"It Was Me"

Stop me if you've heard this one. "Come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For you prayed a prayer in Vacation Bible School when you were eight, you walked down the aisle at the Baptist church, you never missed Sunday School as long as you were living at home with your parents, you gave huge amounts of money to the church, and you generally lived a good life."

What? You don't remember it like that? Hold on while I look it up....

Well, this is embarrassing. It doesn't read like that at all. Jesus actually said, "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me."

Matthew 25 can be stunning. The words of Jesus leave me with tear stains on my cheeks when I realize how off the mark my evaluations can be, how little I speak of giving your life away, and how I tend to spell "service" as "serve us."

Christ followers are supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the world. We are the ones who believe we reach higher when we reach down to help someone up and that we serve God when we serve people in need. So I can't, for the life of me, figure out why we spend so much time marketing our churches (and ourselves) to people we hope will give back.

The world is filled with people who can't give back. They are the sick and dying, the diseased and depressed, the self-centered and self-absorbed. They will take your cup of cold water in Jesus' name, drink it up, and toss the cup on the ground without a word of thanks.

But we don't serve in order to be thanked. Do we? We are not trying to earn recognition, salvation, or reward. Right? We serve because Jesus does, because we go where he goes, and because we take our cues from hands that touched lepers and feet that laid tracks on grimy Galilean roads, even if no one notices.

Many have missed him before. Even the original disciples stumbled over a savior who would give his life away. Yet it was his sacrifice, his service and love, that provided life for all who can see.

I love the song, "It Was Me" for this very reason. The embedded video is an interpretation of the song in a church setting.