Tell me please about how and why we are to serve? What is the Lord’s purpose to be accomplished?
I was thrilled to read of your desire to “serve the Lord” and I trust the scriptures we look at will help to answer your excellent questions. I believe the moment we are saved there will be this “desire to serve.” You may recall that when the Apostle Paul was saved (he was called “Saul” then) on the Damascus Road his first response to the Lord was, “Lord, what do You want me to do?” These simple words expressed his desire to serve the Lord in whatever way the Lord wanted him to. Some have said, “We are SAVED TO SERVE” and that is surely true. Before we were saved, we were “slaves to sin” and we served our master well. But having been saved we have a New Life (Eternal Life) and our desires are completely changed. We desire to obey our new Master (God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ) by living a righteous life. We see this truth brought out in Romans 6:16-18, 22: “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves servants to obey, you are that one’s servant whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? But God be thanked that though you were servants of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became servants of righteousness….But now having been set free from sin, and having become servants to God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life.”
So, we have just seen that the believer in Christ is a SERVANT. Now let’s see HOW and WHY we serve, and then we’ll see WHAT the Lord’s purpose is in our service. As to HOW we serve, the answer lies in the fact that Christ has given us the ABILITY to serve Him by “giving us spiritual gifts.” We see this in Ephesians 4:7, “But to EACH ONE OF US grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” Paul is speaking in this chapter of the truth that each believer is a member of the body of Christ (you can read about this further in Ephesians 2:14-18; 3:1-7 and 4:1-4). The gift each believer has will enable him/her to serve Him in whatever service He leads us into. I often hear young believers ask, “How can I know what my gift is?” I usually reply, “If you will simply ask the Lord (as Saul did on the Damascus Road), ‘What will you have me to do?’ He will manifest various needs that people have and then He will give you the grace (through the gift He has given you) to help meet those needs. This is HOW we will know our gift and this is HOW we will serve Him. I would only add here that it will be done in the POWER of the Holy Spirit as well (see Acts 1:8).
As to WHY we serve Him, we serve Him because He loves us and has given His life for us on the cross. He “served us unto death” and now we are privileged to “serve Him until we die” (or until He comes to Rapture the church to glory). The Apostle Paul expressed this blessed truth in 2nd Corinthians 5:14-15, “For the LOVE OF CHRIST CONSTRAINETH US; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again” (KJV). His LOVE is the reason WHY we serve Him and the more deeply we drink in His love for us, the more we will want to serve Him! The Apostle Paul put it this way in Galatians 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, WHO LOVED ME, AND GAVE HIMSELF FOR ME.”
The PURPOSE for serving Him is linked with what we just saw, for God’s purpose in our service is to GLORIFY HIM! He wants people to see “Christ in us,” which includes them seeing “His LOVE in us.” This brings glory to His blessed Name. But there is another purpose for serving Him, and that is to be a BLESSING to others. We should desire to serve Him by preaching the gospel to lost sinners so they can be saved (see Mark 16:15-16; Romans 1:16; and 1st Corinthians 1:17-18). And we should desire to serve Him so fellow-believers (members of the body of Christ) can “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” (2nd Peter 3:16). As each member of the body is “built up on their most holy faith” (see Jude 20), it will result in “the EDIFYING of the body of Christ” (Ephesians 6:12). In other words, as each member is growing spiritually and serving the Lord as He directs them, the whole body will “GROW UP in all things into Him who is the head—Christ” (verse 15). These are God’s PURPOSES in our service for Him. (DO) (545.5)