...cont. from Newsletter (for full story,
click here)
From
the moment God made Abraham THE PROMISE, and then grafted the rest of us into
Abraham's line as "heirs of salvationā?., we have been expected to free the
oppressed, even when that oppression is self-imposed, as in addictions and sins
in direct violation of God's commands.
In Isaiah 58, God even spurns holy words and meaningless fasts from those
of His children who see people trapped in hunger and do nothing, or see people
cowed in fear and stand guard so they feel safe, or see deprivation of any kind
and toss words or tokens at the problem from a distance certain to keep our own
hands clean.
We trap people in sin when we yell at them
for that sin. We trap people who are hungry when we leave them hungry. We trap people in anger and hate when we
spend more energy taking things from them that we do finding ways to help them. We trap people in sin when we expect them to
live like Jesus when even we aren't living like Jesus. We trap people in sin
when we expect them to live like Jesus when they haven't even met Jesus.
Satan wins when he gets us going on the
hot issues of the day. Atheists and
agnostics laugh behind our backs when they get a Christian so wound up he or
she says or does something that embarrasses God and makes them look uncaring,
or worse, narcissistic.
How
we fight sin and evil is as important as the sin and evil we're fighting. If we look and sound like people of the world
instead of children of the King, then no change will ever last and no peace
will ever come.
This isn't an all-or-nothing battle we
fight, though it often feels that way.
To "win at any costā? is to pay a price too terrible to contemplate on an
eternal scale. To force people to obey
God is to guarantee they will not love Him.
To raise our voices in angry debates wins no converts; it instead drives
away the timid spectators who are measuring which side seems most human because
neither side seems godly.
We who know the author of Patience must mirror His patience with us. We who have escaped the traps of addiction and sin-choices must remember the fear and the hurt behind the false bravado of those defending their addictions and their sin-choices. We are Ambassadors of the King, and we glorify Him when we mirror His mercy. Let the world think and speak and act as it will, if they must, but we can choose to be different. Join us in this pledge to First Do No Harm to those who need to know the Savior.
(Want to make that pledge in public? Click over to our
Facebook page and say so...)
