May our Gospel Have Hands

There are over 12.3 million adults and children in forcedlabor, bonded labor, and commercial sexual servitude at any given time. Of these victims, the ILO estimates that atleast 1.39 million are victims of commercial sexual servitude.

-The Advocates for Human Rights (mncasa.org)

I must admit. I have not always been one to care about social justice. Honestly. I thought that is what liberal Christians did instead of preaching the Gospel to save souls from Hell. But over the last year, and even more so over the last 24 hours, God has made profoundly clear to me that a main pulse of the Gospel message is social justice. The message Jesus came to proclaim, in his own words was:

The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free.

– Luke 4:18 NLT

For far too long I have made these words “spiritual”. I think majority of Evangelicals have. The poor in this passage are the poor in spirit. The captivity in this passage is sin. The blind are blinded by sin nature. And the oppressed are those who are enslaved to addiction. Isn’t that how most of us read it? And if that is, then we see Jesus as coming primarily to proclaim a message about how to get to heaven. Jesus wasn’t very concerned with this life or this world, but wanted us to be prepared to live in a place called heaven. This is the “Good News” right?

God is doing something in the hearts of Evangelicalism- I call is (re)vangelicalism. He is causing us to refocus, rethink, reform, and renew our most basic understanding of Christianity and the Gospel. I don’t know why the Lord is causing this revival to take place now but He is. It is a revival to being Christ centered people. Living the message Jesus himself proclaimed. We are becoming fascinated with the Gospel as we see it in new light- The light of Jesus. What we are finding is that the Gospel and Jesus are both incredibly concerned about this world and this life, right now. While we understand that there definently is a spiritual component to the Gospel message and there certainly is slavery to sin that the cross liberates us from, that is far from the whole picture. One simply has to step back and look at the life of Jesus- he actually fed the poor, healed the sick, and set the wrongly oppressed free. His message was primarily this:

The Kingdom of God is already among you.” (Luke 17:21 NIV)

“If you love me, obey my commandments. (John 14:15 NIV)

This is my command: Love each other.(John 15:17 NLT)

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31 NIV)

The message of Jesus was so blatantly clear- God’s Kingdom has come to the earth and we who are called to be his disciples are called to participate in the building of this kingdom through loving God by loving each other. Jesus spent all of his time with the broken, the enslaved, the prostitute, the sinner, the poor. He chose to incarnate himself as a poor peasant in a ghetto outside Jerusalem called Galilee. The message of Jesus was far more than freeing people from slavery to sin. Once again- it was about that. Jesus did come to forgive and reconcile us to God spiritually. But we must not dichotomize spiritual and physical. In Jesus mind, everything was spiritual. There was no distinction between spiritual salvation and physical salvation. Both were happening and both were happening right now. The Gospel was about being made right with God as spiritual beings and thus setting the world we live in to rights with God. Jesus didn’t come only to execute justice and judgement on sin and death but also on oppression, slavery, poverty, and disease. Jesus spoke out against spiritual oppression from Satan but spent more time speaking out against thephysical oppressors of his day- the Pharisees, Saducees, and Rome.

I am not arguing that one is more important than the other- the Gospel is both spiritual and physical. (not that there is actually a dualistic divide between the two!) Proclamation of the Gospel is both saying and doing. Unfortunately, most Evangelicals have failed at both. If anything, we think the Gospel message is plan of salvation, “You’re a sinner, you’re going to hell, Jesus died, believe in Him, say you’re sorry, you’re going to heaven, now go to church…” If that is all that the Gospel is to you- you are watering down the Gospel. The Gospel is about so much more than individual soul salvation- it’s about universal cosmic restoration that stretches to every corner of the cosmos. No, I didn’t just say that everyone in the universe would be saved. I said that salvation applies to every part or the universe. For the record, I believe that if anyone rejects the Good News of God’s recreating work that they are choosing to be subjected to eternal injustice, suffering, darkness, and pain- hell. Why is that just? Because Jesus was clear:

Store your treasures in heaven- (Matthew 6:20 NIV)

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son (John 3:18 NIV)

Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life. (Matthew 25:45-46 ESV)

Jesus was very clear that if we truly have faith in Him then we will follow his commands- loving the world to heaven. Seeking first his kingdom and righteous reign. Proclaiming the Gospel of liberation to the oppressed and food to the poor and forgiveness to the sinner. This is what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus. We see it all throughout Acts and the Epistles. The preached and fed, they believed and did. Where did we go wrong?

