget about yourself.  So you are tired, it doesn't matter, these people in the house need to be fed.  So you have had a long and troublesome day, it doesn't matter, so has everyone else, so get up as a servant and see to it that the needs are met and something takes place that will ease the situation.  Focus on others.  This is real humility.  The reason why is that our thinking from the very beginning is usually a self-centered focus, but here is a mind shift.  It isn't me thinking about myself, how tired I am, how beat I am, how drained I am, but it is thinking about others.  Someone has to do something, so I'm up on my feet and doing it because a real servant has the focus on other people.  Get up and don't wait to be waited on.  My mother often says that some people think the fairy godmother is going to come in while they sleep and dust and clean and do the dishes and get everything done, but it isn't going to happen.

Stop focusing on your own needs and start focusing and becoming aware of the needs of others around you.  You cannot be a servant if you are full of yourself.  You cannot be a servant if it is me, my and mine and what I want.  The Bible says that Jesus emptied Himself and took upon Himself the form of a servant.  Too often what we do is self-serving.   We do things to get other people to like us, or we do things to get other people to admire our achievements.  That becomes manipulation, not ministry.  If I do this, surely they will like me.  If I do that, maybe I can get them to like me.

Thinking like a servant is really different because it challenges one of our basic problems, something we all struggle with, which is that by nature we are selfish.  I think mostly about me, what I want, what I want to do, where I want to go, what I want to see take place, what I think is right or wrong.  That is why humility is such a daily struggle.  It is a lesson we have to learn over and over and over again.  It is not about me!  The opportunity to be a servant confronts us a dozen times a day when we are given the choice to decide between meeting my own needs and doing what I want, or meeting the needs of others, which is called self denial.  "If you are going to follow Me," Jesus said, "You need to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me."  We can sing, "I want to be more and more like Jesus; Oh, to be His hand extended," but Jesus was a servant, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all the time, He was a servant.

(2) A servant thinks like a steward, not like an owner.  When you begin to think that what you have is yours, you become very protective of it and you bind it to yourself and don't understand that everything you have you have received and everything you have has come down to you from the Father of lights.  It is not ours, it is all His.  He said, "I am giving it to you for a while; you be a good steward of it, physically, materially and financially, but it is not yours, it is mine.  I have loaned it to you, even your children.  I have loaned them to you for a while to be a good steward of them, not to be an owner."

When you become an owner, you become too protective and too focused on the item.  "If anybody does anything to put a little dent or scratch on my car, I don't know what in the world I would ever do."  Some people put such focus on material things that can be replaced, or worn out and need repair and so on, rather than putting the focus where it belongs, "I am only a steward of this thing.  God has put it in my hands and I have the opportunity now to use it, but it's really not mine, it is His, and I just need to be a good steward of it."  He says in scripture there is one thing required of a steward and that is that a man be found faithful.  Don't be an owner.  If you are an owner of your kids, you bind them to yourself and everything they do will irk you or disappoint you or frustrate you or make you angry, because you have bound them to yourself.  They are not yours, they are only on loan to you.  God said, "I'm giving them to you for a while; train them up in the way that they should go, but they are only on loan to you."

To become a real servant you are going to have to settle the issue once and for all in your life about money.  Jesus said no servant can serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and money at the same time.  You can't do it.  He didn't say you shouldn't serve both; He said you cannot, which means it is impossible.  Living for Jesus and living for money are diametrically opposed each to the other.  Money is only a medium of exchange.  You get it and you exchange it for a bill that says "Paid."  Money can become one of the greatest threats of your entire life.  It has the potential to replace God in your life with material things, which will sidetrack you every time.  "Oh, I have got to have this, Oh, I have got to have that, Oh, I've got to get this, I've got to get that, I can't get along without it."  I must have this and I must have that until, if we are not careful, the Supplier of all our needs hasn't been able to do anything about it; you've done it yourself.  We are either Kingdom builders or we are wealth builders.  Wealth builders never seem to have enough and Kingdom builders are content in whatever state they find themselves.

