Revisiting the Love Cycle

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.—Galatians 5:13

I don’t know about you, but I have less of a problem with the serving part of this command and more of a problem with the being served.  

I think that our ability to graciously accept service from other believers—true, God-love-motivated service—is just as much a sign of our spiritual health as being able to serve others in a godly way. This is a realization I’ve continually had throughout my close walk with Christ, but for some reason I keep forgetting about it. (Sheep’s memory.)

I think that if we are able to be served, our perspective about ourselves and God is right….and if we aren’t…we may be thinking as the world thinks.

A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog about the love cycle: realizing and walking in the realization of God’s love for us, and thereby being enabled to love others. I want to add another element to that realization. It’s just like God to add more and more layers, just when we think we understand something. He’s like an eternal layer cake of love that goes on forever.

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.—Philippians 2:1-3

You’re thinking: “Yes, Paul, of course! We should serve others as more important than ourselves and avoid all this rivalry business.” These instructions may seem silly because the idea behind them is so obvious. But it’s amazing how often pride (ie: the opposite of humility) can creep into our service.

The world tells us that everything is a competition. Watch less than five minutes of any television show (and especially the commercials), and you will see an explosion of egos gone wild. Every message we hear tells us that we should distinguish ourselves—that we should look better, think better, act better, dress better, run better, eat better, even sleep better than our peers. And it’s not just America. It happens everywhere. Even in the most ancient societies, people fought and killed each other over who got to be king of the village.

I think that’s called “rivalry,” with more than a pinch of “conceit” thrown in. Mmm…pride soup. (Not an eternal layer cake of love.)

That’s the world’s mindset, manifested in an endless plethora of ways. It tells us we should count ourselves better than others. We must outdo everyone. The message slips in when we least expect it.  And we least expect it in Christian service.

I like to be the leader; I like to be in control; I like to pride myself on how much I serve. I also like to serve my friends more than they serve me—to get ahead of them in acts of service. I mean, most of the time, I am not consciously thinking about this. However, in the drawer in my mind where all of crazy American cultural ideas are stored (along with some discarded habits and a few forgotten grudges), I keep the “tit-for-tat” mentality. Service is a debt; if someone serves me, I must repay them. And, if possible, I want to be in the black—I want to have done more acts of service for my brother or sister than her or she has done for me.

This is the world’s mentality, and it must be broken.

Notice that Paul does not instruct the Philippians to “be of one heart.” He tells them to “be of one mind,” and that’s how they will complete his joy. The mind is where perspectives—wrong and right—dwell and battle it out. Humility—understanding who you are in relation to God, and then in relation to others—is a mindset.

Paul is urging the believers in community in Philippi to all count each other more important than themselves. We tend to forget that this passage was addressed to an entire community. If the whole community is counting others more worthy than themselves and serving like crazy, then who are they serving? Each other, of course. That means, at different times, some people are serving, and some are receiving service. Someone has to be receiving service at some point. (It’s really hard to wash someone’s feet while they are washing someone else’s feet.)

You can imagine how crazy this would get if everyone were keeping tabs. “Well, last week Susie washed my feet, so I have to wash her feet this week…but dang it, Johnny washed her feet today! Shoot, I’ll just have to invite her over to dinner and count it even.” If hundreds of people were doing this (millions, in the entire body of Christ), it would get pretty confusing pretty fast. Not to mention the fact that all of these people would be operating separately, keeping their own tally of what’s happened, as if all of their service belonged to them in the first place.

Jesus said, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” (Luke 14:12-14)

It’s easy to say, “Sure, Jesus—I can give all my money to the poor who can’t repay me. I can feed the homeless. I can run the food pantry.” Those things are wonderful, and we should do them. Physical needs being met for those who can’t repay—that’s mercy. But it’s harder to admit that, when we enter into the body of believers, we have to sometimes become those who can’t repay.

After all, a leg without an eyeball is blind; an arm without a leg is crippled. Within the body of Christ, the love that we exercise in service toward one another isn’t our own. It—along with we ourselves, by the way—belongs to God. We cannot do His magnificent works without His power. And we pretty much never can do anything great or important or powerful for His kingdom without each other. It’s the way things are.

I got to thinking about this because I have had to accept a lot of service over the past six months. I have had friends and relatives offer me shelter, food, clothing—you name it. They have literally met my physical needs. All of my friends serve at church, and they serve me in so many ways on a daily basis. I have also had to accept the service of nearly 100 volunteers who work with me to get my job done. All of these things have been things I haven’t been able to pay back, yet, in my worldly mentality, I have attempted to pay them back anyway.

Some of my service and gifts to other believers has been because I genuinely want to serve them. But these pure motives often get mixed up with my pride, which makes me want to ensure that the service tab has been paid, or to make people admire my service. Then I become uncertain of the reasons for anything I do.

I thought to myself, “Maybe this is just a season when I need to relax and be served.”

But no, that’s not the case; I am actually serving at church and at work now more than I ever have before—like, an insane amount. Then I realized: when other people serve me—feeding me, keeping me warm, helping me relax—they are enabling me to serve others. It’s that simple.

We need to serve one another, because how can we go into the world and do the hard work of serving the lost if we don’t have someone feed and clothe us and offer us refuge? Missional living is something you cannot do alone. You don’t just strike out, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and get to work. Missional living is not the American way—and neither is Christian community.

Within the body of Christ, the love cycle isn’t this: you serve your friend, she serves you back the next day, and we call it even. The love cycle is me serving you; you serving the next person; them serving the next person, until the whole body “builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16), and it’s always even, because we’re all part of the same body, and we all benefit, because we belong to one another. When I serve you, I am serving myself, too; when I accept service from you, I am serving you by allowing you to serve. Real humility comes when we realize that service--giving it and receiving it--is not about us at all, but about the entire body.

Let that blow your mind for a second.

Love God, love your brothers, Jesus and the gospel-writers say repeatedly. They also mean, Be dependent on God, and be dependent on each other. The world would say that’s unhealthy.

But, as we’ve already established, the world’s mentality is unhealthy. (Watch MTV for a few minutes if you don’t believe me.)

Paul continues speaking of a healthy mindset in Philippians:

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (chap. 2, v. 4-8)

We have the mind of Christ. We are members of His body, after all. He is the head that joins us all together (Colossians 1:18).

So if you are having trouble with this accepting-service thing, an immediate and temporary cure would be to go watch TV and make yourself sick on the world’s mentality. But what you should really do is press into the head of the body, Jesus Christ—the one who served even to the point of death on a cross because He knew that it would lead to the joy of being able to call you home, into His body, where you belong.