Why We Are Servants

From the beginning of the Bible to the end, we find a glorious, dominant and recurring theme: God pursues His human creation so they may know Him and experience His perfect and mysterious love. Yet this unrivaled treasure is hidden, available only to those who hunger for it, who will travel the narrow and at times lonely path to find it. While biblical recordation ended some two thousand years ago, God’s systematic and sometimes dramatic pursuit of us to capture our hearts has not. God’s pursuit of us to know and taste the divine is timeless. There are no comparisons for such a beautiful loving act as God’s pursuit of His creation, His calling us into intimacy with Him. Out of gratitude and in response to his indwelling love, we are Servants.

The Apostle John simply wrote, “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Or let us consider the prophet Isaiah, writing in the fifty-third chapter, who wrote more specifically of God’s extravagant love for us, saying that He bore our grief’s, our sorrows, our infirmities, so that we might not be oppressed and withered by them. He continued, saying, “He was wounded for our transgressions” and was “chastised so that we might know [lasting] peace.” Still there is more. Isaiah tells us that Christ gives us the ability to be healed of our physical and emotional wounds because of the beating He endured for us. Yet God did even more—so much more. He did the unthinkable: He asked His Son, deity in human flesh to die a horrible, painful, dehumanizing death, so that we might be forgiven and have an opportunity to experience His love eternally.

While there may be an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all that God, through Christ, has done or is doing for us, yet it is His unmistakable indwelling love that is the most persuasive. It draws us first to Him, then leads us to shed the darkness of our fallen nature and the ever-present culture, which seeks to draw humanity away from God. As Servants we see the deception and utter shallowness of our culture, stealing lives at an unprecedented rate by misrepresenting realty. As Servants of the Kingdom, we run from its many defiling idols, to the safety of our Lord, where all goodness and the holy, abundant life resides.

It is God’s desire that His life-changing love for us be experienced and become the principle source of who we are. That His indwelling presence becomes the divine fuel for all we do. We are Servants because His unerring, all-embracing love compels us, not out of obedience to His written word per se, although we would happily respond to God’s desire in that way, too. While abstract words on paper are powerful and life-changing, nevertheless for us they are overwhelmed by what we experience in our hearts. We are swept up in a holy seduction, God courts us and we come running, surrendering our lives in a state of complete gratitude.

Lastly, we are Servants because we hear God when He speaks into our spirits and asks us if we would like to take His love to those, who, without our help, are trapped in an inescapable web of poverty and abuse, without opportunity to change. Through His invitation we recognize a new sense of joy because we have found a way to give back and show Him the love He has put in our hearts. His tireless pursuit for our hearts paid off, just as He knew it would; we now understand on a level not understood before, that we truly have been created us in His image.