To be Loved, to Love and to Serve

Here is a short account of what my last year has been like my aim is to encourage, motivate, and challenge us all, as we seek to be continually transformed into the likeness of our king, Jesus.

Through this year I have been on this journey asking myself the questions: who am I? who is God to me? And a very important question to me: what is my identity?

I am in a place now where I know the answers to these questions in my head and it is slowly dripping down into my heart, but it is a process and I am a work in progress. I have been blown away by the truth that the one who made everything, who knows it all, who creates beauty in everything with careful precision and delicate intricacies, is massively in love with me. It really doesn’t matter to him how covered I am in bad decisions, sinful thoughts and desires. In the light of his love for me and his goodness to me, everything else pales into insignificance. He is my dad, someone who knows me, loves me. My trouble with this was allowing him to love me, letting go of my conditions, the walls I put up trying to disqualify myself, actually when the one who made me says he loves me no matter what.

I have spent quite a lot of my time trying to get this right in my head and in my heart. Now that I am growing in my understanding, in my life to be my father’s son, I have come to a place where I am asking the question, how should I live my life? I see myself and the people around me: young people who have left their homes; young single mums; kids who do not have a stable family life; young offenders; friends who are caught up in the world of money, success, and pursuing a skewed version of happiness in the wrong places and in the wrong things. I have realised none of it makes any sense. We were made to be loved, that’s it. No other explanation will suffice. The problem is whether we will accept this truth, and, if we do accept this truth, what we will do about it.

Throughout this year, I have learnt to let God love me and to love him, to let him change me from within. This raised another question, how do I let God love me and what does it mean to love him? This was when the rubber hit the road. I am not sure I know the answer but I have learnt that I need to enjoy the company of Jesus in my daily life. At the leaders weekend, Steve Clifford talked about finding God in the everyday. I’ve found practising the presence of God to be a hard way to live. If any of you are like me, I spend quite a lot of my time in my head, and end up ignoring the loving Father. The truth that stood out to me as I was exploring practising the presence of God was the whole issue of independence. I was happy to get on with my life, make decisions and do things without God involved in any of it. The truth is that it is easier for me to live a life where I know what is best for me, do what I think is best for me and have God involved in my life only when I don’t have things in control, when there is nothing that I can do other than worry.

The question that I had to face then was am I going to trust God ruthlessly, believe that his will for my life is perfect and it is whole and he knows best, not me. Therefore I have been learning to submit to his love, his rule and his ways, not mine. While reading David Winter’s revised version of Brother Lawrence’s "Practising the Presence of God", this one bit stood out

Suddenly I saw what ‘providence’ was all about – it’s simply believing that God has the power and the will to do all things well for us, if we only submit to his loving, patient rule. And that nothing we can do – beyond trusting him – will accelerate his will or bring things about which he is not yet ready to do in us.

He goes on to say...

My acts of worship, my attempts at discipline – all effort I had put into trying to please God – were swallowed up in an enormous sense of love for him. The one who patiently led the trees and the plants through their seasons would also lead me, if I would only submit to his loving and yet powerful hand.

That’s what has changed and is changing everything in me and my life, the truth that I can love this mysterious and yet completely real person and give myself to him so that in his wisdom, time and love, he will lead me to wholeness. This is really hard but it is worth it and I haven’t figured it all out but I know no other answer makes any sense to me.

It is this truth that has led me to living actively in faith and has helped me take more ground daily in the fight against fear, passivity and self-image. This truth has challenged me about how I live my life, how I love others the way God loves me, how I love the unlovely, what it means to serve, and, how do I live a life as an ordinary radical and be a fool for Christ? I don’t I have any definite answers but I think these are questions I need to wrestle with daily. I know I can make choices every day that reflect my true calling as followers of The Way: to love and to serve. As Paul says “I have become all things to all men that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings” (1 Cor 9:21-22).

It’s a very hard to choose, out of love for God, to be a servant in all situations and to all people, But it’s also very powerful to choose to do so, not for human glory or fulfilment, but for the sake of Jesus, for the sake of loving relationships and for the sake of one united and yet diverse body.

My prayer is that we will let ourselves be loved by God, and trust him completely so that he will move us from the inside. And that we will love and serve by keeping ourselves in training daily; exercising self-control; and making our bodies our slaves so that we may not lose the race but will become who we are made to be.

Posted by: Jimmy Zachariah on Monday Sep 15th, 2008

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