Serving-saving

What does it mean to serve? I was thinking a lot about this in the summer when I had to lead a group of servant-hearted washers up on a kids camp. I remember thinking about Isaiah 53 at the time, where we get, of course, the most amazing picture of what servanthood really means. As I pondered this, it struck me that serving and saving are really inextricably interlinked. Jesus could only save us by becoming a servant. He is the Saviour because He was first the Servant. We cannot understand Jesus in any other terms. This kind of serving-saving is all about putting yourself at the disposal of another, submitting your needs to their needs, putting your joy in their joy. Perhaps,then, we should, as Jesus did, hyphenate everything we do with "serving". So we do serving-evangelism, serving-love, serving-mercy, serving-preaching, serving-serving. Serving is an adverb for us and not a noun. ANything less than that is not authentic Jesus-shaped activity.