Servitude leads to sacrifice

I was meditating today on.... wait... what was I meditating on?

well the point is, here's what I got out of it that I'd like to share.
If you're like me, it's hard to offer yourself like a true sacrifice to God. By this I mean, that completely within, to make a sacrificial offering, surrendering entirely to the Lord's divine will in ALL things. Ha ha.. okay, I guess those who are truly there are few and far between.

But I was thinking about Peter, and his response to the cross. If you recall Peter's denial of Christ, we can see he was not accepting of the cross. The people asked him if he knew Jesus, and his denial was to protect himself, because he was unwilling to accept the sacrifice required of being identified with Jesus.
He did not yet love Jesus sacrificially.
This doesn't mean he did not love Jesus. He most certainly did, just like many of us do. We love Jesus, but only to a point... are we really willing to give absolutely everything, or is there a point at which we say, "that's enough"?

Fast forward to when Jesus asked Peter 3 times if he loved Him. This is a twofold situation... First, this was an opportunity of reparation for having denied Christ 3 times. Secondly, by looking at the original text we see something deeper. In the original Greek there is more than one word for love. When Jesus asked, "Peter, do you love me?" the word love meant "sacrificial love". Peter replied, "yes Lord, I love you", but here Peter used love in the "brotherly love" sense. Peter said he loved Jesus as one loves a human, but not as one that loves God in the sacrificial way. Another time Jesus poses the same question and Peter gives the same response, but the last time, Jesus asks if Peter even so much as loves him in a brotherly sense. This is why Peter is upset in response and says, "of course you know I love you" (in the brotherly sense). Jesus wants Peter to go further, to have the sacrificial love he lacked when he denied Jesus 3 times. But there's another important thing to notice here. Every time Peter replied that he had a brotherly love for Jesus, then the Lord's reply was always, "feed my sheep". Jesus seems to be telling Peter that because he does not yet have this sacrificial love, the way to have it, is to serve—to feed God's sheep. This means that for anyone who really wants to go all the way and give their lives to God, the way to grow in love is to serve. Then service will grow into sacrifice, and we may be like Peter by the time of his death, who was also crucified.

Let us never run from the cross. It is painful, of course it is, but it is the path of the truest love... and if we want to live forever in love, it is the cross where we must run toward, and not away from. And we can do this by serving one another.