A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
As we’ve already looked at the last two weeks, the Old Testament is
grounded in a theology of God’s justice.
In fact, this is so basic to the nature of God it is revealed in the
creation and natural law. Isaac Newton’s
3rd law of motion says, “for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction.” You could call that
the law of consequences (justice). But,
we know this is also found in the New Testament. Paul called it the “law of sowing and
reaping”. It simply said that because
God is just, there are consequences to our actions, direct correlations between
what we do and what we experience as a result.
Remember Jesus saying things like, “you will be judged with the measure
that you judge others”? No story that
Jesus tells illustrates this more disturbingly than the “parable of sheep and
goats” (Matthew 25:31-46). In it Jesus
reminds us that because God is just we are held accountable for how we live our
lives, particularly as related to the practices of justice and mercy towards
the poor, hungry, the sick, and the imprisoned.
(remember Micah 6:8 “what does the
Lord require of you but to do justice and love kindness”) According to Jesus if we act with justice and
kindness by feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, clothing the naked,
visiting the prisoners we would be blessed by God with eternal reward, but if
we didn’t we would be held accountable.
The disturbing thing about the story is that those who were held accountable
and punished for not “doing justice and loving kindness” claimed that the only
reason they didn’t is they failed to see the injustice and brokenness (in
particular that they didn’t see Jesus suffering it). For those of us who live in the prosperity
and security of America (at least those of us who live middle to upper class
lives socially and economically) it is really easy to not see. It is easy to not see how many children are
hungry, how many people have no health care, how many students fail to
graduate, and how many people are going to prison because it’s not happening in
my neighborhood. As a church that has
become largely middle to upper class socially and economically we find it more
convenient to move our church when the neighborhood changes, to move our youth
minister when he/she reaches out to kids “not like ours”, to budget far more to
sustain ourselves than to our mission and outreach.
I love our theology of grace in the United Methodist Church, but I think
we need to be reminded there is a theology of justice. There is accountability for how we live
individually and corporately. We need to
remember we will reap what we sow and we will be judged as we judge.
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