Perfect freedom

the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve,
and to give his life as a ransom for many
(Mark 10:45)

In my previous post, I explained how being part of this year’s Holiday Club had sparked my thinking about serving God more generally. In doing so, I was reminded of a prayer attributed to Saint Ignatius of Loyola: 

Teach us, good Lord,
to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost;
to fight and not to heed the wounds;
to toil and not to seek for rest;
to labour and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do your will.
 
Ignatius was born in 1491, the youngest son of a Basque nobleman. He served as a page and then as a courtier at the courts of leading Spanish noblemen. But in 1521, when a French army invaded Spain and attacked Pamplona, he led the defence until he was hit by a cannon ball which badly damaged his legs. While recuperating he had a conversion experience and committed himself to a life of serving God. He collected his insights, prayers and suggestions in a book, Spiritual Exercises, regarded by many as one of the most influential books ever written on the spiritual life.
 
This prayer clearly came out of personal experience. And it reminds us that serving God can be hard - really hard. But for Ignatius, the most important thing was knowing what God wanted him to do, and then doing it in a way that was honouring to God. The commitment and self-sacrifice that needed to go into this were a given, rather than a reason for holding back.
 
I was also reminded of a curious phrase that’s included in the Collect for Peace, a set prayer often used in more formal times of worship. In referring to Jesus it says “… whose service is perfect freedom …” What does that mean? How does that work?
 
The prayer has roots back to St Augustine, many centuries ago. He saw Jesus, the Lord of Heaven, coming to earth as a servant and calling us to follow His example of service. While the world sees freedom as license to do just what we want, Jesus has freed us from this sort of self-centred life and its consequences through His death and resurrection. And we then experience the reality of this new and genuine freedom though living the way Jesus calls us to, a key part of which is taking up that call to serve.
 
So while serving may seem hard at times, it’s what we’ve been called to do by a Saviour who also said He’d come to bring life in all its fulness. And the more we learn to live in obedience to Him, the more we’ll experience this wonderful truth. Serving shouldn’t mean we allow ourselves to reach a point of burnout, but it must involve an openness to whatever He calls us to do, irrespective of our fears about the size or nature of the challenge it may bring.
 
So how about making the prayer at the start of this post your own?

Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash