How Can I Help?

“We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up.” – Romans 15:1-2 (NIV)

I was at a Bible study recently where someone shared the beginning of Romans 15 from Eugene Peterson’s The Message:

Those of us who are strong and able in the faith need to step in and lend a hand to those who falter, and not just do what is most convenient for us. Strength is for service, not status. Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, “How can I help?”

Because The Message is a paraphrase and not a literal translation, Peterson was able to add layers of meaning to the Bible’s words—and I think this is one case where that really worked. To me, “Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up” doesn’t pack the same punch as “Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, ‘How can I help?’”

It’s completely natural to make decisions based on what would be most convenient or most pleasing to me. And yet, for Paul, following Jesus means taking the unnatural step of setting those considerations aside and, instead, asking ‘What would be best for the people around me’?

Maria Skobtsova

Maria Skobtsova was a Russian Orthodox missionary in France, who spent her life serving the poor, those with mental illnesses, addicts, and others in Paris, until the Nazis invaded and eventually murdered her in a concentration camp. “Mother Maria,” as people called her, knew a thing or two about caring for the people around her. She once wrote that, if we want to serve others, our attitude must be

… conscious renunciation of oneself, in a readiness always to follow the will of God, in a desire to become the fulfiller of God’s design in the world, a tool in His hands, a means and not an end.

This is what Paul’s talking about in Romans. A “conscious renunciation of oneself” means choosing not to pursue my own convenience or pleasure. A desire to become “a means and not an end” is a way of saying that my life—my words, my actions, my plans—my life is aimed at the good of others, rather than at myself.

When you do that, you become “the fulfiller of God’s design in the world.” In other words, you make the world look more like God always intended. Yes, you. Your selfless love makes, even just in small ways, the Kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth.

But that’s only possible when Jesus’s people begin to look at the world with new eyes, no longer asking “what’s most convenient for me?” but asking ourselves “How can I help?”

Listen to this week's devotional below!