Serve God with Justice
Other Posts in this Series
- Serve God
- Serve God as a Foot Washer
- Serve God with Your Fruits
- Serve God with Justice
Increasingly I’m convinced that we make Christianity, or at least our understanding of what it means to be Christian, way too complicated. We imagine God has some standard of behavior we have to live up to earn God’s blessing. This “list” of standard behaviors grows every time we go to church and hear another “You should . . . . ” sermon or Bible study lesson. So we spend our days trying to check off all the ”shoulds” in order to make God proud of us.
The problem with such a scenario is at least two-fold. First, there is no way in the world we can ever live out all these expectations that we place on ourselves. This is especially true when the expectations are contradictory or at least competitive with other expectations. For example, how is it that we must be more forgiving on the one hand and “spare not the rod” on the other hand in disciplining our children? How is it that we are to be more generous at the same time we are not to “throw pearls to swine”?
The result of this “undo-able” list of expectations is a great deal of guilt. No matter how hard we try to live out our Christianity, we continue to fail and come to believe that God looks upon us with disdain for our failures.
The second problem with this complicated Christianity is that it makes God into an exacting, unbending, schoolmarm that raps our fingers every time we do the slightest thing wrong. In reality, God is a wondrous God of charity and forgiveness, a God of grace that pursues us.
Yes, there are many instructions in the Bible God gave us, but when we boil it all down, what God wants from each of us simple–at least in its essence. God wants us to love. These words are voiced over and over through out scripture. God also desires us to live lives of justice and righteousness. Again these are repeated time and again.
When we think of justice we often think of retribution or punishment for those who have done wrong. In the Bible, however, justice means something different. Justice is the act of caring for those who are defenseless, those who others take advantage of. To live justly is to stand up for the marginalized, to tend to the needs of the poor and the outcast, to become the voice of those who are voiceless. To live justly means we see the world through the eyes of the oppressed and do something about it.
We are often so busy trying to figure out how we can live up to some impossible standard of Christian expectation that we become self-absorbed. We spend all our spiritual energy trying to figure out how to draw closer to God or how to say all the right formulaic prayers. These very efforts keep us from justice. They keep us from caring so deeply about the plight of others that we act on their behalf. They keep us from what we really desire–living in Christ.
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