I know it’s stupid. But I cringe every time I hear that little phrase.
It’s nothing really, but it still is, you know?
This morning I caught it in the lyrics reaching my ears via car speakers. Lately, every time I hear the sentiment I feel my insides knot and my shoulders cramp.
“And I will serve you, my God. We will serve the Lord together…”
Serve the Lord? How, exactly?
A reel begins rolling in my head, snapping and popping an old reality.
Sunday mornings, leaving the house at dawn and not returning from church until hours after the sun had settled behind the hills. Saturday schedules spotted with “door knocking” and meetings and practices and picnics and special dinners. Tuesday’s visitation, Wednesday’s kid’s club, Thursday’s missionary meeting, Friday’s deacon’s meetings. Choir practice, piano playing, special music, “teen soul winning,” nursery shifts. Baking cookies, delivering newcomer gifts, serving snacks, teaching Sunday school, organizing special services and revivals and conferences.
My heart races and I shut off the mind reel. How did we maintain such a pace for years?
Nobody forced us to say yes to absolutely everything. It was expected, sure, but we could have said no and established our own priorities.
I wonder, now, sitting quietly on Sunday mornings, reading the Gospel with my husband and small folk… was putting on a weekly event what the Psalm writer had in mind when he penned the words “Serve the Lord with gladness?” Is this the only context for having a heart turned toward ministry?
I confess I’m afraid of the answer, worried that if I flesh out this recent pondering I’ll end up running ragged and battered and never having an evening at home with my husband. But then, my jaded side shows often.
So would you flesh it out, here, with me? What does “serving the Lord” look like in your life, today, right now?
{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m wondering about this a lot to. I’m not sure im called to help out at church groups or make tea. I’m praying a lot and hoping God will give me a nudge in the right direction.
Right now for me, and truly always from this day forward!, serving the Lord for me is determinately trusting in Him alone. Yesterday I had another small miracle; a gift~due to this determination to know that I know that I know my way in everything is by the grace of God alone. I am blogging right now
http://www.gingerfetish.blogspot.com
For me, right now, it’s this: following His lead and guidance in what I’m being called to do, which are simple things of my heart’s longings and urgings, things that I realize fill me as I do them, and things that allow the Spirit to breathe in my life… those things right now are writing, typing up my old journals, harvesting from the words I discover in them, artistic pursuits, spending the days with my children, being a friend, making home fun and relaxing on the weekends when hubby’s off from working… And I’ve been there with the physically exhausting, church-driven serving… and it was all good, but it’s a different season now… the church we attend, it’s over an hour away… and we don’t go every weekend… and it was hard not to be physically involved, for a long while… to give up background singing for women’s ministry, to give up leading teens at youth ministry… really, Lord? i thought… YOU don’t want me out there, in the typical sense of serving… there’s a time and place for everything… And sometimes, the letting go, the freedom is HIS choosing for us, to serve heart-fully, that’s what I’m learning. And we find, that then, we truly follow… that is what currently holds true for me. I’m sorry, I’ve taken up so much space here already! Thank you for asking… The answer may be different than you expected, though, Ashleigh… you’ll see…
I serve the Lord at home while caring for my son.
I serve the Lord at work while caring for others.
I serve the Lord at play while joyfully going through life.
When I notice, when I act, when I engage I am serving the Lord.
Jesus reminds us that the law says: “…‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” – Luke 10-27
When we love God and love our neighbors we’re serving and living as we should. Service comes in all forms and methods. It’s not the how that’s important, it’s the why. Why you’re doing what you do and who you’re doing it for make all the difference.
I love your response Becky!
