I’ve discovered a new word. It’s a beauty. I was reading ‘The Preacher – His Life and Work’ by J.H. Jowett with a friend when we came across the following sentence: ‘The absence of a sense of vocation will eviscerate a man’s responsibility, and will tend to secularise his ministry from end to end’.

Don’t you love that word ‘eviscerate’. I can’t wait to use it in a sentence, but what does it mean? My friend, who’s much brighter than I am, began his analysis. ‘Viscerate’ is from the Latin ‘viscera’: ‘of the gut or intestines’. The ‘e’ prefix is a negation. My friend did well. I looked it up online. ‘Eviscerate’means ‘to disembowel’ or ‘to deprive of vital content or force’.

No longer will I speak of being ‘gutted’ or ‘gutless’. From this day forth those words are banished from my vocabulary. From now on I will be ‘eviserated’ when disappointed, and my cowardly companions will be referred to as ‘those evisceral wonders’.

Jokes aside, do you see the point Jowett is making? When we serve the Lord, we need a sense of God’s purpose and calling in everything we do, otherwise our ministry will be eviscerated. It will be emptied of its vital content or force. Ours will be a heartless, mundane, service thoroughly secularised, essentially indifferent from someone whose only motivation is to work for their pay check.

God calls his people into ministry. He has prepared good works for each one of us. So serve with your gut. Serve with joy and purpose. You’re serving the Lord! Let yours be a visceral ministry.