Everything we have in this life has been borrowed to us. It’s temporary. I don’t understand why I am privileged to live in a comfortable house, while hundreds of millions of people don’t have a place they can call home! Why do I have the option to choose what my next meal will be while millions of people don’t even know when they’ll eat again?
Amidst all these choices, I often find myself thinking about the things I don’t have. Looking at other people’s lives and feeling hard-done by. The more I allow my thoughts to regress, the more God seems to make me aware of my blessings. And the more aware I become of my amazing life, the more I am drawn to the plight of the “forgotten”. It makes me realize that I spend more money on coffee every week, than a fifth of the world’s population has at their disposal for and entire month!
And here I am… proclaiming my love for God and telling my other “well-to-do” neighbours about him. That’s the easiest thing to do when things are going well. But here’s something that might make us look at our privileged lives a little differently. God says in Isaiah 58 that if we start DOING something about the hungry and the oppressed, then our lights will shine in the darkness. The reason why the church is failing on so many levels to impact the world is because we expect people to come through the doors of our church buildings so that we can tell them about Him.
We need to be taking Jesus to the world. Jesus never told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and the nations would come to them… He told them to go to the nations. Jesus never sat in synagogues, waiting for people to come to Him, He went to meet them where they were at. He fed them, healed them and loved them. By doing this they saw His heart and they were open to what He wanted to share. It’s time we start to take the church into the world and break through the walls that are cutting us off from reaching those who need His hope.
If we want His light to shine in a dark world, we need to take up our cross, sacrifice things that are holding us back and give hope to those who don’t know where their next meal will come from. We need to give a place to stay to the homeless and show love to outcasts. That’s what God calls “true religion.”
Mark Davidson
