Serving God, serving people or serving self -- Day 5 of 50

Every one being brought up with different background and one's own story. Our life may sharp our world view, and the way we interpret the Bible. Mission and calling is from the Bible, and yet we have to be careful about what we are doing or serving, even if we consider serving is our primary calling and mission.

How do we serve? I think we can serve though our profession, through our volunteer work in the community, ministry in the church.

I think before the question of how to serve, I think it is important to know what do we serve and why do we serve. And it is also very important to figure out the priorities in the lists that we serve. It would be great if we can get principle from the Bible to answer these questions.

Why do we serve?

I think it is important to have the motivation of love or motivation of God.

During the process of our services, I fear that we are intentionally or unintentionally led astray to serve ourselves, serve the people without the love of God, rather than serve God himself. How can we serve the invisible God? I think we can serve God through serve the people, but we can also serve the people or ourselves with merely the name of serving God and without God’s heart.

Are we serving because of fear or love? We can serve because we are afraid of the voters, of the congregations, of the leaders, of God. Can the fear of God be a kind of motivation? I think yes, but I think the fear of God can be a kind of motivation for us not doing something rather than doing something? I fear that fear someone other than God as our motivation can be problematic. I prefer not to say that fear of God is a motivation, but a kind of status of a godly Christian, but what motivates us to serve is the love of God, so that we can love the people and serve the people.

Whom do we serve?

One of my concerns of promoting crowd sourcing is that the crowd would be the decision maker together through collaboration. If the crowd is not godly but powerful, I fear that it will cause more destruction rather than construction. Please pray that while postmodern reality and context can confuse people, God will keep the next generation to read the Bible and understand it carefully and apply it in some relevant ways to glorify God.

I think the methodology and strategy is relatively less important. I hope I can commit more time to pray for the next generation and I will be able to spend more time to study and understand better God's word and hopefully I can pass that on. Sometime it is very scary to serve as Bible translation consultant for quality control and approve the publication. May the Lord have mercy to me and show me the way.