The Hollywood Commandments By DeVon FranklinSýnishorn

What It Means to Carry a Crown

Service often has a negative connotation. We want to be the one at the top, calling the shots, making the decisions, getting the glory. But it’s useful to step back and look at examples of people who took the service mentality to heart. The greatest example of this is Jesus, who said, "Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all" (Mark 9:35, NIV). His whole life was an example of someone who could have sought glory and power, but instead sought to serve everyone.

Look at King David. In 1 Samuel 16:12, the prophet Samuel anointed David as the next king. But he doesn’t immediately go and sit on the throne or look for his crown. After being anointed the next king, David goes and serves the current king, Saul. In Samuel 16:21, it says, "David came to Saul and entered his service. Saul liked him very much, and David became one of his armor-bearers." Saul makes David his armor-bearer, which was a position of service. He had to serve a king before he could be a king!

Take the modern example of my friend Erica Greve, founder of the charitable organization Unlikely Heroes, which rescues children around the world from sex slavery. She was already in a program at U.C. Berkeley to become a social worker—a service profession— when she counseled a girl who had been sexually assaulted and decided to serve more intensely by starting an organization to help children in foreign countries who had no one to turn to. But even that wasn’t enough. Erica chose to serve at an even deeper level by personally going to dangerous places like Nigeria and Burma to counsel and even physically rescue girls who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. That is a true passion to serve.

In the church, we look at examples like these, and we talk about two important things: destiny and service. We talk about having a destiny that’s ordained by God, that is set down by God specifically before we were even a glint in our mother’s or father’s eyes. That’s true. You do have such a destiny. We also learn the importance of service, and how service to others is an important part of following Jesus. Many times, service is defined through the lens of community service, and while serving the community is incredibly important, what is often missed is the lesson about how taking on a service mindset is a requirement to achieve our destiny—and how committing to the process of success itself is essential to achieving a successful career and fulfilling the call on our life. Just because God has ordained that you’ll one day be CEO doesn’t mean you can just expect it to happen without preparation. We saw in the last two chapters how crucial preparation is, and part of that preparation involves service.

Serving someone first is an obstacle that many folks can’t get around. Ego can be a career killer. I’ve come across many people who proclaimed the desire for success but lacked the ability to humble themselves in order to achieve it. Too many people walk into a job thinking, “What can I get, and how can I get it fast?” I’ve been tempted by similar thoughts more often than I even want to admit. For example, when I became a studio executive, I remember obsessing over how fast I could climb the ladder to become a senior executive, not realizing at the time that no matter how much I wanted it, I was unprepared to do a senior executive job. We forget that even though being a superior might be already written into our life’s script, in order to achieve it, we must spend some time as a subordinate.

As Christians, one of the bedrocks of our faith is service. In Mark 12:30–31, Jesus gave two commandments, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these." That means, "Treat your neighbors' needs with the same importance as your own."

We serve because we have been called to serve, and to do so in all aspects of our lives: in our relationships, with those who have less than we do, and our careers. When we only apply this idea to community outreach, we miss out on the value this idea can bring to our lives. If we never bring an outreach mentality into our career pursuits, we will be missing out on our God-ordained success. How good is the outreach you provide to your colleagues? How well do you service the needs of your superiors? If you view service as something you do only as part of your church or youth group, you will miss what service can do to help you progress toward the career you’ve been praying for.