Just a thought...
“The way of Christian witness is neither the way of quietist withdrawal, nor the way of Herodian compromise, nor the way of angry militant zeal. It is the way of being in Christ, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, so that the healing love of God may be brought to bear at that point.” - N.T. Wright
Tom Wright is one of my favorite authors. He is an evangelical bible scholar from Great Britian and one of a small number of conservative Christian scholars that really engages thinkers who take Christians to task.
It is too easy for us to fall into a place where we believe we are doing God's will and involved in the work of his Kingdom only to discover that we are messing around on the periphery rather than living in the center of what God is doing.
His phrase "at the place where the world is in pain" makes me wonder: Where does God want us to be?
posted by The Wheatland Mission @ 8:13 PM
2 Comments:
The first thought that comes to my mind is; as big as the world is and as much pain as there must be, it would almost have to be intentional or truly disengaged to be only on the peripheral or could it just be naivete..... at least from a spititual standpoint?
I watched the movie "Chocolate" the other night. I thought it to be a cross between Polyanna and Mary Poppins. At the end, the pastor is preaching and he says the following, I want to talk about Jesus's humanity, how He lived His life here on earth and how we measure our goodness. We cannot go around measuring our goodness by what we don't do, by what we deny ourselves, by what we resist, and who we exclude. We have to measure goodness by what we embrace, by what we create, and who we include.
It's interesting to think about how many times we consider ourselves martyrs, how many times we seem to say woe is me and fret about seemingly small, insignificant things in our own lives while Jesus looks at the homeless, the sick, and the poor who suffer immeasurably in this life. If only we could have that mustard seed of faith and concentrate on living life as He would have us live it rather than merely trying to survive in our own sinful nature that leads to death.
I think we should encourage each other to live and fail and live again rather than to die, pity our plight, and die again. In the first scenario, we are our in the world living life but expecting that we will stumble. In the second scenario, we avoid the world, still stumble, and build a bigger wall between ourselves and the world that is in pain.
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