But that’s not the point of this post. What I really wanted to write about is the importance of actually getting involved in justice. The first step is realizing that it is central to the Christian Faith. It is what it means to be a follower of Jesus and is what James calls “true religion to God” (James 1:27). Justice is the offering that God requires. God, in fact, says in the Bible that if our worship isn’t mainly about setting the world to rights, than our worship is detestable and unacceptable to Him. If our worship is songs and Bible reading, we have fallen short of God’s standard:

“I will tell you the kind of [worship] I want:
Free the people you have put in prison unfairly
and undo their chains.
Free those to whom you are unfair
and stop their hard labor.
7 Share your food with the hungry
and bring poor, homeless people into your own homes.
When you see someone who has no clothes, give him yours,
and don’t refuse to help your own relatives.
8 Then your light will shine like the dawn,
and your wounds will quickly heal.
Your God will walk before you,
and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind.
9 Then you will call out, and the Lord will answer.
You will cry out, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’

“If you stop making trouble for others,
if you stop using cruel words and pointing your finger at others,
10 if you feed those who are hungry
and take care of the needs of those who are troubled,
then your light will shine in the darkness,
and you will be bright like sunshine at noon.
11 The Lord will always lead you.
He will satisfy your needs in dry lands
and give strength to your bones.
You will be like a garden that has much water,
like a spring that never runs dry.
12 Your people will rebuild the old cities that are now in ruins;
you will rebuild their foundations.
You will be known for repairing the broken places
and for rebuilding the roads and houses.

Isaiah 58:6-12 NCV

We as Christians should want nothing more than to give glory and honor to Jesus Christ and have his righteous reign established on the earth. He has called us to be his body, his hands, his feet, his incarnate presence on the earth. We are Sons and Daughters of God, filled with the Spirit of God. We are the hands of God on earth, the answer to the prayers of those who cry for help and healing, the arms of love and comfort to the broken and afflicted. That is who we are. This is our job. And we have failed. I have failed.

You wanna know what broke the camels back for me on this? Tonight I was watching the Leeam Neison classic, “Taken” with my parents. In the movie his daughter is kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. The movie graphically shows what happens in the industry and the gruesome reality of the hopelessness to those who are imprisoned as items to satisfy the lusts of perverse men and women. But I have seen the movie 10 times. What made this time stick? At the end of the film my mom looked over at me and said, “Brandan, does this stuff really happen in the world? I mean, sex trafficking?”. It hit me. This stuff is real. I assured her it was true and I even rejoiced with her that my former college, the Moody Bible Institute has actually just created a new major, the first of its kind, fully devoted to training men and women to fight human trafficking. Can I just say, I didn’t ever really appreciate the major until tonight. I have never been so proud to be a part of an Evangelical institution that is taking Jesus call for justice seriously. But the reality is- most of us wont go to Moody Bible Institute and get a degree in fighting sex trafficking. Does that mean we are any less called?

After my conversation with my mom, I came in my bedroom and read Isaiah 58 and began to weep. Images of young women being molested and killed flashed in my mind. I prayed for God to have mercy on them, to comfort them, to free them, and to bring justice to the oppressor. But overwhelming response I felt from God was a still small voice saying “Yes, prayer is powerful, but you are your own answer to prayer.” This message wasn’t just for me. I believe it was for all of us. EVERY member of Christ Church has been called to fight injustice, give voice to the voiceless, and help to the helpless. We have been called to fight for legislation on Capitol Hill to end these injustices, to donate to organizations, and more importantly to actually, with our hands and feet, move to defeat these hells on earth and bring God’s renewal and restoration to the darkest places. In Neil Coles address at Moody’s Mission Conference, he called Christians to “Run to the darkness”. We are the light. We must go. If we truly love God. We cannot sit silent. This is not a game. This is what it is to be a Jesus follower. If we don’t do this, in the words of author Peter Rollins, we deny the resurrection of Jesus.

By now, I hope your feeling the discomfort I am. We need to do something. For the love of God! (literally) We cannot call ourselves Jesus people and deny the very core calling of Jesus himself. But the sad thing is, most of us (including me) will probably read this blog, say a quick prayer, and be done. That’s the Christian tendency. Laziness. My prayer is that every day, images of oppression and injustice would haunt us and the grand hope of the Gospel would inspire us until we do something in this world for the Kingdom of God and the sake of the Gospel. May God’s Spirit set a fire within us to be doers of the Word and not vain hearers only. The Bible is chock full of calls to justice and action. (Don’t believe me- buy this) It is essential that we not only preach the Gospel to save souls but live the Gospel of the Kingdom to save lives. In doing so, we participate in Gods renewal of the world and build our hope that one day, upon the return of Jesus, he will fully and finally finish what we have begun to make his prayer true: “Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven…”

Would you please pray for God to raise up workers for the harvest?

May our worship have hands. May our Gospel have hands.