Love is SERVICE...

"Your attitude must be like my own, for I, the Messiah, did not come to be served, but to serve and give my life." Matthew 20:28 (Living Bible)

Wait! This is Jesus talking. Jesus, the Son of God, the one who's seated at the right hand of the Father is saying that He, the ultimate in royalty (I mean He's the Son of God after all) came to...SERVE?!?! Not only does He say He came to serve but also to give His life. And give His life He did indeed! So, being the son of God, one third of the trinity, the personification of God on earth, that also means that He is Love because He is in God and He is of God. So if we break that down, we see that Love=Service. Now I wonder how many of us actually think of love being service. Most of the time we think of love in this fluffy, flowery way. It's romantic, it's sweet to think about and wonderful to experience. Especially when we're getting all kinds of wonderful gifts out of it. But let's just be honest. We rarely think of love as service. It's less romantic that way. How many of us say that we love our jobs? But if our boss asks us to do something that's not necessarily in our job description, something that may require us to stay later or come earlier, something that may require us to cancel or alter our own personal plans for the day, something extra that we, GASP, may not get paid extra for, are we still loving our jobs? But that is service. The extra thing that's not necessarily what we planned on doing but will help someone else. That's service...and that's love.

1 John 3:17 (KJV) says "But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" So this is basically asking if we see our brother (or sister) in need and we have the riches of the world but we do nothing to help that person in need, how is it possible that God's love (which is real love) dwells in us. Verse 18 goes on to say "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth." Again, it does no good to speak lofty, lovely words about our love for another person (or God or our job or mankind in general). We must love "in deed and in truth". That is, we display our love by the sincerity of the things we do. And because God has called upon us to be sincere in all that we do, we can just justify everything that we do out of a pure heart as service/LOVE to God.

So Serve and Love...