Operation Serve

So I broke into a house for the first time ever (see picture above)! And I did it in the middle of the day wearing a bright orange Grace shirt.

Well, I didn’t exactly break in. I was trying to close that window so that I could bleach the siding on this family’s house. I did this as a part of Operation Serve, a day where our church served the Montgomery County community.

It was such an amazing day. I was a project leader for one of our neighborhood projects, and we cleaned the siding, replaced the floor, tub surround, toilet, and vanity of the bathroom, rewired lots of appliances, cleaned gutters out, landscaped, and put in two new doors…all in the name of Christ! My project was one of 14 neighborhood houses where similar work was done. There were 23 projects that went on outside of the neighborhood “extreme makeover”. These projects comprised various activities, such as landscaping, building wheelchair ramps, ministering to folks in the nursing home, “random acts of kindness,” a block party, delivering flowers, …all in the name of Christ! Why would we do something like this? Because Christ has served us and commanded us, in His Word, to serve others.

Christ did not come on this earth to be served, but to serve (Matthew 20:28). The disciples got a great picture of this when Jesus washed their feet. He had come to be their servant. “This majestic person from whom they have now come to expect the unexpected has finally gone too far…the act of feetwashing was the proper duty of only a slave.” (S. E. Schnaiter, “Leadership Preparation: Theme of a Paragraph, John 13:1-20,” Biblical Viewpoint, (November 2000): 16.) Yet Jesus explains that this act of service represents a deeper reality that he will serve them by dying on the cross in their place. “But I am among you as one who serves.” (Luke 22:27) As Christ has served us, dying in our place on the cross, we are called to serve others.

Why does the task of evangelism have to be relegated to sharing a few Scripture verses from Romans, accompanied by an impersonal tract that simplistically explains the gospel? Jesus didn’t just seek to meet people’s spiritual needs. Take, for example, the story of the 4 friends bringing the paralytic to Jesus in Mark 2:1-12. Did Jesus just forgive the man of his sins and neglect his physical problems? No. He forgave the sins, then healed the man’s paralysis. He met both the physical and spiritual needs of this man. How about the feeding of the 5,000 in Mark 6:30-44? If Jesus didn’t care about us working hard to meet physical needs, would he have cared about the hunger of these people?

At Operation Serve, we served our community with no strings attached. We gave, expecting nothing in return. When we serve in that way, we are acting like Christ.