I read your thoughts and were saddened. I can totally relate. Everything you listed was “serving” in a church building or within church activities. What if as Christ followers we are obedient to start our service at the Lord’s feet each day asking Him who may we serve that day to glorify His name and not our own. What if we started in our own homes first – serving and loving on our husbands and children. This is our first and primary mission field. Once we have been faithful with these things then ask the Lord to lead you in HIS work – what blessing when we joyfully serve the Lord and his appointed work he has set out for us instead of being so busy “doing” good things that we miss what He has for us! If we have so many “serving” things to do that we neglect things at home or our relationship with Christ then we are sinning – it has become an idol.
Pray- ask- joyfully submit – to the awesome opportunities he has just for you to serve him in in order that His name be made great! He will be faithful.
I struggle with this too…even after completely burning out a few years ago. I want my “yes” to be determined by where the Lord leads, as well as my “no.” Great post!
For me, right now, it boils down to this: seeing the pain of the people that I meet in my daily life, and doing what I can to help ease it. Most of the time, that means listening.
That is exactly what I was going to say, Addie. I am looking into more “formal” ways of serving by volunteering in my community but nothing has come to fruition yet. In the meantime, I believe ministering to those around us is a greater calling than getting caught up in the busywork of church.
Agreed. Sometimes I think that church can become this machine. It takes so many people to run it, to keep all the programs going, to make sure everything goes smoothly…while in the meantime, people are getting MISSED. They’re walking in, bleeding and broken, and we’re too busy tidying up the church kitchen to notice.
You two are knocking it out of the park here. The machine has a difficult time slowing enough to give community something other than just lip service.
I used to have keys to the church, and it was crazy. And now, after a move that helped release things from my grasp, I do little. I have come to realize I serve God in all things, and that this life i am meant to live to serve God doesn’t have to drive me crazy. I will do things out of my comfort zone, and I will do things I don’t particularly want to do at times, but through it all I have to believe that God being the focus is how I serve Him.
I think about this often. I have gotten a lot more involved this last year at our church. Now I find myself rushing in and out of the house without a free evening all week. It all has to do with the church, and when I think more about it, I feel like it is so self-serving. Not that it’s all bad. Of course we need people to teach Sunday school and make coffee, etc. But what I want to pursue more of is serving those in the community who need it. Jesus taught that when we show love for the weak and downtrodden and rejected, it’s as if we are helping Jesus himself.
Sometimes serving the Lord means waking up every morning, going to work, working all day diligently, and than going back home to repeat the process.
I wanted to read everyone’s answer, but chose, instead, to just write my answer, with no distraction and no need to delute it from fear of others answers.
I have chosen, or maybe I haven’t, but He has….to reject the religious idea of serving Him to the point of neglecting other people and things He would have us focus on. Ahem, like Him for one. Oswald Chambers, I believe, has said that the one thing that can create a danger to our walk with Him is Christian service. Hmmm. Anyhoo….
Right now, I serve Him by loving, by His love and grace, the people in my immediate family that aren’t following Christ, which in turn would make MY following Him much easier.
I’m working on a project to hand out more lunch bags (brown bags of grace) to the homeless in Denver. It’s something I feel God has been asking me to do for years, and I just started before Christmas. Super stoked too!!! Just grabbed me some free mayo packets at 7-11….SCORE!
Serving Him by being a sounding board for a few people who are voicing their questions, doubts and anger towards God, and NOT turning my back on them because their questions, doubts and anger touch too close to my reality. It all just pushes me further into His Arms….which is probably the point
Serving Him by praying to be open to His Spirit’s nudging’s in my life and have started a prodigal journal to pray for people who have turned from Him (just like I had). I firmly believe it was all His idea, I’m just along for the ride. And WHAT a ride!! He brings me people with stories and names and prayer requests and I’m humbled and honored and thrilled to be in on His bigger Story.
funny, i just wrote, “find out more about why we serve” on our new website http://www.casasporcristo.org/#/home/why-we-do-it
Right now and for the past 7 years I’ve “served” by teaching people how to build homes for families living in poverty in Juarez, Mexico. Now called the “most violent city in the world” how I serve has changed a lot from the safe pews of a church building…
I could so relate to this. I used to think that I had to do all of the activities and projects every week. And then I started to realize that if I got myself too busy with projects, I was missing God. I need to seek Him to serve Him and sometimes that requires me to sit still at His feet.
