I will warn you now that this is a long post. Wait until you have a decent amount of time free before beginning it, because I want your full attention. This post contains a good portion of one chapter of Tom Davis' book, Red Letters, that really impacted me. I hope it will do the same for you.
“When we enter the kingdom of God, we join a family. Our whole world changes. The things we used to care about don’t matter so much. Instead, we are privileged to care about the things God cares about. What matters to him matters to us.
There’s nothing more important on God’s agenda than caring for the sick and the hurting, the poor and the orphan. There’s nothing more rewarding than giving our lives to those who need the most help.
Remember what I said in Chapter 1? God closely identifies himself with the poor. According to Matthew 25, he is the poor. I’ve always found the passage fascinating. It doesn’t say, ‘When you clothe the naked, feed the poor, and visit the sick it means a lot to God, he’s happy, and it’s “sort of like” doing it to him.’ It says when we do those kinds of things, we do them to him. He is them. I think it’s pretty clear that this means following Christ is all about helping the outcast.
How serious is God about this? Well, the hard-to-swallow part of Matthew 25 shows us. I don’t like to think about this passage much because it’s not very pretty. But it is real. And it is God’s truth.
"Then he will turn to the 'goats,' the ones on his left, and say, 'Get out, worthless goats! You're good for nothing but the fires of hell. And why? Because—
I was hungry and you gave me no meal,
I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,
I was homeless and you gave me no bed,
I was shivering and you gave me no clothes,
Sick and in prison, and you never visited.'
"Then those 'goats' are going to say, 'Master, what are you talking about? When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or shivering or sick or in prison and didn't help?'
"He will answer them, 'I'm telling the solemn truth: Whenever you failed to do one of these things to someone who was being overlooked or ignored, that was me—you failed to do it to me.'
(Mt. 25:41-45, The Message)
Those who ignore the needs of the hungry, the prisoner, and the orphan will have to account for their behavior one day. Apparently, God’s not going to think very well of them. In just these few paragraphs where Jesus talked about heaven, he told us everything we need to know about how to live our life today. He told us what’s high on God’s priority list and what that means for how we should live.
What if there is a huge secret about what it means to ‘work out our salvation’ in this verse? What if a life of faith is all about what Jesus was saying here? Can you imagine! I don’t think this is so far-fetched. Perhaps it’s why Jesus put so much emphasis on these verses. When asked by his disciple what will happen at the end of this age, Jesus didn’t speak of the thunderous applause of angels or of being ushered into beautiful huge mansions. Instead, he set the scene of a one-on-one interview with Jesus himself asking only one important question: ‘How well did you take care of the people I love?’
If this is true, then those heavenly transcripts that list what we did for the poor, the needy, and the suffering will show evidence of whether or not our Bible study, our discipleship groups, our quiet times, and our pew-sitting actually moved the short distance from our head down into our heart. Jesus is serious about this. I love this quote by Richard Rohr from his book From Wild Man to Wise Man:
‘I would say that if you only think about Jesus, “believe” Jesus and believe things about Jesus, not much new is going to happen. It is the risk of “acting” like Jesus acted that reconfigures your soul. We are converted by new circumstances much more than by new ideas. Or as I like to say, we do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.’
A Hope and a Future
One of my favorite passages of Scripture is Jeremiah 20:11-14. I can’t tell you how many times I quoted it while in Bible college. Jeremiah’s words gave me hope. They reminded me I had a destiny.
I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for. "When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I'll listen. "When you come looking for me, you'll find me. "Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I'll make sure you won't be disappointed."
[…] As I’ve come to recognize the diversity of living conditions and circumstances in our world, I’ve had to ask myself some tough questions: Does this Jeremiah passage apply to everyone or just to those of us who live in wealthy countries? Does it pack the same kind of meaning to people in developing countries; do they get to look forward to a hope and a future? Does it apply to the infant who was just infected with HIV through her mother’s breast milk? Does [a ten-year-old girl who’s the head of her household] get to claim this promise of a God-ordained destiny?
God says, ‘I will not abandon you.’ Put yourself into the figurative shoes (she has no real ones) of a five-year-old girl somewhere in the middle of Africa. Your father has died of AIDS and, after you’ve watched your mother cough up blood and shrivel to nothing for the last month and a half, she, too, is gone. How do you make sense of this passage? How could you not feel abandoned?
What do you set your hopes in? You set your hopes in people. People who might show up and offer a refuge, a safe place, a home. People who are the living embodiment of Christ himself. People like you and me. People who can show, with the actions of their heart, that God has not abandoned you at all.
God created every human being in his image, including people like this five-year-old girl whom the rest of the world has thrown way because of cruelty or neglect or indifference. God has plans for each of them to have hope and a future too. Here’s what I’m getting at – God does not abandon us. But sometimes, it takes the touch of God-with-skin-on to remind us of that. Perhaps you’ve had seasons when the silence of God has echoed loudly in your heart. How did you find your way back? I expect the encouragement and prayers of others helped. And that’s who we are to be to the poor and hurting in Africa – others. God’s others. God has given us the tools and the resources to give hope to the hopeless. But unless we take those tools out of the closet, millions of innocent men, women, and children will continue to die without knowing that hope.”
(Red Letters, by Tom Davis, p. 103-108)
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