This last Saturday night we had all the guys from youth group crash over at the church office. It was a time to play games and fellowship and to seek the Lord. And it was fun. The topic came up about love and how in our western culture we love through convenience only. If you scratch my back, then I will scratch yours. Yet the Lord was not that way. He loved us with the right kind of love. The love that he had for us was an inconvenient. Love is an action, it’s a verb and it is inconvenient. Jesus had to go out of his way to show us what this was. He left heaven and became a man and then he went out of his way and inconvenienced himself to pour himself into other people.
So the question came up. When was the last time I inconvenienced myself for another person. And as I thought about it, I kept coming back to the whole you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. Every time I have blessed someone, it has been because they blessed me. It has been convenient. And the Lord rebuked people like that in the book of Luke. He said that sinners do good to those who do good to them, but where is their reward? They have it in full.
How I want to be a man who would love in the same manner that Jesus did. I want to be a man who would inconvenience myself for others. I want to be a man who would show love by my actions and not just by my words. Words alone are so meaningless.
And this is a struggle for me, because though I do want to be that person; the one who inconveniences himself for others, at the same time, I don’t want to be inconvenienced at all. So now what? How do I become someone I am not when I don’t want to do the work that it takes to become that person?
For starters I can ask the Lord to burden my heart. What that means is that he will give me this burden for others. When the Lord places a burden on me; what that does is that it causes me to no longer be content serving myself only. I will have a burden; a weight on my shoulders that will tell me that I must do more. And once I have that weight there it can only be relieved by inconveniencing myself by serving the Lord through serving others.
After the Lord gives me this burden, I have to then make the choice to inconvenience myself. And what that means is that I have to choose to do things that I wont want to do. If I want to do it that is great, but if I don’t then it’s inconvenient and I have to choose to obey the Lord and do what I know is right. And that is the hard part. If I were not so selfish, this would be easier but the truth is that I am totally selfish and I want to be served. But this is not the road that the Lord has chosen for those who love him. He wants his kids to serve and therefore I must surrender all that I am to him so that I can fulfill this call that he has upon my life. This is the destiny of a child who belongs to the Lord. He must serve and that is inconvenient. But ultimately it is worth it. For when we do these things it will give the Lord opportunity to reach those who we are serving in a practical way.
So please pray for me. Pray that I would be a man who willingly inconveniences himself for others. I want to hear the words when I die and enter into the Lords rest, “Good job my faithful servant, enter into the rest of your Lord!”
