How am I to labour in the kingdom of God? Do I serve men with my hands? Do I serve men with my lips? The Bible is consistent to the idea of sacrificing my whole body as Christ sacrificed His body to fit the purpose of His Father. If the gospel is best demonstrated with my hands, then let it be so. If my hands need to be cut off to best demonstrate the gospel, then let it be so. But I need to be aware of the objective of serving God, that the sacrifice I am called to is for the freedom of men from the bondage of Satan.
I am not to mutilate myself and call it suffering for purpose of Christ. Suffering is only to take place in obedience to the commandments of God. Any suffering will be in vain unless I obey the words that God has given to His people as commandments, "to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” that the there is a daily renewal, in living these commandments, by the Holy Spirit. However, I find these commandments more difficult to walk through than even self-mutilation.
Where the advice of the world would say, "get a good job, own a house, get married, have a healthy family" and so on, these good things cannot be the only way to identify with God's favour. In fact, these are all temporal things of the world, where even the most Godless person could sustain. The favour of God could help us, too, sustain these things for a time, but it doesn't provide any guarantees, because His favour is identified by that of which is eternal.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; these are fruits of the Holy Spirit and a few of the things we can identify as being sustained for eternity by the God who showed us love: demonstrated by the sacrifice of the Father, grace: demonstrated by the obedience of His Son, and power: demonstrated by the labour of His Holy Spirit.
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