After writing this, but before you are reading it, we learned that missionaries serving in Haiti, have been kidnapped. Both adults and children among them and all but one Americans. For nearly two days, this has been all we have learned about the incident. Pray for them and for all missionaries currently serving in Haiti, pray for Haiti, and pray for our fellow believers in Haiti. Same for Afghanistan. So many believers are being called to suffer and give their lives for our Lord right now. The action of serving God requires such a heart of faithful love and obedience for our Savior! May we serve Him by upholding these dear brothers and sisters in our prayers, and be willing like them, to give our all as we serve God together. 

Service to God is a topic that doesn’t go away. It is always before us. As I wrote in the last blog, serving God involves our hearts and our motivations. A life filled with blessings from God awaits those who “will indeed obey my commandments…[and] love the LORD your God, and … serve him with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 11:13). Therein lies the secret to faithful service that brings glory to God.

The Bible often speaks of living out our faith for the glory of God in terms of service and work. We become the hands, feet, and heart of Christ in our doing.  Our acts of kindness point others to our Savior.  We rely on His strength and His power as we work (Zechariah 4:6).  It is endless work, but we are assured our labor is not in vain. “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

We often choose where and how we would like to work. We join church and community outreach programs, usually drifting to those that we feel we are more gifted to do, or that require the amount of time we can spend, or those that focus on needs that particularly interest us. Perhaps we’ve been in similar places as the people we choose to help, and working with them is an excellent choice. Sometimes we receive training so that we are as best equipped to do the job as possible. Some of us are called to foreign missions, some to local outreaches to the poor, homeless, children, refugees, or addicted. All of these are good works, and as Christians who comprise the Church, the Body of Christ, we should be actively involved in such ministries. Not just a few of us, but all of us!

I have to say that I see churches who strive for biblical truth, yet still aren’t reaching into the community at all with ministry. Battered children, the homeless, the poor, and many more are part of their communities but are ignored by these churches who call themselves Bible-believing Christians. And I also see churches whose whole existence is helping, but rarely, if ever, preach the Gospel to those they minister to. 

As I read the New Testament about when the Church was growing at a fevered frenzy, I see both preaching and serving combined effectively to help physical bodies as well as spiritual souls. James points this out: “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (2:15-16). On the other hand, we are to go into all the world and “preach the gospel,” to bring His word everywhere, to all parts of the world and to all peoples, discipling those who believe (Matthew 28:19).                                                                         

While we may participate in various outreaches and ministries that are good, and we can be doing them from a heart of love for God, we need to be careful who we align ourselves with as we work, making certain the ministry doesn’t fall into either of the extreme categories mentioned above. 

Beyond that, this commandment from Matthew suggests that more humility and more obedience is required of each of us as individuals. That individual service is perhaps even more important than participating in group service. Service will often carry us into places we would rather not go, or call us to share ourselves, even our homes, time, and possessions, in a way that we would rather not. Often, as individuals, we are blinded by the need right in front of us, and step around it as the priests and Levites did in the parable of the Good Samaritan. 

We would rather not get involved with the beggar sitting on the street corner. Or the obviously inebriated loudmouth on the commuter train. The girlfriend that is being verbally or physically abused by her boyfriend. The drug dealer down the street. The children whose parents are rarely home. An unknown in the doctor’s office who has just received a disturbing diagnosis. The pregnant woman without hope of a good future for her baby. A crying child. A despondent acquaintance. The messiness of situations next door, and sometimes in our own families. Even the close friend who has never actually heard the gospel. We justify our reasoning. We often make judgment calls regarding these situations rather than delving in to help. But as James writes, “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (2:13).

These are the tasks that we are called to daily. This is the work that the scriptures are talking about when they say we need to “equip ourselves,” to “put on,” to prepare, to do. That preparation training involves focusing on our leader, Jesus Christ, keeping ourselves in His Word, utilizing the power of prayer, and believing that He who is in us, is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).

Just as the merciful God loved you and gave Himself for you, so He has called you to put your faith to work to show His mercy and grace that you have experienced to everyone you know and come in contact with. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

Once again, we come full circle back to the knowledge that giving and serving are only done well if we are kept, daily, minute by minute, by “the cleansing power of the precious blood when applied by the Holy Spirit…the keeping power of our God.” That’s how Frances Ridley Havergal, the great English hymnwriter, put it in a letter to a friend: 

“[When] we limit God’s power to ‘keep’; we look at our frailty more than at His omnipotence. Where is the line to be drawn, beyond which He is not ‘able?’ The very keeping implies total helplessness without it, and the very cleansing most distinctly implies defilement without it….

“I had never seen the force of the tense before, a continual present, always a present tense, not a present which the next moment becomes a past. It goes on cleansing, and I have no words to tell how my heart rejoices in it. Not a coming to be cleansed in the fountain only, but a remaining in the fountain, so that it may and can go on cleansing.”

Trusting in that continual cleansing boosts our ability to work. Francis Schaeffer once preached a sermon entitled, “The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way.” He warned that the biggest problem in doing our work is in trusting our fleshly power rather than the power of the Holy Spirit to do it. He said: “Is it not amazing: Though we know the power of the Holy Spirit can be ours, we still ape the world’s wisdom, trust its forms of publicity, its noise, and imitate its ways of manipulating men! If we try to influence the world by using its methods, we are doing the Lord’s work in the flesh. If we put activity, even good activity, at the center rather than trusting God, then there may be the power of the world but we will lack the power of the Holy Spirit.”

So much work to do. So many different kinds of serving. We must be alert and keep our eyes wide open to see it and act on it. Give. Walk beside. Pour out ourselves, just as Christ has poured out Himself for us. He provides the strength and the joy while we do it. And blessing upon blessing into our lives. 

“Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen” (Hebrews 13:20-21).