Because it can Deepen our Walks with Christ

You have an assignment. Go down to the DeVos Recreation Center. Make sure to take a few friends with you. Go to one of the weightrooms. Find an empty bench for bench pressing. Take all of the weights off of the bar. Now, find the big round weights that are marked 45 pounds. Put 3 of these weights on each side of the bar. Counting the weight of the bar, you now have 315 pounds on the bar. Lie down and try to bench press this. Make sure you have a few spotters!

For most of us, this would be absolutely absurd! The idea of trying to bench press 315 pounds without any preparation would be idiotic. We should have been training to bench press this kind of weight long before we actually tried to. But, how many of us approach our spiritual lives this way? We're trying like crazy to be like Jesus, but we've never trained to be like Him (Ortberg, 2002). One of the ways we can train to be like Jesus is through the spiritual disciplines.

Think about when Jesus asked the disciples about who they thought he was. Peter confessed that he was the Son of God. Jesus foretells his suffering, and Peter bellowed that these things would never happen. Jesus rebukes Peter and then lets the disciples know what it will take to truly follow him. In Luke 9:23, Jesus tells them, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."

The spiritual disciplines are things we can do to follow Christ with purpose, and, as the name implies, discipline. The disciplines help us focus our attention away from ourselves and on the presence of God so the Holy Spirit can transform us. The disciplines themselves don't transform us; the Holy Spirit does.

Service is one of the disciplines (Foster, 1998). When we engage in service as a spiritual discipline, we can be transformed. But, our approach is critical. Anybody can serve. In fact, you can put this book down right now and go pick up trash around Wal-Mart for two hours. Come back, pick up your book, and nothing's changed about you because it was just a fulfillment of some requirement. On the other hand, imagine that you approach your trip to Wal-Mart as an opportunity to serve the community, to get attention away from yourself, and to be a good steward of the environment. As you work, you think about what you're doing and why, and when you're through, you talk with God about why it was important. The crux of the matter is your approach, attitude, and motives.

Dallas Willard (1988) reflected on this point by contrasting simply doing service with doing it as a spiritual discipline. When discussing service as a spiritual discipline, he wrote, "But I may also serve another to train myself away from arrogance, possessiveness, envy, resentment, or covetousness. In that case, my service is undertaken as a discipline for the spiritual life" (p. 182). Notice how he used the word train!

Obviously, there will be times when service is difficult, but we must stay the course of training to be like Christ. Perhaps Brennan Manning (2003) captured this idea best: "Servanthood is not an emotion or mood or feeling; it's a decision to live the life of Jesus. It has nothing to do with what we feel; it has everything to do with what we do-humble service" (p. 29).

The next time you approach a service project ask yourself this question: Am I doing this because I have to or because I get to? Perhaps tweaking your attitude and checking your motives will help you engage in service as a spiritual discipline with the goal of becoming more like Christ.

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