Serving Others Is Serving Him

Serving Others Is Serving Him

Then they will reply, “Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?” And he will answer, “I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.” Matthew 25:44-45

Abe Brown was one of my heroes. I got to know him when I became head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and he asked me to visit some prisons with him. By that time, he had been visiting prisoners around Florida for two decades, and was known all over Tampa not only for this work, but also for his great success as a football coach at Tampa’s Blake High School. After retiring from coaching, he even went on to pastor the First Baptist Church of College Hill. He was a minister, educator, and coach who, before he died at eighty-three, had touched the lives of many the world would consider to be “the least of these.”

Reverend Brown’s passion was ignited when he was visiting one of his former high school players who was in prison. The young man was excited to see his former coach because he rarely had any visitors, and Reverend Brown learned that his situation was true of most of the inmates. And so Abe Brown began spending time with inmates and enlisting volunteers to do the same. Then he reached out to inmates with programs designed specifically to help them reenter society. He did all he could do to prevent inmates from going back to the environments that got them in trouble and into prison in the first place.

Abe Brown touched the untouchables of our society. He was always picking somebody up and raising them just high enough to see the sunshine at the end of the rainstorm. Reverend Brown believed that when he served another person, he was serving the living Christ.

We’re all called to do the same. Maybe it’s not specifically through a prison ministry or coaching or teaching, although God does always find ways to push us out of our comfort zones. Maybe it’s a place where someone is in need. Maybe it’s where we will find the less fortunate and be able to help them, perhaps as a witness to show them what Christ has done in our lives.

Uncommon Key > When you stand before God face-to-face, He will ask you when you helped the least of those among us. Make sure you can answer—always!