The Servant King

From various things which I read over Easter:

Attitude to Serve - The Correctional Leader's Calling

I believe the purpose of a leader is to better the lives of his followers. Leaders should always ask what would deliver happiness to his followers and lead them to it. As correctional leaders, we serve our followers, the community, and a social cause...

Once we set our minds on our vision, getting there is non-negotiable. Though some might become faint-hearted before reaching the destination, we need to place the larger cause above our self-interests.

- Chua Chin Kiat, The Making of Captains of Lives

To have a fulfilling life you have to make promises

To have a fulfilling life you have to make promises. You have to surrender some freedom of choice to taste a higher freedom, the freedom that comes after you've settled on a direction, chained yourself to a cause and enlarged your capacities...

If you're going to commit to something for decades or life as it should have, as Martin Luther King once put it, three qualities. First, length. You should be able to flourish in it for a long time. Second, breadth. You should touch a lot of people. Third, height. It should pull your gaze upward and put you in contact with transcendent truth...

Most of all, the things you commit yourself to should satisfy your yearning for righteousness...

The people who look at life through a moral lens inverse the normal logic of life. Normally when we're making the big decisions we try to follow a straightforward cost-benefit logic. Does this meet my needs? Does this work for me? Am I getting more out of this than I put in?

But people who adopt the moral lens are looking for ways to forget themselves, surrender themselves, to throw themselves into something without counting the cost. They understand, if only by instinct, that their true joy is found on the distant side of unselfishness, not on this side.

People who use the moral lens don't ask, what do I want from life. They ask: What is life asking of me? What problems are out there in my specific circumstances that I am well positioned to address.

People who see through a moral lens don't ask: How big is my impact? They ask, can I do this work the way it should be done. Dorothy Sayers once wrote that if you try to serve the community with your work you will end up distorting your work. You'll be angling for applause. You'll be thinking the world owes you something. But if you just try to serve the work - if you just do your specific craft the way it should be done - you'll end up serving the community even more.

- David Brooks, University of Pennsylvania's Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2016

A Vision for Our Hearts

Jesus Christ comes to do something much deeper than any social revolutionary has ever done or ever been able to do. He has come to actually change our whole hearts. To change our natures. The Bible shows us that God has a wonderful vision for His world. We have all rejected that vision and yet, even after that rejection, God in His amazing mercy and love continues to pursue us...

So, go ahead and give to Caesar what is Caesar's but then give to God what is God's and remember you belong to God, all of you.

- Mark Dever, God and Politics

Christ's Example of Humility

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

- Philippians 2:1-11 (ESV)

From heaven You came, helpless babe
Entered our world, Your glory veiled
Not to be served, but to serve
And give Your life, that we might live

This is our God, the Servant King
He calls us now to follow Him
To bring our lives as a daily offering
Of worship to the Servant King