Cycling Grace

In an endless cycle of grace He gives us gifts to serve the world. This is how to make a life great and eucharisteo embarks us on the path: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave” (Matthew 20:26 – 27).

Outside my window, the whole of creation chooses just this. The leaves of the maple tree freely unfurl oxygen, clouds overhead grow pregnant with rain to bless, the soil of our fields offer up yield. All His created world throbs with the joy in eucharisteo: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

This is the way Jesus Himself chose. “That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not be served — and then to give away his life in exchange for the many who are held hostage” (Matthew 20:28 MSG).

It’s the astonishing truth that while I serve Christ, it is He who serves me. Jesus Christ still lives with a towel around His waist, bent in service to His people … in service to me as I serve, that I need never serve in my own strength. Jesus Christ, who came into this world “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), will one day come again and “put on an apron, and serve them as they sit and eat!” (Luke 12:37 NLT), and even this very day He faithfully serves that we might say, “The Lord is my helper” (Hebrews 13:6).

Every day for a month we as a family read together Isaiah 58, and we can’t get over it and we come to know it in the marrow and the fiber:

It’s the fundamental, lavish, radical nature of the upside-down economy of God.

Empty to fill.

While the Deceiver jockeys to dupe us into thinking otherwise, we who are made in the image of God, being formed into Christ’s likeness, our happiness comes too, not in the having, but in the handing over. Give your life away in exchange for many lives, give away your blessings to multiply blessings, give away so that many might increase — and do it all for the love of God. I can bless, pour out, be broken and given in our home and the larger world and never fear that there won’t be enough to give.

Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God.

He has no end. He calls us to serve, and it is Him whom we serve, but He, very God, kneels down to serve us as we serve. The servant-hearted never serve alone. Spend the whole of your one wild and beautiful life investing in many lives, and God simply will not be outdone.

God extravagantly pays back everything we give away and exactly in the currency that is not of this world but of the one we yearn for: joy in Him.

Father God, the glorious God from whom and through whom and to whom are all things, You reign and You rain down blessings, that my life may become a blessing. Lord God, please — pour me out in this place, my life used up in Your endless cycle of grace.