serveserveserve

This weekend I’m going to speak on serving. Sometimes I wonder if I speak too much about that, but then in a deep spiritual meditative state, I think, “Naaaah.”

To me it’s like asking, Can you talk about love too much?


Uh, it’s kind of the Main Thing, isn’t it? Or as Paul said, “The greatest of these…”

When we speak of the love God has for us or His commandment that we love one another, we might forget that love is a verb...there is action connected with it. No action, no real love. And so it makes me wonder: if the word love has become so misused and abused, what if we exchanged the word serve instead?

I posed that once at the Vineyard and got an interesting response from someone a few weeks later who told me he began thinking about his wife like that. What if instead of saying he loved her, he began saying he served her? He began thinking about ways he could creatively serve her. That’s love in action.

Maybe that’s why Paul wrote in Ephesians: “Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men…”

Try it for a week: catch yourself and substitute the word serve for love. See what happens. Then I wonder if when you say “I serve my new laptop…”, you might stop and think, “Ouch. I wonder if I really do?”