To Love And To Serve

When I was in the first grade, a very long time ago, and started to learn about God, the book the teacher used had a lot of questions and answers about God that we were expected to memorize. Even now, decades later, I remember the first two questions and the answers:

Who made you?
God made me.

Why did God make you?
To love and serve Him in this life, and be with Him for eternity in the next.

The concept of eternity may have been a bit difficult to fully comprehend, for some of us it felt like eternity was how long it took to get to the weekend so we could play with our friends. It was, at best, a hazy concept, that “forever and ever” idea that someday we would understand.

It was the whole idea of loving and serving someone or some being that we could not see or sense, whom we would never see or feel in an ordinary, human way that was a bit difficult to comprehend. Like all kids that age, we just took it on faith that God existed and we had to love and obey Him like we did our parents. We knew the teacher knew everything and so we just took a blind leap of faith. Being children, that was easy.

Many years and decades have rolled by since that first-grade innocence, and some of those classmates have certainly gotten to fulfill the last half of the second answer. The others, I am sure, have gone the ways of the different results of the seeds that were thrown out in that well-known parable. Most, I am sure, are still loving and serving Him in some capacity or other. Some have gone into different ministries, became business people, teachers, joined the military, became husbands, wives, parents. It is how we did all of those different vocations that reveals to the world and ourselves just how we have loved and served Him who made us.

How do you love an all-powerful, all-loving Being? And how do you serve Him? The simple answer is by following the rules He has laid out for us. The bible is that guidebook, the one He created through the divine inspiration of those who wrote the words down for the rest of us to read. It is an operational guideline, a step-by-step set of instructions by which we are to govern our lives. The marvelous gift that He has given us is the total freedom to choose how we do that, or even whether we do. Our choice to follow His living words is the outward and inward expression of our love for Him, unconditional and all-accepting.

The second half of the second answer is our reward. It tells us up front that God created us to spend eternity with Him in Heaven, that we were designed from the very beginning to do exactly that. The neat thing is that He gave us the promise of that reward up front. We don’t have to earn it, it is already ours. There is, of course, a choice, that issue of Free Will, the other wonderful gift He gave us. We can choose to turn Him down, we can choose to go the other direction and spend eternity with God’s antithesis, the Devil. The Devil is always looking for new recruits to populate his kingdom. One theologian I heard said that God does not send us to Hell, we choose to go there. We choose to go by turning our back on God, on His ultimate mercy and forgiveness, and telling Him that we don’t want any part of what He is offering us. We do that through sin and rejecting God’s forgiveness. It doesn't matter how big or serious our sins may be, or whether or not we feel we are worthy of God’s forgiveness, God is still bigger and more forgiving of any sin we can commit. His forgiveness is universal, it is already there. It is up to us to accept or reject God and everything He has given us, promised us. We don’t know for certain if anyone has ultimately rejected God, after all He is open to last minute appeals and changes of heart. We only know that God created us to be with Him and not with His sworn enemy.

There is a statement you can read on plaques, signs and bumper stickers that says, “As for me and our house, we serve the Lord.” The price we pay is not a price, but a joyfully performed duty, one of obedience and submission to His will. The reward is greater, more unfathomably wonderful than anything we can imagine. It all comes down to simple math: Love + Service = Eternity with God. How can you go wrong with that?