Serve the Lord – The Kingdom Curriculum (V) 4

Serve the Lord

“You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20.3; Deuteronomy 5:7

“And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul …” Deuteronomy 10.12

To “have” God is to serve Him.

Love for God is expressed in service. We who “have” God, who fear Him, walk in all His ways, and love Him, rejoice to be able to serve Him in every area of our lives. We want to be available to further His purposes, to make known His greatness and love, and to extend to others the grace He daily shows us. We are naturally inclined to serve ourselves, to make ourselves the center of attention, and to try to draw the affection of others toward us, as if we were somehow the most important person in the world. But that is to have ourselves as our deity, and not God.

To “have” God as our God we must serve Him, from the depths of our soul, in all the activities and practices of our lives. Thus everything about us declares to the world that we are not our own; we have been bought with a price and will not serve ourselves, but God.

Such service must come from within, in our hearts and all our souls. The soul consists of three interacting and overlapping components. Since the heart is the core component, from which flow all the other issues of life (Prov. 4:23), the Lord mentions it here, together with “the soul”, as a synecdoche for the whole of our inner lives. We must rule our affections – our desires, longings, emotions, hopes, and attitudes – so that they incline increasingly toward the Lord as the object of our love. But we must also train our minds to think God’s thoughts after Him, so that we relate to others in the way Jesus did, as a servant and agent of God’s grace (Jn. 13:1-15). Paul says that we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). That being the case, we need to recognize any time our minds are reverting to self-serving ways of thinking and re-submit them to the purposes of Christ. Jesus came not to be served, but to serve; we serve God when we worship Him as we ought and reach out to others with His grace. The more we think this way, the more our minds will engage our affections to serve the Lord out of the love we have for Him. The conscience – the valuing and priorities component of the soul – will then solidify our new hearts and new minds in new default choices, so that, increasingly, serving God becomes “second nature” to us.

We have the Lord as sole God and King in our lives when we realize that we are not our own; we have been bought with a price, the price of Jesus’ precious blood (1 Cor. 6:19, 20). We are an extension of Jesus into the everyday situations of our lives. Loving God, we will serve Him there, boasting of His goodness and might, demonstrating His love, standing for His truth, and living out the reality of our new walk in the Kingdom of the one true God.

Be sure to order your copy of The Law of God by going to www.MyParuchia.com and clicking on Publications, then Waxed Tablet. Begin to make daily reading and meditation in God’s Law part of your discipline of the Word (Ps. 94:12-15).

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“In the Gates” is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.