For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.
Mark 10:45
So long as we think of ourselves and of what is due to us from others, it will be impossible for us to minister to very many people. But where true Christian love reigns in the heart, the centre of life falls no longer inside the narrow circle of self.
Those who carefully study our Lord's life will be struck with His wonderful reverence for human life. He looks upon no one with disdain or contempt. The meanest fragment of humanity that crept into His presence, trampled, torn, stained, defiled was yet sacred in His eyes. He never despised any human being. And, further, He stood before men, not as a king, demanding attention, reverence, service, but as one who wished to serve, to help, to lift up. He said He had not come to be ministered unto, but to minister. He never thought of what was due from men to Him, but always of what He could do for them, how He could serve them.
How could it be otherwise, since He came to earth solely to save men, and since His heart was so full of love for them? Whenever a human being stood before Him, He saw one in whose heart were sorrows which needed sympathy, or one bruised by sin needing healing and restoration. Thus He was easily able to serve all. The more repulsive the life that stood before Him, the more deeply, in one sense, did it appeal to His love, because it needed His help all the more on account of its repulsiveness.
There was not one whom He thought it a degradation to serve. When the disciples were quarrelling as to which one should take the servant's place and wash the feet of others, He quietly arose and peformed the humble service. He was never more conscious of His exalted glory than He was that hour, and yet there was no reluctance in His heart. The question of their immeasurable inferiority to Him never rose in His mind. . . . When we have learned to look upon human lives as He did, it will be no painful task to minister, at whatever cost, to the lowliest and most unworthy about us.
We are willing enough to serve those whom we honour. But we are apt to hold our lives as too sacred to be spent or sacrificed for the sake of those whom we regard as beneath ourselves. . . . When we learn to measure others, not by their rank and station, but by the worth of their spiritual nature, by their immortality, by the possibilities that lie in the most ruined life, it will be no longer humiliating for us to do even the humblest service for the least of God's creatures. Then there will be nothing in us that will seem too rich or too sacred to be poured out for the sake even of the most despised. We may honour ourselves and may be conscious of all the power and dignity of our lives as God's children, and yet not think ourselves too good to minister to the smallest and the least.
We must not think of ourselves as deserving attention from others. We are not in this world to be made much of, or to be waited upon and served. . . . Rather, we are to regard ourselves as the servants of others for Jesus sake. We are to put ourselves before men as our Master did, not asking what benefit or help we can get from them, but what we can do for them. . . . Instead of being repelled by men's moral repulsiveness, our pity is stirred and our hearts go out in deep, loving longing to heal and to bless them. Instead of being offended by men's rudeness and unkindness, we bear patiently with their faults, hoping to do them good. Nothing that they may do to us turns our love to hate. We continue to seek their interest despite their slights, insults and cruelties. We are glad to spend and be spent for others even though the more abundantly we love them the less they love us. . . .
We cannot love them as we do our friends. We cannot approve their faults or commend their immoralities or make black white. We cannot make ourselves think their characters beautiful when they are full of repulsiveness, or their conduct right when it is manifestly wrong. Love plays no such tricks with our moral perceptions. It does not hoodwink us or make us colour blind. It does not make us tolerant of sin or indifferent to men's blemishes. Christ never lowered, by so much as a hair's breadth, the perfect standard of holiness by which He measured all men and all life. Nor must we. . . . We are not to look upon any sin leniently or apologetically, and yet we are to love the sinner, to pity him and have compassion upon him, and instead of turning away from him in horror and self-righteous pride we are to seek by every means to lift him up and save him.
Under all the ruin of his sin is the shattered beauty of the divine image which the gentle fingers of love may repair and restore.
Dr J R Miller, Week-Day Religion, 1897
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