Does your conception of God – the Father of Jesus – have space for him putting on an apron to cook and serve you dinner? Is your God one who would encourage you to sit back at the table while he did the hard work?
If not it’s time to let Jesus shake up your conception of God. In Luke 12 Jesus tells a mind-blowing and often overlooked parable:
“Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.”
Luke 12:35-38
Did you catch that? God himself is going to joyfully serve his servants who are present and ready when he returns. He’s going to put on the apron, head to the kitchen, cook up a feast, and serve it out.
That’s a bit of a shock to my system, wired as it is with a good Reformed bent and relishing the awe-inspiring images of God in Isaiah 6 and the throne room scenes of Revelation. How do we reconcile this seeming paradox throughout scripture? How can the one who is “holy, holy, holy,” the Alpha and Omega, maintain his God-ness while cooking dinner?
The God who loves to serve
The very fact that it feels like paradox is evidence that we haven’t yet aligned our view of God with who he truly is. Who are we to say that it’s not God-like to get your hands dirty and to serve your creation? My friends, we serve a God who loves to serve and, I would argue, gains the most glory for himself when he does serve.
This isn’t an isolated idea in one parable in Luke’s Gospel. It goes all the way back to Genesis, when God literally gets his hands dirty creating Adam and then chooses to serve and meet Adam’s need for companionship by creating Eve. Millenia later Jesus, the one who accurately imaged God where Adam failed, said of himself, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45) God-in-flesh came to serve.
We are so stuck in our worldly thinking, assuming that for God to be Holy and deific he needs to be distant and above it all – especially above serving his subjects. But, my friends, behold the strange beauty of the reality that in God’s mind, “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10:43)
God, displayed in the face of Jesus, the greatest among us, becomes the servant of all. His love, as all true love is wont to do, makes it a joyful and glorious thing to serve those he loves. God loves to serve.
The God who loves to serve you
Let’s set aside anything that causes us to imagine our God as distant, cold, and uncaring in his holiness. Let’s set aside the thoughts of a creator who demands perfection and crushes those who don’t meet the standard. The God portrayed in Jesus is warm, close, and tender while simultaneously fiercely adamant about God’s laws. He can say that not one dot of the Law will pass away and then moments or days later break those laws by going out of his way to touch an unclean leper and, then not separate himself from the community for the allotted cleansing period.
The reality is this; we have a God who loves to serve his people. He delights to answer our prayers and fulfill our desires. He wants to care for you like a good Father wants to care and provide for his favorite children.
Love and serve in response
Luther lays out the only reasonable response to this kind of God when he writes,
From a Treatise on Christian Liberty, found in The Collected Works of Martin Luther.
“such a Father, then, who has overwhelmed me with these inestimable riches of His, why should I not freely, cheerfully, and with my whole heart, and from voluntary zeal, do all that I know will be pleasing to Him and acceptable in His sight? I will therefore give myself as a sort of Christ, to my neighbour, as Christ has given Himself to me; and will do nothing in this life except what I see will be needful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neighbour, since by faith I abound in all good things in Christ. Thus from faith flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a cheerful, willing, free spirit, disposed to serve our neighbour voluntarily, without taking any account of gratitude or ingratitude, praise or blame, gain or loss.”
Love begets love. Service begets serving. When we truly grasp the delight that the Father, Son, and Spirit have in serving us their children the only (super)natural response will be to love and serve God and those around us, obeying the great commandment to love the Lord and our neighbor, thus fulfilling all the law.
Are you struggling with some besetting sin or old pattern of thought that you can’t seem to kick? Have you been striving for months to deal with some issue in your soul? Stop trying and start letting God serve you. Receive from Him what he delights to give and watch as that receiving starts transforming what you do with your day-to-day life.
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