(3) Real servants think about their own responsibilities, not what other servants are doing.  One of the things I see going on in the Body of Christ today that is very frustrating to me is when believers are comparing themselves among themselves.  "I'm not as strong in the Lord as she is.  I don't have the knowledge of God like she has."  Well, she has been serving the Lord for twenty-one years and you have been for one.  You haven't had to walk in her shoes, down through the valley and through the trials and tests.  How are you going to be what she is?  How is it that we can compare ourselves among ourselves?  Don't compare yourself with other believers and don't find fault and don't be critical and don't compete with other believers, because you need to be too busy for Jesus to be concerned about some other servant.  Be too busy in the work of God and in what God has given you, to worry about some other servant.  There is no place for petty jealousy in the Body of Christ.  When you are busy serving you don't have time for that stuff.  It is not our place, nor our job, to evaluate the Master's other servants and how they are doing, or not doing.  It is not our place.   He did not make me a policeman of the Master's servants in the Kingdom of God.  God said, "I will take care of them; they are my servants.  They don't belong to you and are not on your roll of servants and you can't discipline them or discharge them, but I can because they belong to me. Never mind them; you just make sure you take care of whatever I have asked you to do."  You just be faithful and do what He wants you to do.

It isn't our place to defend ourselves against criticism.  You don't have to do that.  They are not really criticizing you, but what you stand for or what you live for or what is valuable in your life.  They are criticizing a lifestyle, not you, and you are not going to change your lifestyle, so don't even defend yourself against that kind of criticism; it is not necessary.  Let Jesus handle the criticism.  Don't forget, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay."  When Nehemiah was building the wall and was criticized, he simply said to them, "My work is far too important to stop now and to listen to what you have to say."  My work is too important for me to stop.  If you serve Jesus you might as well expect to be criticized.  Neither the world nor even an entire group in the Body of Christ understands what God really values.  Remember that the disciples criticized the lady who took something that she owned, broke it open and poured it over Jesus' body.  They said, "This is a waste," but it was an expression of love and the lady had absolutely every right to do that because it belonged to her and she could do with it as she pleased, and she did.  Jesus said to them, "Leave her alone, she has done what she could."   By the way, nothing you ever do for Jesus is a waste, no matter what other people may say or think.

(4) A real servant's entire base is his identity in Christ.  His base – that which he stands on, the foundation of his life – is his being "in Christ."  His footing and sureness and steadfastness of his feet, it's all his identity with Christ.  Don't become a disconnected hodgepodge.  This whole thing about dichotomy doesn't work in the family of God.  Don't disconnect what you do every day from what you are every day.  Do not disconnect what you are going through from your involvement and relationship with God.  Don't disconnect your job, your calling, your responsibility, your work; do not detach or disconnect anything about your life from the base on which your feet are firmly planted in Christ.  Realize and remember that you are unconditionally loved and accepted by grace and thereby don't have to prove anything to anybody.  You don't have to prove anything to anybody when your feet are firmly planted in your relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  Big job, little job, out front job, job behind the scenes, important work, or lowly task, it doesn't matter, unless you are insecure and need the attention.

Did Jesus feel threatened or did Jesus suffer from a poor self image when He knelt in front of His disciples and washed their feet?  I think not.  Taking that role and taking that task was the equivalent of being the shoeshine boy.  Jesus knew who He was and that didn't bother Him.  Settle it once for all, in your identity in Christ.  Only secure people can serve other people.  The more insecure you are, the more you want to be served and the more you will need other people's approval.  I know of a person who thought he wanted to be a server in a restaurant, but the minute someone treated him unkindly and he took it as a personal affront and personal rejection, he set the tray aside and walked right out the door.  Only secure people can serve other people.  The more insecure you are, the more you want other people to serve you, rather than you serving them.  You want to snap your fingers and have people come to attention.  The more insecure you are, the more you whine and want someone else to wait on you.  The more you do that, the more you will need other people's approval.  Base your conversation and your values on your relationship with Jesus Christ and you will then be free from the expectations of others.  Then you can serve.  Servants find status symbols totally unnecessary.  They never measure their worth by their own accomplishments.

(5) Servants think of ministry to others as a God given opportunity, never an obligation.  They really enjoy helping others, seeing things get done to assist in meeting the pressing needs at the moment.  They serve the Lord with gladness because they love Him and could never do enough to prove that.  So grateful for His love and grace in their lives they would do anything, anytime, anywhere for anyone.  Serving is the highest calling in life.  God has promised when it is all over and said and done, your reward straight from His hand to you will be waiting for you on the other side.  Be this kind of Christian.  Serve.  Don't demand, serve.  Be quick to respond and do everything you do as unto the Lord, not as men pleasers, but to please Him.