God is love, not, God is loving. God and love are synonymous. Love is not an attribute of God, it is God; whatever God is, love is. If your conception of love does not agree with justice and judgment and purity and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong.
~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
~ James, a slave of G_d, and The Promoter of Pure Religion in Chapter 5
Oh beloved, we do it. We all do it.
We look at the poor, and somehow within ourselves, we generate the misguided idea that somehow we are of more worth than those people who occupy a socio-economic strata somewhere “beneath” us.
We want to pay those workers who work for us even less than the pittance we throw into their lives. We build rationale around our thinking about the partial truth that those who are in our employ would simply take advantage of us anyway.
We look at some of the self-caused tragedy of poverty: The sex, the drugs, the laziness, and the lying – and we paint the whole population with an overly wide brush.
Oh, sometimes we feel a bit sentimental. Sometimes we feel a bit guilty about the whole thing and we spend a little bit of our time, talent and treasure to “help” a few people with a few grains of food, or a few sheets of paper for school, or few measly dollars if they are loose in our pocket and can slip out of our tight-fisted hands. And on it goes… until we even sometimes go overboard and twist our theologies into some conception of liberation-by-force farce that only brings more death and misery to the people we are wishing to free in the first place.
It is this edgy rough-edgedness that, hopefully, dogs us and makes us uncomfortable about our old natures. We see in this disposition towards others who are really no threat to us that our fallen humanity really cares nothing about mankind. It does, rather, rather that others might actually die that I might maintain my own comfort.
And as horrible as this propensity is, it is actually good news in very many ways. We come to realize that in our depravity (without Him we are actually nothing good, and can do nothing good) – any sense of self-righteousness gets tossed out the window when we see clearly that we would (in the flesh) rather allow a baby to starve than forgo the purchase of the latest electronic gadget, or piece of clothing we desire.
And in forgoing any sense of our own righteousness – and begging Him to provide us with His – we finally, and thankfully, begin to wake up to the truth. We begin to see that each person is truly made in the image of the One who has saved us from our own poverty. We begin to see them as He sees them: as infinitely valuable.
We begin to Love.
We begin to yearn, even fight for justice for those who cannot find justice on their own. We begin to see that the foundation of His throne and His Kingdom is a heavenly, true, noble, just, pure and very lovely righteousness which yields a very salty, very active, very earthy, very practical sort of approach to helping those in need.
Can we see it?
When we finally give up any illusion that we have any righteousness of our own, it is then (and only then) that we can finally begin to truly look outside of ourselves and see both our need for help and the desperate need for us to help others in so many ways. And there is a profound beauty in all of this. The Help we receive is His Grace (read the very power that raised Christ Jesus from the dead!). So, the help we give others can literally be nothing other than a conveyance of that same Grace from Him – directly to others. And, as His Word and His Work does not ever come back void, His purposes will always be fulfilled.
We simply have but to walk along and be Him to others. To Love them as He has already Loved us…
This is very good news.
