What is the Cost of Love?

My body aches. My shoulder muscles are sometimes too tender to touch. The thought of picking up a rake and machete and walking back into the jungle is often dreadful. 

Our first week and a half in Costa Rica was simultaneously our first week and a half of ministry. It looked like working solely at the YWAM base we now call home. We cleared out acres upon acres of jungle with a machete and a rake in hopes of a new kitchen and a soccer field one day, built compost bins from bamboo trees, shoveled dirt into wheelbarrows and hauled them from one side of the base to another, hand mixed and poured concrete, and completely re-tarped the structure we dry our laundry under. 

We didn’t share the Gospel with one single person. And it was still ministry. 

Ministry is sometimes enduring physical pain out of a love that is eager to serve no matter the cost. It’s staring at the bright red, painful blisters on my hands with dignity because Jesus chose me, fought for me, and made me worthy to suffer for His name. To have hands that are a mere shadow of the holes that were once in His is an overflow of honor and kingdom in my life.   

Ministry is often begging God again and again and again, day after day after day, hour after hour, to tame our deep desire for comfort and rest. It’s when my flesh is loud and my body is weak that I have to choose to continue to carry my cross. Even Jesus fell on His face from torment and bloody sweat in the Garden of Gethsemane as He fought His fleshly desire to not go to the cross for us. If perfect Jesus needed his Heavenly Father to fight for Him in such a moment, how much more do we need Him daily?  

Ministry is growing the field that I will never eat the fruit from. It’s blessing the jungle dirt I have been raking for days with the work of my hands and dreaming with the Lord about a future I will never see. This week I have watched something old be stirred into ground for something new. Sounds familiar to my own heart.   

Ministry is always bringing my weakness and inexperience and mistakes to bring to the altar because it’s often all I have. God never fails to use such a sweet aroma.

Ministry is paying the cost of love. 

As John Piper puts it best, “Untold numbers of professing christians waste their lives trying to escape the cost of love. They do not see it as always worth it. There is much more of God’s glory to be seen through suffering than through self-serving escape…God designs our tribulations to intensify our hope for the glory of God. And God, in love, will use whatever trials necessary to intensify our savoring of His glory.” 

So join that worship session, share the gospel with the person you see every day in that coffee shop, read your Bible, post about what Jesus is doing in your life, share a message with your Bible study group, and go to church on Sunday’s. That is ministry. 

But ministry doesn’t stop where sacrifice and suffering start. It’s quite the opposite. Love has little to do with emotion; it has much to do with self-denial for the sake of another. It has nothing to do with us and what we bring to the table, and everything to do with God and the way He has invited us to His table. Ministry is a life caused by a scandal of grace and sustained solely because the Author of mercy hasn’t stopped pursuing the people He created to be satisfied in His glory. 

Thanks God for a life of ministry in which the cost of love is what you have already payed for me; anything I have that is worth giving is what you have already gifted.