I still go to church, but I don’t participate in nearly as many committees as I used to. I choose the few I feel called to, and I find myself able to give so much more to them now that I’m not running, running, running back and forth between my so many things.
For me, it means listening to that little tug of the heart… that small voice that nudges me in the right direction. It means letting go of what I think or what I want and surrendering to His will. It means letting go of my preconceived notions and embracing what is. It means blooming where I’m planted. And, it means singing when I’ve all but lost my song.
I’m working on all of the above, wishing it came easier…
This is so truly relatable. I’ve grown up in a Christian household and so often for us ‘serving’ means helping a particular church finish what they’re doing here, or being at church at this time, and I have to wonder: really? This is the serving the Lord the Psalms speak of? Some of my questions are probably selfish, but I’ve been questioning nonetheless.
Right now, serving the Lord looks like trying to show my much much-younger brother what a grace-ful woman is like, or how he should speak to girls, or just listening to him when he needs someone to talk about his legos too. It looks like trying to write stories that are true-to-character. It looks like being there for a friend who’s just broken up with someone. It looks like throwing myself into doing or creating something I’m passionate about and asking God to please, please let me do it well because He’s done beyond well in creating this world.
Church? I’m still learning church.
Right now, today, my service isn’t so much about what, but it’s about purposefully concentrating on WHY I’m doing or not doing xyz. Sometimes I remember to consider that important question and other times…I totally space it and end up in survival mode. *It* is most definitely getting easier, the older I get (thirty-something can be liberating in some ways),…to *see* a bigger picture and care less and less what other persons think of it.
I’m also finding…I have less and less to say (hey, I used to have LOTS to mindlessly say) as I have more and more questions along the way. Just learning as I go here!
Aaaah … ‘how do we serve?’ Let me start by sharing that I became a born again believer in Christ through my husband’s witness to me 19 years ago (I was 26 years old). I became a believer shortly after meeting him. I never grew up knowing much about God or church – my mother always said, “I will never darken the doorway of any church.” Before I met my husband I told God, “I don’t know if you exist … but if You could let me come to heaven when I die, I will do anything – ANYTHING you ask of me, I don’t care how much it hurts.” Then I find out that Jesus already did the ‘anything’ … I knew what it meant when they say, ‘Jesus paid a price that I couldn’t pay.’ There are no words to express what I felt, only sobs.
Now to the point on serving God, my husband and I have attended churches throughout the years and although we love God far and beyond anyone else, we have forsaken what we have come to call, ‘the show.’ I don’t mean to offend anyone … but we have attended so many services where the teaching is blatantly smeared. Where worship feels more like a chanting service to summon the Holy Spirit (hinduism) instead of realizing that, as born again people of God, we are already Spirit-filled.
Serving God for me has more to do with me serving my husband and my kids, and my brothers and sisters in the Lord – for they are my siblings in the Lord and I treat them as such! By my husband and I teaching and talking about our faith and discussing and teaching each other scriptures in our home, with our kids, and our friends, is how we go about serving God. Me being a good mom and wife and striving to be the godly woman that God is ever moulding me into, is serving God. To me serving God is not serving in church activities like youth groups and whatever other group there is. I don’t understand the need to segregate everyone into groups for teaching. Are not the older women supposed to be teaching the younger women (and same with men)?? How can College & Careers, or Young Adults or Youth Group teach anyone anything of real value without some grey-haired persons in the room whose ‘been-there-done-that’??
The body of Christ is a family and traditional church shows no reflection of that in service or programs. I went to a church once I went to for 2 years and coming through the door, I was asked, “Oh, you must be new here?” She was embarrassed when I told her how long I’d been coming.
