Serving God with Eagerness: Rekindling Our Passion to Serve

Remembering the Wonder of Eagerness

I have a memory as a child of the first time my uncle saw the Gulf. As our car pulled up over a hill, we saw the beautiful blue-green waters and the sandy white beach. My uncle's eyes widened, his mouth flew open, he stammered with excitement, so eager to touch this breathtaking stretch of water he had never seen before. "It's just so big!" he kept saying.

I'm sure you have memories like this: wonders of nature seen for the first time, Christmas presents being unwrapped, or the soft touch of your first child. How do we approach God? Do we approach Him with eagerness or the opposite, with indifference or apathy? Our eagerness to serve God should reflect that same sense of awe and joy, not the indifference that too often marks our spiritual lives.

When Eagerness Fades in the Christian Life

Sometimes, especially when we have been Christians for a long time, that eagerness to serve God we had initially starts to fade. It becomes more of a habit, with not a lot of thought put into it. As my pastor recently said, "Worship should be a way of life, not just something we do on Sundays." True worship, when lived daily, renews our eagerness to serve. What does the Bible have to say about eagerness? Let's look at the New Testament and uncover some of the things we are told to be eager for.

What the Bible Says About Being Eager to Do Good

Titus 2:14 and 1 Peter 3:13 tell us to be eager to do what is good. Is doing good a priority for you or do you even ask yourself that question? Sometimes it may be a little difficult to determine what "good" is in a given situation. We should pray and reflect before jumping in without knowing if what we are doing is really good. Eagerness should always be guided by discernment.

Serving Others with Eager Hearts

1 Peter 5:2 says we should be eager to serve and 2 Corinthians 8:19 reminds us to be eager to help. Serving others is the hallmark of living a Christian life, a life meant to be poured out for others. Not just out of duty or obligation but eagerly, out of love for Christ. Are we looking for ways to serve? Are we finding excuses for not serving?

Paul's eagerness was not just a concept, it was practical. As Paul explains in Galatians 2:10, Peter, John, and James encouraged him to help the poor, the very thing Paul says he was eager to do. Are we eager to help the poor or do we look at them as people who made sinful choices that put them where they are, as if they are therefore undeserving of help? Have we forgotten our sinful choices? Poverty can strike any of us at any time for many reasons. Remember to stay humble. Paul's challenge to the church was not to just be eager to help in words but to finish with action.

In 2 Corinthians 8:10-12 Paul tells the church at Corinth that they had been very eager to give to help their brothers and sisters but now their eagerness should be to follow through and eagerly finish the work. How often do we start out excited to do something for God and then fail to accomplish it, or delay doing it? If we are eager to serve by giving of our time or money, then continue, don't delay. If we begin eagerly, we should also finish eagerly.

"Eagerness isn't just a feeling we wait for—it is a choice we make in the midst of our daily grind."

Paul’s Example of Eagerness in Ministry

Eagerness seemed to be a characteristic of Paul. In Philippians 1:20, Paul explains that he "eagerly expects and has hope" (NIV) that he will have courage in whatever outcome there is from his imprisonment and that Christ alone would be magnified. In Romans 1:15, Paul proclaims his eagerness to preach in Rome. Do we see evidence of eagerness in our own lives? What are you excited to do for God, like Paul and like the church at Corinth?

In Romans 8:19 Paul explains,

"For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God."

This means that not just us as believers, but indeed all of God's creation is eager to see the curse of sin lifted from this world and the natural world restored to what it was intended to be. 1 John 3:2 tells us that, "what we will be has not yet been made known." There are glories to come with our Lord that we have no knowledge of at this point but our attitude, like that of all of God's creation, should be an eagerness to see it.

Living Each Day Serving God with Eagerness

Paul explains to the church in 1 Corinthians 14:12 that he knows they are eager for the gifts of the Spirit but he wants them to excel in the gifts that build up the church. Every gift we have needs to be used carefully with the knowledge that there may be unbelievers among us who won't understand what is happening. The chaos going on in the church at Corinth at the time Paul wrote was not edifying or uplifting them spiritually. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:33, "God is not the author of confusion, but of peace." Chaos is not of God.

In 2 Peter 1:10 Peter explains that we should "be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure." The word eager here is often translated as diligent which means steady and persistent. Here, Peter is telling us to make sure we are growing in our faith and becoming steadily more Christlike. Our daily life needs to incorporate things that bring us the assurance of our salvation like Bible study, prayer, service, and fellowship with other believers. In other places we are told to be "diligent workers." We should be a diligent Christian serving God. The works we do are the evidence of our salvation, not the cause.

Eagerness for the wrong things, however, is a serious problem. 1 Timothy 6:10 explains that those who are eager for money, who love it, "have wandered from the faith." Are we eager to be liked and accepted? Are we eager to have more of the things we want or think we need? Or are we eager for the will of God to be done in our lives?

So why, if Scripture repeatedly calls us to be eager, does it seem to be such a problem for us? Perhaps because our daily life so often becomes a grind. Each day, like the last, each day boring and monotonous. We wake up, go to work, handle responsibilities, deal with difficult people, face the same frustrations, and collapse into bed only to repeat it all tomorrow. We may feel like eagerness is a childish emotion we have outgrown or luxury we can't afford.

But the Bible Hub commentary on 2 Peter 1:10 challenges this resigned sort of life explaining that spiritual eagerness is "a zealous pursuit of spiritual goals, righteous living, and God's will demonstrated through action and commitment." Notice the words: demonstrated through action. Eagerness isn't just a feeling we wait for, it is a choice we make in the midst of our daily grind.

But a life lived in eager pursuit of God and His holiness is anything but a grind. Each day offers opportunities to love. We can anticipate that each day God will show us, if we are willing, where we can eagerly serve and help the world around us. The difference isn't in our circumstances changing, but in our eyes being opened to service where we are.

Do you remember my uncle's face when he first saw the Gulf? That wide-eyed wonder, that stammering excitement, that inability to contain his joy at something so beautiful and vast? This is the same body of water that locals drove past every day without a second thought. But my uncle was looking at it with fresh eyes and it was breathtaking.

"Eagerness happens not because our circumstances have become less grinding, but because we've remembered who walks with us through the grind."

Eagerness for God should reflect the same, seeing things with fresh eyes. Each day should be a new one, almost like we're seeing it for the first time, filled with opportunity. Let our hearts, like Paul's and like creation itself, be eager for every opportunity to serve our great God. Jesus Himself was eager to save us, to reach us, to call us His own. How can we approach Him with anything less than eager hearts?