Passionate Service

Passionate service involves serving with excellence. Again, I have been around these firefighters enough to know that they joke around a lot. They have a good time together, but when they are on, the professionalism goes way up. There is no room for sloppiness when you are going to a fire. There is no room for lateness. When the alarm goes off, someone can’t sit back and say I’ll be there in about 20-25 minutes. I have to go check my mail. No, they never allow that. They don’t allow sloppy behavior. They don’t allow anything sloppy to happen at the scene of the fire because, at a minimum, it’s going to disrupt the teamwork. At a maximum, there is the possibility that somebody may die. They absolutely have to serve with excellence. I have seen enough to know that is what they do. So if firefighters are called to serve with excellence, why would Christians not be called to serve with excellence. I have said before, something about serving in a church or serving in a community, sometimes we lower our standards. I know a lot of you are professionals and you have great jobs out there. When you are at work, you are on and you’re a professional. But somehow, when you get to the church or you get into a service project, you lower your standards. You show up late for a practice session. You are assigned to work in the nursery or downstairs or anywhere and you say I can’t make it today; they’ll do fine without me. Or it doesn’t matter if you’re 20 minutes late and there is a line waiting out there when you get there. That is not service with excellence. That is mediocre service. It’s not anywhere near passionate service. We are called for passionate service. We are called to excellence. We are called to service excellence not simply to impress people to do a job, but we are called to excellent service because we know who ultimately we serve. The last passage I want to look at comes out of the later part of Ephesians. Ephesians 6:7 says “Serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord, not men.” See our service is motivated by love, but it also means that we perform our service because we know ultimately who we serve. We serve the one who created us. We serve the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is who we serve and so we should serve with excellence. When we begin to serve with excellence what happens is the light of the One who created us, the Excellent One, comes down through us, and we begin to shed God’s light and God’s glory out into the community. That is what is happening in excellent service. As I close, as I think about these firefighters, as I recap why I believe that they demonstrate passionate service, think about it. Think about the fact that they are willing to serve. They are not forced into the situation. Think about the fact that they know their skillset. They know that they are gifted in what they do, but they don’t want to stop there. They know that they have to continue to develop themselves, continue to equip themselves to be better at what they do. So when that call comes in, they don’t just sit back, they go forward because they know that ultimately their call is to respond. They respond. They also know that when they do respond when they do their job that there is a risk that they may be burned. There is a risk that they may even die, but they don’t care because all they care about is doing what they have been called to do and doing it with excellence.