Serving God is serving your own family and brothers and sisters in Christ on a personal level, not an organized committee level. That’s my opinion anyway.
Lovingly, Risé
I second this response! This pretty much sums up what I was going to say! Serving Him starts by serving our husband, children and family. Then it spreads from there. Sadly so many are serving so much in their church that they have forgotten to serve their families.
Holly – thank you. And so true – when lives get so caught up in programs that family is neglected one has to wonder if its worth it.
)
Attending all the activities offered at church, has become very important, in our christian subculture. I has even become a standard for measuring how “holy” a person is. Many times growing up I heard the expression, “If the doors are open, we’ll be there,” with the implication that those who didn’t follow such practices weren’t “good christians.
As a teenager, and through my early adult years, I began to realize it’s not merely the do’s and don’t that make you a good christian. It’s the condition of your heart~ SPECIFICALLY your heart attitudes~ fruits of the spirit~ how you treat people. I don’t know about you, but working on my character keeps me more than busy. I don’t have to attend all the activities at church to serve God, or please him. In fact, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees on many occasions for doing all the right things but having a wicked heart.
Since we moved to Paraguay our church ideas have shifted tremendously. We were a part of that ever exhausted team of cogs that made the “machine.” The machine exist here too but we have taken a very different approach to how we interact with it. I find that more of our ministry work happens sitting at a meal or just after a PS2 tournament than it does in the confines of the box. I don’t discount or dislike the more institutional church environment I just find more opportunities to be like Him outside of it.
I think one of the ways to serve the Lord is not doing every single church function or being at church 7 days a week. I think the most important thing we need to do is simple, 1 Thessalonians 5:17 Pray without ceasing. I we can get ourselves to pray always, God will reveal the ways He wants us to serve Him. It may not be what you expect, or even want to do, but if you obey, He will bless you and your service.
Oh man, this post made me really sad. Not because I doubt your heart (I don’t,) but because the church is so damn good at sucking the life out of those who will say “yes.” I’m so sorry. Too many good people have been abused by this strategy. This is what a previous pastor called the “Cruise Ship Model.” Where a small group of staff/volunteers work 24 hours a day to provide a multitude of activities and shows for the people to choose from. The people who attend “pay” to be there, and therefore expect the church to provide a program for every possible need. The problem is that this model is false. A better model is the “Base camp/Life saving station” in which EVERYONE is equipped at base camp to go OUT and rescue people out there in the community. We spend an awful lot of time and money making things comfortable and fun IN church, rather than having an incredible impact out there in the hurting community. Lynn Hybels said that the most untapped resource in Christianity is WOMEN. I think she’s right. Another speaker I heard said “Serve the coffee if that’s what you want to do, and then go raise HELL” about something big, like poverty, human trafficking, or lack of access to clean water or medical care. I think we were meant to have a bigger impact, but we get swamped by church committees, pot lucks and “teas.” I like tea. But I’d rather lobby to free girls from brothels and bring my kids with me so they become passionate about things that really matter.
I haven’t experienced this constant hive of activity in church. I can’t imagine how anyone caught up in this kind of “service” can truly experience their own walk with Christ every day. Surely this kind of “service” must get in the way, at times, and replace the sense of peace that comes with a closeness to God. If that’s happening and that peace is gradually being replaced with a sense of chaos or perhaps resentment, maybe the Holy Spirit IS trying to help you see what you miss by this kind of “service”. Nourishing our own soul, in a true, beautiful relationship with Our Heavenly Father, gives us the best chance of “serving” in the way he asks. Loving Him FIRST, keeping close to HIM on a personal level, ensures we KEEP trying to be best equipped to love one another and recognize HIS will for us. Be lead by HIM, not some “committee”. When we’re close to HIM, we will find our way to where we’re meant to be. Handing all doubts, questions, concerns over to him, completely TRUSTING Him, WILL guide us in our walk with Him. We just have to trust him with every part of our being.
Beth