Service, Faith, and the Freedom of God
A Reflection on the point of service in the Christian life
Several years ago, I sat across the table from a retired priest who told me something that startled me. He said, “When I was young in my vocation, I had little time and great desire to pray. Now that I am retired, I have plenty of time and little desire.” I don’t know if he meant it as a confession, a lament, or simply an observation, but I’ve never forgotten it. It shook me, because I realized in that moment: I don’t want the last act of my life’s drama to be marked by weariness or jadedness, as though I had exhausted myself in acts of service without ever learning to truly rest in God. I don’t want to pour myself out for years in a frenzy of activity, only to discover that my faith was built more on self-will than on the Spirit.
That conversation changed me. It pushed me to ask hard questions about the nature of service. Why do we serve? For whom do we serve? And what does service actually do to us?
St. Paul, in Romans, says that “you are slaves to the one you obey” (Romans 6:16). That’s not exactly a slogan you’d put on a bumper sticker, but he’s making an important point: service always has an object. You can be in service to God, or you can be in service to something else—your ego, your reputation, even your desire to be seen as “good.” Jesus himself tells the parable of The Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel because he wanted us to see this precise point. The priest and the Levite who pass the dying man on the side of the road are in fact serving! They did not withhold service to God. They are just not serving from a place of faith, but a place of external justification (purity, undefilement, and outward obedience to the law). Jesus’ hailing of the Samaritan outcast as the one who showed mercy, is an invitation to grounding service in love of God and neighbor woven together (Luke 10:25–37). Service, when offered rightly, is not a performance for God’s approval but a participation in God’s life.
And that’s where things get tricky, because we live in a culture that is all too ready to make service about self-improvement or resume-building. Volunteer hours for college applications, community service for public recognition, even church service as a way of feeling more virtuous. Service becomes a tool to polish the image we project to the world. But the Christian story reminds us that service is not meant to be transactional. It’s not about how we look or even how we feel. It’s about emptying ourselves so God can fill us.
Paul again says it best when he writes to the Philippians that Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). If service is meant to look like Jesus, then it is less about racking up good deeds and more about letting go—making room for the Spirit to work in us. True service is not distraction from the hard things in life, and it is certainly not absolution by our own effort. It is an act of trust: offering ourselves as we are, so that God’s grace can do the real work.
This is why worship and service are bound together. The dismissal at the end of the Eucharist—“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”—is not about putting our Sunday religion into weekday practice by sheer willpower. It’s about continuity. Just as Christ comes to us in bread and wine, so Christ is revealed through us when we carry his image into the world. Service is sacramental in that way. It is a visible sign of God’s invisible grace at work in us.
Now, does that mean service will always feel holy or easy? Not at all. Sometimes service looks like digging through a church closet for the twentieth time looking for the extension cords, or sitting through a long committee meeting, or bringing someone a meal when you’re already exhausted. But here’s the thing: holiness is rarely glamorous. Most of the time, it looks ordinary. And yet, as Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones…truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:42). The point isn’t the scale of the act but the heart behind it.
That retired priest’s words have stayed with me because they highlight the danger of service disconnected from prayer. If our service is only about our effort, then eventually it runs dry. But if our service is prayerful—if it is an extension of worship, a movement of the Spirit—then it becomes life-giving, both to us and to those we serve.
So the question isn’t whether we serve, but who we serve, and why. If we serve for applause, for control, or even for self-justification, then we’ll end up burned out and empty. But if we serve as those who have been filled first by God’s love, then service becomes freedom. It becomes a way to know God more deeply, to see God alive in our neighbor, and to recognize God at work in our own lives.
At Christ Episcopal Church, that is our hope and our calling—that our service flows not from exhaustion but from joy, not from self-will but from the Spirit, not from a need to prove ourselves but from a desire to reveal Christ alive among us. Our service to one another, to our community, and to the world is not about polishing our image but about deepening our relationship with the living God.
And maybe that’s the invitation I hope we all hear: if we can hold onto this truth—if we can remember that service is not how we prove ourselves but how we open ourselves to God’s work—then maybe, just maybe, we won’t end our days burned out or jaded, weary of prayer. Instead, we may end them still hungry for grace, still desiring more of God, still free. And that is why we serve.
Pax et Bonum!
Fr. Ben +
