“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’” (Matthew 25:37-40, NIV).

I was watching a video podcast called 1 Degree of Andy on YouTube where he and the guest made an interesting comment on the parable of the sheep and the goats. Those sheep will hear Jesus say that they ministered to Him when they fed the hungry and gave the thirsty something to drink and so on, and they will reply, “When did we do that?”

In one sense, they’re ministering to Jesus by serving the least of these. But also in another sense, their greatest moments of service will be when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, which is to say they won’t be aware of the magnitude of what’s happening.

So many times, we think people will remember us for the big dramatic moments where we saw hundreds come to faith in Christ or we spoke to multitudes. But so often, the times when we made the biggest impact will be the ones we don’t remember at all.

It will be like someone comes up to you and says, “Remember when . . .” and you will have to be reminded. They will say that what you said or did in that moment changed their life forever but you had no idea.

To me, the perfect kind of serving and ministering is a lot like C. S. Lewis’ idea of the perfect worship service. We won’t remember what the songs were or what the sermon was about because we will have been so focused on God that we noticed nothing else. When we are making a true Kingdom impact is when we’re so focused on Jesus that we don’t notice anything else except serving Him in that moment.

That should give us hope. We may have blessed others without realizing it just as there are surely times we have been blessed by those who were unaware. It’s probably so we won’t get puffed up and lose focus. Otherwise, we might try to serve out of our own strength (and fail miserably) rather than out of the overflow of God’s love for us.