Today I am beginning a 3 week series entitled:
Do we really want the same things God wants”
Matthew 23:23 23 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.
The three things that will be looked at are; Justice, Mercy, and Faith. Today we will be looking at the first of these. Justice. On the bulletin I have the picture that most of us think of when we hear the word justice. Another image might be the statue of blind justice, with the scale in one hand, a sword in the other and a blindfold on. While this understanding of justice is correct, it is not the entire understanding of justice. Justice in this sense is simply about making correct judgments. But, this is only part of a Biblical understanding regarding justice.
Today the word injustice is over-used to the point of meaninglessness. Newspapers prints headlines that read; Football teams suffer injustice because of bad officiating. We hear this word injustice thrown around so much that we tend to forget that there is a real thing called injustice.
The Bible speaks of “doing justice”, whereas we speak of “getting justice.” Doing justice is to maintain what is right or to set things right. Justice is done when honorable relations are maintained between husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and employees, government and citizens, and human beings and God. Justice refers to neighborliness in spirit and action.
The Unfamiliar Passions of God
Are God and I interested in the same things?
I am interested in me
on a good day—family
on a really good day—people I like, and that like me, and that look like me.
on a phenomenal and particularly spiritual day—people I don’t like.
But since I’m a Christian and a Pastor I figure that this understanding is a bit shallow, and so I have to look in the scriptures to find what God is interested in.
Psalm 10
As I read this psalm I can’t help but hear the heart of Solomon. I can only imagine what must have prompted him to write this psalm. I wonder if he had just witnessed a great injustice, of if he had just been told news about injustice, either way we can clearly see that Solomon is troubled by those who oppress and those who suffer at their hands. This psalm is about 3000 years old, and in it we can see and hear much of the injustice that happened then.
We often get the image of villages and tribes in a land far away in both geography and time, yet we look around us and we don’t see these things, and so we often times relegate them to the facts of history, and only refer to them as anecdotes, or novelties. After all things like that don’t happen today, right?
There was a man who owned some land, and the local government leader who controls the police arrested this man and threw him in jail in order to steal his land. --1998
There was another man who was arrested and thrown in prison for a robbery that he did not commit. He was beaten and tortured and told to confess his crimes. --1998
There was a family that needed money for food, and medical expenses, but they were poor and so they went to a local money lender for help. The money-lender gave them 1,500 rupees in exchange for…their 10 year old son. This young boy is forced to work and is only given food when his master wants to feed him. --2001
A young girl was promised work in a town away from her mother and father, while on the way she was taken, by the people who promised her work, and was placed in a brothel and beaten for three days until she consented to “service” paying customers. She had to “service” up to 30 customers per day. --2001
When did these things happen? Surely it they must have happened a long time ago, because that sort of stuff doesn’t happen today. Give the dates for each case.
So then, I wonder why we never hear about this stuff? I wonder if it is because of where these things happened.
1,000,000 children are sold into “bonded slavery” each year across the globe.
It is estimated millions of women who are in “forced prostitution” around the world.
Corrupt local governments falsely imprison hundreds of thousands around the world.
In 1994
800,000 in Rwanda died at the hands of those in power in 8 weeks.
100,000 people died each week
14,285 people died each day.
595 people died each hour.
10 people died each minute during those 8 weeks
and it didn’t affect my life at all!
Even as I was preparing my notes for today, I had to look up what year this genocide happened.
And yet somehow I have audacity to say that God is outraged by 9/11, and I am sure that he is upset about the events on that day.
However, Four times as many people died in one day in Rwanda as did on the morning of 9/11.
Stewardship of Power
Micah 6:8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Isaiah 1:16-17 16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17 learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
These two verses show us what we are to do; do justice, and to love kindness learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.
Often times today when faced with these facts, we simply sit bolted to our pews in despair, wondering what on earth can I do against all the injustice in the world. Who am I that I can do anything to stop this stuff, it is so far away and I am but one person.
In America we are literally the most powerful nation on earth, we have more resources at our finger tips than most nations have in their budgets.
We spend more money on golf balls every year than the entire budget of Cambodia.
Fairfax county VA, where I was born spends three times more money on their school district than Honduras has in its budget.
Here in America the minimum that we can earn per hour legally is $5.25. In Peru half the people live on about a dollar a day.
Their national budget of $9 billion is about one forth of what we pay on cable TV each year.
In America we spend on average $250 per person on law enforcement each year, in India on average they spend 23 cents per person per year.
Should we apologize to the world for being well off, no. Should we apologize to the world for the way we comfort ourselves…I leave that up to you, but before you answer I want you to listen.
Remember the story about the rich man and Lazarus? The rich man thought that because he was blessed then he was righteous, and because he was poor meant that Lazarus was not. Jesus tells us through this parable that we are not to be only for ourselves, but for others, and the blessings that God gives us are to be used to help others.
I’m just little old me, what can I do?
Jesus feeds 5000
If Jesus could multiply the food to feed roughly 20,000 people don’t you think that he could have just made the food? What was all this business with the kid and his can of sardines and muffins? The child is us, what God has given us he wants us to be obedient with.
The process that freed Osner Fevre
On Thursday I asked the President of IJM what we could do as a local church, being that we seem so powerless to stop these things or even do anything about them.
He told me.
1. Pray for these situations, and so I joined their prayer committee.
2. Get involved, do research and find out what is really going on around the world and make noise.
3. Educate people on what is going on and what we can do.
And, so I ask the question again.
Are we really interested in the same things God is interested in? Do we really want justice? Do we really care about what happens to people a world away?
Sheik Mohammed, one of the richest horse buyers in Kentucky and the world
with farms in Lexington, and Paris Kentucky. Has been implicated in child slavery.
