What fuels you?
We are all fueled by something but not everything that fuels us is healthy. Common sense will tell you-you can pull energy from foods that are actually dangerous for you but they leave with a short & painful quality of life.
This is so key as it pertains to our service to God…and as you will find, serving God also means serving people.
Some people serve for political reasons, some serve to control, some serve to prove to something to someone else. These things will fuel energy to serve but none of them are good for you. If anger is your fuel, if pride is your fuel, you will always need to be angry to serve, you always need to retain your pride to serve (I mean arrogance).
But there is another fuel, it’s good for you, and accomplishes more than any other fuel, but you gotta go in the opposite direction as the culture.
It’s called gratitude.
This means, being genuinely grateful for what you have. It means shutting down that auto-pilot habit of focusing on what you DON’T have and PURPOSING to focus on what you do have. I purposely remind myself of things I DO HAVE going for me and then thank God for them.
This focus makes serving easier. It makes me WANT to serve and ultimately do what is right. After all that God has done, it’s the very least that I could do.
1 Peter 4:9-11 Modern English Version (MEV)
9 Show hospitality to one another without complaining. 10 As everyone has received a gift, even so serve one another with it, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. 11 If anyone speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God. If anyone serves, let him serve with the strength that God supplies, so that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion forever and ever. Amen.