Serve


We have been focusing on God’s call this past month. We’ve talked about Call, Fruit, and Gift. Today we arrive at perhaps the most important aspect of call – the doing of call. We usually call this, serve. We are called to be servants for God in our world.

The image of a servant is not a popular one these days. The image evokes poor people dressed in bad clothing doing messy, menial things. Not many of us our attracted to that picture.

Serving is unattractive to us, in part, because it is opposed to the image that we have been conditioned to accept about ourselves, that is, our core identity of consumer.

We are consumers in our world. And the problem is not just that we are consumers of a lot of what we don’t need. The fundamental problem is that “consumer” has come to identify our meaning and purpose in life.

Our culture of consumption has created needs where they didn’t exist before. Listerine is a classic example. Did you know before there was Listerine there was no mention in popular literature of bad breath? Yes, people had diseases of the mouth, rotting teeth, open sores. To us they would have stunk. To them they didn’t. People invest billions of dollars into products and advertising to tell us we need things that wouldn’t have occurred to us naturally. We have learned to smell bad breath.

Why do we celebrate Valentine’s Day? Because a card company told us to.

Our consumer identity has permeated every aspect of our lives, even the spiritual. Listen to what James Twitchell, author of the book, Shopping For God, writes:

“The implications for this kind of relationship-marketing are profound. Citizens have rights and responsibilities, but consumers have only rights, with virtually no responsibilities. Gimme. Feed me. Save me. . .Our Lady of Perpetual Sacrifice has been replaced by Our Lady of Sales.”

We view church as another product where we pick our favorite and hope we get good value for the choice. The best expression of the spiritual for a consumer of church is, “I got a lot out of that service today.” That’s the best that can be said.

But the Gospel bids us come and die. The Cross is not an advertisement. It’s a sign to come and serve.

When the disciples cried out to Jesus, “Give us more faith!” he answered with this:

“When the servant comes in from the fields, will the master say come sit and eat first? No, the master will tell the servant to prepare the dinner and serve him first before the servant can himself eat. And the servant knows this.”

When we are looking for a spiritual experience and crying out, “Give us more!”
Jesus says, “Serve.” True servants know this is their duty.


We won’t serve until we give up some of our consumer priorities and make our commitments actually match the convictions we say we have.

John Ortberg writes about binding commitments. Binding commitments are actions or choices made in the past that tie us to a future course of action. Some are dramatic, like choosing college, getting married, buying a home. If you buy a home that you can only afford by working two and three jobs at a time, then you have bound yourself to a certain future with hidden costs to your life.

Some binding commitments are more routine but they also shape our lives powerfully. Anyone with a kid in soccer knows this. “There are cults that place fewer demands on a person’s time than soccer leagues do,” Ortberg writes.

Some commitments are unspoken. Our primary unspoken commitment is watching television. Adults in America average four hours per day. Parents spend that average watching tv, one hour a day shopping, and guess what, six minutes a day playing with their kids.

Routine and unspoken commitments look small, but they are daily and they drive our lives. We do not sense the gap that begins to grow between what we say matters most to us and what we are actually doing with our lives.

We have to make room for our convictions. If you find yourself saying, “We just haven’t had time to come to church,” or “I don’t have time to help out with that ministry,” chances are there is probably a growing gap between your convictions and your actions.

The Gospel has a sense of urgency to it. There are windows of opportunity in our lives and the lives of those we hope to reach. Those windows aren’t open forever.

Look at Charlie Bucket. Charlie Bucket is a good boy but his family is very poor. There is the scene in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the boy gets, as his only birthday present, a chocolate bar. He decides to share it with his whole family. His parents object, “Oh no, Charlie, not your birthday present.” But Charlie insists. He breaks the candy bar into pieces and passes it out to his family members like he is administering the Body of Christ. Maybe he is. It’s a holy moment.

Well, it happens that Charlie receives one of the elusive golden tickets to go to Willy Wonka’s fabled factory. But he has a dilemma. He can sell the ticket for a lot money, money that his poor family desperately needs. Charlie announces that nobody is going to the factory for the contest. His family sits in stunned silence. But then his grandfather, the crusty, biting one, calls him over.

“Boy, there’s plenty of money out there. They print more every day. But these tickets, there's only five of them in the whole world. And that’s all there’s ever going to be. You’d have to be a dummy to give this ticket away for something as common as money. Are you a dummy?”

Charlie’s eyes light up as he says, “No, I’m not.” He enters the contest.

Don’t you be a dummy. Don’t sacrifice the opportunities of your life for something as common as money, or shopping, or television.. Listen to this. . .

“We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which He prepared in advance for us to do” Ephesians 2.10

God creates these opportunities for a faithful people. As it says in Romans 4 “It depends on faith. . .in the presence of God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Your faith will increase as you serve. No more excuses! Stop delaying. Get involved. This is worth giving your life to.