This Is WhyShembull

WHY SHOULD I SERVE? No child (especially babies) ever wakes up in the morning and thinks, "I'm really going to think about my parents and their needs before my own today. I'll ask them what they need help with, consider their feelings, and try to honor them as much as possible." As much as we'd love that to be the case, it takes years of training, maturing, and learning to become the type of person who puts other first. Now, we can justify it a little when the child is between the ages of 0-13. Once kids get older than that, we begin to expect more from them. The same is often true for us spiritually - at first, we're primarily interested in "feeding ourselves." As we grow, (hopefully) we begin to consider what Christ has done for us and start to think about how we can offer our lives to Him more and more. Unfortunately, our culture is saturated with Christian newborns, roaming from church to church, "shopping" for what's best for them. The problem with this is that the mentality is that church is all about what I can get. Instead, as our Bible verses for today will show, when we meet Christ we become increasingly aware that our life is not our own. With that in mind, we realize that God's grace for us is so incredible that we can't help but begin to offer our lives to Christ so that He can continue to reach others. We realize that we only met Jesus because someone else was willing to be used by God without the ulterior motive that God would do something for them. We serve because we love the lost. We love the lost because He first loved us. By serving in our local church, we're declaring our love and submission to Christ and doing everything short of sin to make God's love known to those who are far from Him. This is why we serve. [Illustrations included in this devotional are not visible in this view. Illustrations are only supported in the Bible App for IOS, Android, and at Bible.com]