Live to Serve
When you devote your life to God, your priorities will change. And that's okay.
One thing that I’ve been trying to do lately is call my friends with no purpose in mind other than catch up with them and see how they are doing. I highly recommend you do this too. We need to be checking up on each other, and you never know how much a simple call could mean to some of your friends.
So last week, I called up one of my friends, a great young man who has recently converted to catholicism and is making a sincere effort to walk the righteous path. We got to talking and he mentioned how he was worried because, since his conversion, he was finding it difficult to maintain the same drive, motivation, and discipline when it came to worldly matters that he had before he started following Christ.
He told me how before, he felt like an absolute machine, dialed down in his routine, completely confident in his ways, tunnel vision, and hustling 24/7. He said how after he let Christ into his heart, he was finding it more difficult to stick to his routine and go “monk mode” again.
This led to an incredibly interesting conversation, since I told him I had felt the same way, and was trying to pinpoint precisely why that was the case, and trying to figure out whether that was a mistake on our part, or just a natural change that comes about when you choose to make following Christ your top priority.
On a quick side note, that’s in part why I wrote Christian Vitality. That book is my response to the concerns of many young Christian men who want to follow Christ faithfully but maintain their masculine drive strong. If that sounds like you, highly recommend you check it out here.
Back to the story, I told him I’d ben wrestling with similar questions, and had found some very satisfying answers as to why this was the case and what a man could do to recover that drive.
Why This Change Happens
I realized by talking to my friend —and many others— that this is quite a common issue for Christian men today. And come to think about it, it’s perfectly normal. After all, accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior means dropping your old identity for good and letting Christ give you a completely new heart. Is it not to be expected that your entire life will change?
And the reason why this specific conflict can occur is simply because, when you become a follower of Christ, your priorities change.
Whereas before your main priority could’ve been your career, your business, etc., now, your priority is to hold God at the center of your life.
Think about it: when you don’t care about God you can easily just disregard everything else and focus solely on matters of the world. You can dedicate your entire life to your business, your fitness, or whatever your heart has as its top priority.
But Christianity demands a different set of priorities, and while you absolutely should include in those priorities your business or career, your fitness, and so on (another point in Christian Vitality), they are simply not your main concerns any more.
Worldly matters get relegated to a secondary spot, and matters of the heart and spirit take over. It’s no wonder that when this happens, you simply won’t feel as motivated to arrange your whole life around hustling.
I’ll give you an example from my personal life. Before my conversion, all I wanted to be was rich and famous. My entire life revolved around that. I went completely monk mode into business, fitness, and self-improvement, and was hustling and grinding like never before. I could shut off all distractions and focus exclusively on the task at hand. It was pretty cool. But it was individualistic and deeply selfish, in the sense that I made myself completely unavailable to anything and anyone else. I allowed no interruptions.
After giving my life to Christ, I simply cannot do that anymore. In my efforts to imitate Him, I simply cannot shut myself off like that. Just the other day, I was ready to sit down and write for hours, when a friend texted me: “I need your help”.
What could I do but answer his request? I dropped my plans to write and went to his house. He had just broken up with his girl and was needing my company and advice.
What was more important? My own routine or helping my friend out?
The old me would have probably answered his request half-heartedly, told him I was busy and tried to help him out just enough to not feel like an asshole but without letting my own plans suffer or change.
I recently read in a book how “being a Christian is being willing to let yourself be interrupted”, and I thought that was just a beautiful statement. Christian life is a life of service, of sacrifice, of bringing light to the world and offering the best parts of you to the people you share this journey with. And that too often means that you’ll have to sacrifice your own plans to play that role better.
Now, to be absolutely clear, this is not an excuse to drop all attempts to build a solid routine with which you can progress in matters of the world as well, but it is an explanation as to why things change when you make serving others one of the main priorities in your life. It does become more difficult to find the time for your own things, but do not think that that’s reason enough to quit trying to achieve greatness in the world too.
What a man does is make it work. Even when it’s difficult, he finds a way to serve his people, and also do what must be done and move upwards in the world. He doesn’t complain, he doesn’t whine, he doesn’t expect validation or compliments for playing his role, he simply bears up and he does it. He lives to serve first, but he doesn’t let that be all he does. He serves first, and then still finds a way to build his business, take care of his fitness, and become a great man for worldly standards.
As soon as you devote your life to God, your priorities change, and sometimes, when we compare ourselves to who we were before, we realize maybe we aren’t being as “productive”. But that’s okay. It’s because your focus is now on being a good man under Christ, not on simply being a successful man. And that changes everything. It demands way more from you, in a different way.
Christian life is a life of service and sacrifice. It’s normal to change after accepting Christ, and it’s normal for an adaptation period to happen, while you find your new groove and while you come to terms with the new heart Christ has given you.
The beautiful thing is that a life of service is the most fulfilling life possible. It’s the most joyful and satisfying thing, and it’s the best way to live a good life. A life of service is one in which you get to truly answer your calling under God, and it’s in service where you’ll find your vocation and purpose.
God bless you and have a great rest of the week,
Simple Man
I recently joined the great Will Knowland fromKnowland Knowsin his podcast on YouTube, where we talked about what real Christian Masculinity means. Give it a listen here: