Quotes About Service

Jesus gave us a model for the work of the church at the Last Supper. While his disciples kept proposing more organization ? Hey, let's elect officers, establish hierarchy, set standards of professionalism ? Jesus quietly picked up a towel and basin of water and began to wash their feet.

Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving—God's self-giving and human self-giving—and not about self-imposing.

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, "Well isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.

Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver.

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.

Grace dispensers give out of their own bounty, in gratitude (a word with the same root as grace) for what we have received from God. We serve others not with some hidden scheme of making converts, rather to contribute to the common good, to help humans flourish as God intended.

From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven.

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

The storm laid bare an unmistakable truth. More and more Christians have decided that the only way to reconquer America is through service. The faith no longer travels by the word. It moves by the deed.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not "What did I get out of it?" but rather "Was God pleased with what happened?

What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus' sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?

sacrificial love is one of the most powerful weapons in the Christian's arsenal of grace.

First, as should be clear by now, I believe that dispensing God's grace is the Christian's main contribution

Where is the church when it hurts? If the church is doing its job—binding wounds, comforting the grieving, offering food to the hungry—I don't think people will wonder so much where God is when it hurts. They'll know where God is: in the presence of God's people on earth.

God wants us to flourish, and paradoxically we flourish best by obeying rather than rebelling, by giving more than receiving, by serving rather than being served. Six times in the Gospels Jesus iterated the deeper truth that we succeed not by acquiring more and more but by "losing" life through service to God and others.

Let me see them as thirsty people, I pray, and teach me how best to present the Living Water.

Imposition stands starkly at odds with the basic character of the Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving—God's self-giving and human self-giving—and not about self-imposing.

I do "good works" for my wife not in order to earn credit but to express my love for her. Likewise, God wants me to serve "in the new way of the Spirit": not out of compulsion but out of desire.

Fulfillment comes not in pursuit of happiness, but rather in pursuit of service.

God's gifts are best used when we give them away in serving those who have less.

The phrase "the body of Christ," expresses well what we are called to do: to represent in flesh what Christ is like, especially to those in need. The

When I ask, "Tell me the first word that comes to your mind when I say Christian," not one time has someone suggested the word love. Yet without question that is the proper biblical answer.

we in the body of Christ are called to show love when God seems not to.