Please enjoy a blog post written by Elder Tim Hooey on Service:
Sometimes I think I understand love. I know what it means that God loves me and I choose to enter into His love. I choose to look at people with love and treat them accordingly. This love is generous and disinterested in personal gain.
Sometimes I am in desperate need of understanding love. I can’t imagine why or how God would love me and I choose to reject His love in favor of my own way. That way is not always pretty, but sometimes seems good. When I choose that way, I also choose to love people the only way I know how, through my own effort. This is sometimes good, but often greedy and full of motives that ultimately have my best interest in mind.
Over the past month and a half, as a church, we have been talking about service. Lately, I have been thinking of service as an action that flows from love, something that finds its breath from love and cannot survive without love.
When I mention service, I’m not referring to any kind of act that helps people. We are all perfectly capable of helping people without thinking twice about why we are doing it and how God is involved, and to some degree we do this regularly. The type of service I am referring to is Kingdom-extending, selfless, and often sacrificial. This type of service comes in the mundane and everyday as well as the heroic and extraordinary.
Matthew 22:37-40 has a lot to say about love and service. After Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he answered:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Love God. Then, let that love for God produce love for people. If we love people, and are concerned for them, it seems that it would be natural to serve them.
I found out almost two years ago that Theodore Judah Elementary School was in desperate need of help, attention and love. Almost 50% of the student body is living under the poverty level, and numerous families are homeless. As I let myself enter into God’s love, and then let that love produce a love for my community, it was natural to jump in and begin serving Theodore Judah. For me, that meant mentoring a boy from the school once a week at lunchtime. The two greatest commandments ever created required that I spend $3.25 on popcorn chicken and tater tots so that I could be involved in the life of a person who needs me. I find this thrilling. Not always easy, but thrilling.
Service is love in action. Sometimes I choose to love and my eyes are open to the heart of those around me. Sometimes I choose not to love and I miss out on extending the reach of God’s Kingdom to the ends of the earth. My prayer for Oak Hills is that we would be people eager to experience God’s love, then, as a response to His love, we would love our community actively.
1 comment:
I was in a bible study once that was talking about the fruit of the spirit and one of the ladies said 'let's just start with one, start with love, that's an easy one'. WHAT! I thought, is she crazy. Maybe it is easy for some to love but love has never been easy for me. "Trying" to love others and serve them on my own power doesn't usually get me very far before disappointment, disillusion and bitterness sink in. But loving God and letting our love for him spill over is a whole different way of life. I pray that I am learning to love and serve others because I am a child of God and that is what his children do, out of a love for him. Not perfectly, of course but more and more and I pray that it becomes who I am-a person who loves God and loves others.
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