By Dan Brooks
We are told repeatedly in scripture to serve God. It is the essence of every law, edict, and commandment. But what does that mean and how exactly do we render such service once we figure out the how and the why? We could define service using Merriam-Webster, but the service we seek to define was defined in scripture long before English was a thing. So, let’s turn to the definition of service in Hebrew; Avodah (עֲבוֹדָה), can mean “work, worship, and service” it can also mean business work or agricultural work and, in a more traditional sense, serving God or doing God’s work.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Colossians 3:23-24
The Good Samaritan parable may be my favorite example of this type of service. God is not served directly, but through the Samaritan serving the wounded man he is. To hear it from Jesus directly in Matthew 25:34-40 has helped my understanding of what serving God means: “Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
We can’t yet serve God face to face. But we can serve each other. Which reminds me of a passage from John 13:34-35: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
Taken with Jesus’s pick for the highest commandment to love God with all your heart, strength and mind with one commandment like it being to love your neighbor as yourself, I feel that the highest form of service is to serve one another. It’s to feed or give of your time or talents to help another. It’s to lead by example. It’s to live life in such a way that those you meet will know, beyond any doubt, that you are a follower of Christ without you needing to tell them you are. You don’t have to tell it if you can show it.
It is clear that no one person served God more diligently that Jesus did. He didn’t just praise God in the Temple or in synagogues, he was down in the trenches among every outcast group of his society because that is where the need was. That is where the need is and always will be. Jesus was taken to task by the Pharisees because he kept company with sinners of every type; tax collectors, prostitutes, thieves, zealots, lepers, the blind, and the sick.
That was how Jesus served God. He spent his ministry sharing the Gospel with a Samaritan woman at the well, praising the woman who washed his feet with her hair while taking the Pharisee who criticized her sinful ways to task as Jesus forgave her of her sins personally, he taught a parable about a tax collector and a Pharisee where the tax collector walks away from the Temple justified before God rather than the Pharisee. He spent so much time with the people labeled as undesirable by the religious elite that Jesus soiled his reputation among them. His service looked nothing like what they imagined service to God should be. The experts of his era missed the point entirely.
Jesus never tended toward the legalistic interpretations of scripture. He taught in parables, similes, analogies, metaphors, because in giving us clear principles, he rendered a legalistic approach unnecessary. If your choices are based on principle you will know the right path in most situations, but if you get hung up on the letter of the law so much that you lose sight of the spirit behind it, then you can’t see the forest through the trees.
Jesus sized up the Pharisees this way In Matthew 23:
“Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.
For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,
And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues
And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.
But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.
And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.
But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.
And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.
But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”
There is more to go with that, but the example Jesus uses of pristine coffins hiding rotting death inside is the best way of thinking of that legalistic approach to faith. Faith is not meant to be abstract. It is meant to be a verb because it is an action. It’s the act of serving others as you would serve God himself.
The phrase to go the extra mile comes from the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5. In his time, under Roman occupation, Roman soldiers would press Jews into their service by forcing them under threat of death to carry their equipment for however many miles the soldier desired. Jesus was telling his audience to not just go the distance, but to double it. Don’t just stand there and allow someone to slap you in the face, but to turn and offer the other cheek as well. If someone asks you for your shirt then give them your jacket, too.
“And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”
The idea is instead of doing the least, do the most. In Genesis 4:24 Lamech, a descendant of Cain, says that if Cain is avenged 7 times then he will be avenged 77 times (77 times was an idiom that stood for eternity) which meant he demanded infinite punishment for a limited transgression. As such, he was one of the most evil characters in scripture and everyone in Jesus’s audience would have caught that intended connection as they knew as much about scripture as we are about pop culture.
It’s like asking why be good when you can be great? Sometimes we have to shoot for the stars just to get off the ground. And why can’t we reach that high when we were favored best among all of God’s creation? We are fashioned in his image and our capabilities are greater than I think we can currently understand. Certainly, it is in our best interest to be better today than we were yesterday and to be better tomorrow than we are today. We cannot change who we were, and we really cannot change who we are, but we can absolutely choose to change who we become.
So, why not shoot for the stars?