Jeremiah 31:31-34 [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=jeremiah%2031:31-34;&version=72;]

1 Corinthians 13 [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20corinthians%2013;&version=72;]

Luke 4:14-20 [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%204:14-20;&version=72;]

One of the things though that I need to constantly remind myself of, and that the church in general can fall into the trap of, is doing works of justice and forgetting why we do them. Why is it that we do what we do? What motivates us? How is this work that we as Christians do any different from any good works that anyone else does? Or is it different?

The work that we do is not just a humanitarian response to the crisis of world poverty. It is a response to the love of God within us. In the church I grew up in, everyone knew the words of John 3:16 – For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. But a passage I never knew was 1 John 3:16-17 – We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us-and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

The early Christians were known for their acts of good works, and they were known for why they did them. Being a Christian in the 1st Century Roman Empire was often a death sentence. It wasn’t the fact that they worshiped Jesus that got them into trouble. Under Rome you could worship anyone – as long as you paid ultimate allegiance to Rome. But it was that that the Christians refused to do. For them, the fact that Jesus was Lord meant that Caesar wasn’t. And that was unforgivable to Rome.

The other thing that made them stand out was their care for those whom no one else wanted to care. These Christians actually took in lepers and cared for them; they actually treated women as equal, in a time when a woman couldn’t testify in court because she had the same status as that of an animal and she wasn’t to be trusted. The Christians did this because they were following Jesus. It wasn’t just because they thought these would be nice things to do. And they did these things in the power of the Spirit. Once the Holy Spirit came on the disciples at Pentecost, the Roman Empire would never be the same. Empowered by the Spirit, they changed from cowardly men who hid from Jesus in the hour of his greatest need, to men and women who willingly died for what they knew was true.

In these passages today we see the inseparability of the work of the Spirit from works of care and concern for people. The great prophet Jeremiah, who railed against the injustices of his day, proclaims that the days are coming when the law of God will be written on people’s hearts. Paul, in probably the most famous passage that he’s written, and one that you’ve probably heard at numerous weddings, says that without love we are nothing. We can give all we have to the poor, we can work for justice ’til the cows come home, but if we have not love it doesn’t mean a thing.

We don’t get involved with social causes just because they’re great humanitarian issues to be involved in. We do it primarily because we have the enormous privilege of participating with God in the bringing in of the kingdom. Jesus prayed “may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”. Doing it without God makes it a kingdom without a king, and that is no kingdom at all. It’s a recipe for disaster. The 20th Century is a perfect example of that. The great Socialist experiment of a classless society fell in a heap because they treated people as commodities, as cogs in the machine. Unrestrained capitalism has now gone the same way because we’ve also treated people as commodities rather than as human beings made in the image of God.

What God wants is relationship. World Vision CEO Tim Costello often says is that salvation is the restoration of the image of God, and we have the privilege of playing a part in that. When my pastor spoke once and was given a great reception, some people said he should run for Prime Minister, and his thought was that the job is too small. There is no greater privilege than working with God, being indwelt by His Spirit, to bring his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

What keeps us going in this work? Why do we burn on and not burn out? Jesus spoke of it in the passage we had to us today from Luke’s Gospel. He came back fro his desert experience filled with the power of the Spirit. And when hr got up to read, he said ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor’. This is what gives us the energy to keep up the fight, to keep going when the cause seems hopeless.

Last year my wife and I went to ‘Voices for Justice’ which is the annual conference of Micah Challenge. We went to Canberra to lobby our politicians to increase Australia’s level of overseas aid giving to 0.7% of GNI by 2015. And for 2 days beforehand we listened and learned about why were there. One of the things we learned was that history belongs to the dreamers. It belongs to those who are laughed at because their cause is so ridiculous. It belongs to those who show the fragrance of Christ in the world, to those who do what they don’t necessarily want to do, but do it anyway because it’s right, no matter what the outcome.

That day we learned that history belongs to people like William Wilberforce. Where would the world be today if it weren’t for people like him, pressing on for 51 years to end the injustice of slavery 200 years ago, a system that was the very foundation of the might of the British Empire? Getting rid of it was the equivalent of banning the charging of interest on loans in our society today. It was seen as hopelessly utopian and would destroy the economy and our very way of life.

Where would African Americans be today if it wasn’t for people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King who stood up tirelessly for the rights of their people – the very rights that white people took for granted? I wonder if the United States would have had the courage to elect a black president if it wasn’t for the groundwork of people like them 40 and 50 years ago.

Where would South Africa be today – despite it still having enormous problems – if it wasn’t for the courage of people like Nelson Mandela and that smiling lovely man, Desmond Tutu, people who have risked their lives for their country and who for the last 15 years have seen apartheid become a relic of the past?

