Choosing To Serve

The holidays are a busy time of year for everyone, and even busier if your home is a central spot for friends and family. For the first time this year, my home was the gathering place for my family. All the cooking and sleeping and socializing happened at my house, which of course meant a great deal of preparation, shopping, and cleaning beforehand.

During the planning stages, I considered how I would handle all the people in my house. Would I be helpful or irritable when a guest needed something? Would I be cheerful during our time together or exhausted by the end? Would I be a dictator or a servant?

Often times in daily life, we forget that we have many opportunities to choose our attitude toward others and the circumstances of our lives. Our natural tendency may be to complain and fuss and have a bad attitude when relationships or situations are not how we would wish, but we can choose to put our ill-tempered feelings aside and instead respond in word and deed as Jesus would have done.

Of course, choosing to act like Jesus is not always easy. At first, it is very difficult, because it is a discipline that must be practiced. Just as those of us who want to get in shape after the New Year will be successful if we develop new habits that become part of our lifestyle, so will we be successful imitating Jesus if we practice to such an extent that it becomes habit.

In the meantime, the Holy Spirit is within us cultivating our hearts so that responding like Jesus is not just a habit but second nature to us. We still at times have to make the choice to turn away from our old tendencies, but through the work of the Holy Spirit, our desire to please Christ and imitate Him is stronger than our desire to indulge our old habits.

And out of our desire to please Christ grows a sweet willingness within us to serve and help others, in order to lead them closer to Christ, and bring glory to Him.

The summer before my senior year of college, I traveled to France to do mission work. It was a stressful six weeks. Not only was the trip poorly run, but I did not speak the language and experienced a great deal of culture shock. We also had limited personal time, which was trying for me since I need quiet to recharge, because we were so busy trying to spread the gospel and reach French students.

Shortly after I returned home, I participated in a service project that consisted of offering household help to disabled senior citizens. My small team was assigned to help an elderly man who was mostly blind. When we arrived at his apartment, he listed off projects he needed done, and before I knew it, I had been assigned the worst job on the list, which was to clean his toilet.

I went to check the toilet, and it was pretty rough. It is quite a unique experience to clean a blind man’s toilet, and it takes a lot more elbow grease than would normally be required. The surprising part was that once I dove in and got started, it really wasn’t so bad, and I was even happy that the toilet was going to be really clean for him. Being happy and willing to perform a task like that was not in any way a typical reaction for me at that time in my life.

I believe I was able to respond that way because I had spent the previous six weeks in France learning the importance of putting my feelings and opinions aside and focus on what I was called to do that summer which was reach out, serve others, and spread the gospel. What I had been practicing was starting to turn into a habit.

John Henry Newman, an Anglican leader in nineteenth century England, said that “to take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once and for all: it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.”

Tasteful or distasteful, we are called to serve and respond to others and the situations in our life as Jesus did. It is one important way in which we imitate Him. In Mark 10:45, Scripture says “for even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” God desires the same for us, and as our practice becomes habit, He develops within us the qualities that distinguished Jesus from others around Him. As those same qualities become a marker in our own life that we are followers of Christ, our life will have a sweet fragrance that will win the respect of unbelievers and point them to the Lord Jesus Christ.

By Taylor Martin Wise, Copyright 2009