In this fifth blog about life-threatening devotion to God I will address how we serve God by serving others.
As a reminder, in my first blog about this topic I offered this description:
“Life-threatening devotion is having a love for God that is stronger than any other love we have. It’s a devotion to our God and Father that is worth more than our own lives, and is worth any sacrifice to maintain that relationship. It’s the kind of devotion that makes us give up sleep to pray or study His word, give up food to humble ourselves, or give up our reputation to serve rather than be served.”
The following three weeks we examined what life-threatening devotion to God meant for our marriages, for our children, and in our witness. Now let’s look at life-threatening devotion to God in service.
What is service?
The first definition for service that comes up online is “the action of helping or doing work for someone.” Many people like to do acts of service. Gary Chapman, in his book The 5 Love Languages, lists “acts of service” as the fourth way some people prefer to show and receive love and affection.
My brother-in-law Don Wallace loved that way. He always seemed to find some way to help the people he loved. His son Jeremy is very much the same. I first suspected he was serious about his future wife when she came to a family event (she was already a friend of the family) and said Jeremy was at her house repairing something. They were engaged and married not long after that.
The call to serve
Jesus calls us to serve one another. In fact, He considered it a prerequisite for leadership, and gave us the best example of life-threatening devotion in service:
But Jesus summoned them, and said, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever desires to be first among you shall be your bondservant, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Matthew 20:25-28*
Jesus’s idea of service was absolutely life-threatening. He gave His live, poured out His soul (Isaiah 53:12), poured His blood for our sins (Matthew 26:28), and bore our sins in His body on the cross (1 Peter 2:24). He calls us to the same type of life-threatening devotion.
Paul, who considered himself a bondservant of Jesus Christ, made service a part of his evangelism and apostleship. When he did a “check back” with the apostles in Jerusalem after starting several churches from Asia to Greece, he noted that they agreed he was on target with his preaching, but encouraged him to serve the poor, which was already one of his priorities (Galatians 2:10). In Thessalonica, Paul didn’t even allow the church to support him, but worked extra hard so he could give more. That devotion caused a riot in the city, after which he had to escape during the night because his life was threatened (2 Thessalonians 3:7-9, Acts 17:1-10).
Service to others
So how about us, you and me? What is our life-threatening service? Where do we take up our cross and follow Jesus? Is it feeding and clothing the poor? Is it visiting the sick or the prisoner? Read Matthew 25:31-46 for a real challenge about service.
Jesus makes it pretty clear that life-threatening devotion to God involves service to others. His brother James wrote that the value of our religion is based on service to others.
Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. James 1:27
Where is your life-threatening service?
The challenge in the comfortable church in this comfortable country is to choose to be uncomfortable, to lay aside our comfort and safety for the joy of serving Jesus by serving others like Jesus, with life-threatening devotion.
A few years ago, I gave the commencement address at a homeschool group’s graduation ceremony. I told the graduates that God had given them two gifts and one choice. The gifts were the blood of Jesus and their own testimony. Their choice was how they would live in light of those gifts. The challenge was to live so they could fulfil this scripture:
And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. Revelation 12:11
Where does your life-threatening devotion compel you to serve? Let me know with a comment below.
By His calling, in His strength,
Dean
*All Scripture quotations in this article are from the World English Bible (WEB).
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Pop-up scripture references are from the New King James Version (NKJV).
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