Where would eastern Europe be now if it wasn’t for the almost completely non-violent revolutions that took place in 1989 which brought the Berlin Wall crumbling down and a people reunited with loved ones after being segregated from them for 30 years?

All of these people took their cue from Jesus of Nazareth, as did most of the non-government organisations we know of today. Pretty much all of the major aid and development organisations have started with Christian roots. Check out the following list:

a.. World Vision – started by the Christian missionary Bob Pierce in Korea in the 1950s. b.. Oxfam – started by a group of Quaker intellectuals in 1942, along with social activists and Oxford academics, they formed the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in response to the plight of refugees in Greece. c.. Red Cross founder Henry Dunant was a Christian who was also influential in the founding of the YMCA. d.. Save the Children was founded by a lady named Eglantyne Jebb who was a committed Christian.

All these organisations were started by Christians, and they all did it because they loved Jesus and wanted to spread the good news of transformation of lives, both individually in their hearts and of society.

Then there are the great learning institutions, many started by Christians because they saw the value of education and in Jesus they saw a God who taught people.

Take Harvard University – the original College’s purpose was to train Puritan ministers. Harvard’s early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae “Truth for Christ and the Church.” In a directive to its students, it laid out the purpose of all education: “Let every student be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of all sound learning and knowledge.”

Yale and Princeton in the United states were likewise started by Christians.

And then if we go back to Wilberforce, not only was he motivated by his faith to abolish slavery, but he also founded the Church Missionary Society, with Hannah More he established Sunday Schools, and with others he founded the RSPCA.

Then we have the great revival preachers – people like John Wesley and Charles Grandison Finney. They all combined social change with the spiritual. Wesley and Finney were both abolitionists like Wilberforce. Charles Finney, who invented the altar call, that time after a sermon where people are invited to come forward and make a personal commitment to Christ, did this equally to sign people up for the abolitionist movement. It wasn’t just about saving souls, and it wasn’t just about getting people into social justice. It was about both.

To further illustrate the importance of remembering why we do what we do, you may have seen an extraordinary article in the London Times late last year written by an atheist who is convinced that Africa’s only hope is the Gospel. The article was called, ‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God’ [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece]. An incredible admission.

We can’t do the work of God without the Spirit of God. Jesus said the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he spent whole nights in prayer to stay close to God. His death and resurrection point the way to a new world where we are in intimate relationship with him and with each other, indeed with all of creation. That’s why Christianity makes a difference. That’s why it’s not just about social work, and not just about getting people into heaven. For Jesus there was no distinction, it was about salvation, a salvation that is the restoration of the image of God in creation and putting the world to rights.

When Jesus returns, which I believe he will, it will be to put the world to rights. And that’s why we work for the good of the world, to love the poor and do all we can – to love what God loves. That’s why works of justice, caring for the earth, and loving all who come across our path, are so essential. God is coming back to put the world to rights and we are called to participate in this work. That is why Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you or among you. The kingdom of God is here and now, and we are called to help bring in the kingdom as part of our mission of following Jesus.

As N.T. Wright says, our mission is to be envisioned in terms of “what would it look like if God were running this show?” We will be the fragrance of Christ in a world of stench.

Let me finish with the words of Shane Claibourne, a young Christian activist from the United States who was in Melbourne recently, and who wrote an article about his time here, called ‘When Jesus and Justice Kiss’ [http://blog.sojo.net/2009/01/29/when-jesus-and-justice-kiss/]. Here’s what he said:

I was proud to be part of a witness that showed folks a Christianity worth believing in, good news they could see and touch and feel.

I got to preach, in the middle of Fed Square in Melbourne. I preached Jesus. Sweet, wild, dangerous Jesus. Then, at the end of the week of revival, as the grand finale, we did communion, hand in hand with the aboriginal Christians. Our communion elements were “damper and billy tea”, which I served with a beautiful, wise, old aboriginal pastor. Many of the folks stumbled up to the Lord’s table for the first time. One young woman took the bread and, holding it tenderly, whispered to me, with tears running down her face: “I believe. For the first time in my life, I believe.”

I prayed that night with tears streaming down my face, that just as our bodies digest the damper and tea, that we would be the ones being digested, that we would become the Body of Christ. As the old saying goes, “You are what you eat.” May it be so. Body of Christ, fill us. Blood of Christ, inebriate us – that we might no longer live, but that you would live in us.

In the end, the reason we do what we do is all because of Jesus. With the law of love written on our hearts, and the Spirit of God overflowing out of us, our mission is to be a part of the bringing in of the kingdom. That is the hope that we long for, that God is putting the world to rights, that there will be a day when there will be no more tears and no more pain. And as Martin Luther King said the night before he died, we as a people will get there, with Jesus as our guide.

by Nils von Kalm

http://soulthoughts.com