Injustice

This has become, for lack of a better word, a popular phrase.

As I walk the campus of my small community college, it’s quite a common conversation piece. Kids talk about following IJM on twitter, church groups proudly tell stories of missionaries dealing with these issues as if they are their own, wristbands have been distributed along with brownies around the campus. 

But I wonder how many out there actually see the injustices of the world from the eyes of my Savior.

In fact, my question for my generation is this:

What are you doing to see God’s heart for justice become reality in our world?

Last night I sat in a room of thousands of believers who came to worship Christ. It’s the same typical mass worship night. A chorus begins, so we all raise our hands. The worship leader implies that God is here with us and everyone screams. Pictures of children and poverty in Africa scroll through the big screen and we all watch with eyes of sorrow.

I sat in the front row of the balcony looking at the faces of thousands of people watching the word JUSTICE fill the screen. They erupted into a quick scream, joining in with the rest of the room, and I was immediately taken back to Pavlov’s Dog. In one quick ring of a bell, the mouths began to water. But in mere seconds, the word passed and the worship continued. 

But how many in that room are actually striving to see hope come to our broken world?

When did we turn the injustices and the immense suffering of the innocent, forsaken and helpless into a fad?

Now please don’t read me the wrong way. I know that there are some out there who truly long to see God’s heart to rescue the oppressed come to play in our cracked and bleeding world.  Many hearts might be sincere. But as we claim to be a generation that is working to bring freedom to the captives, let us stray from simply claiming an idea for ourselves in order to secure a feeling of belonging to something that is so much bigger than ourselves.

We allow ourselves to sit in the presence of God, to soak him in, to ask Him to draw near like our own relationship with God is the only thing that matters in the world. In fact, in saying this, many would probably consider me without compassion or feeling for my fellow Christians and their struggles. But in your life and mine, in our walk with Christ, I’ve discovered something that many of us have refused to accept.

Your salvation was not for you.

God’s unending, undeserved grace was not given to you so that you could sit idly and enjoy his presence for yourself. There is a world of darkness screaming out under the torments of poverty, disease, hunger, injustices. Real injustices. Real slaves, real prostitutes, real 8-year-old girls getting raped for the profit her captors.  

They are not an idea.

They are not a cause.

They are not a picture and a wristband that is there to remind you to think of something other than yourself for 2.5 seconds out of your day.

They are not simply a movement to become a part of.

They are trapped, held down, enslaved in a world of hurt and hopelessness and worthlessness until people, soldiers that have chosen to be the hands and feet, the voice of Christ, decide to not just claim an idea of justice but actually rise up and do something to FIGHT for it.

Until you decide to walk out in this God driven law of justice, your soul should not be at peace.

So go. Give. Speak out.

Whatever it is you can do, do it.

Not every person is supposed to go to Southeast Asia to fight for child prostitution. Not everyone can go to Africa and raid a cocoa bean farm to free those in bonded labor.

But you can get down on your knees and earnestly cry out for God’s longing to rescue the oppressed and enslaved in our world today.

Leonard Ravenhill says in his book Why Revival Tarries that “No man is greater than his prayer life.” In fact, he goes on to say, “In the matter of New Testament, Spirit inspired, hell-shaking, world breaking prayer… for this kind of prayer there is no substitute. We do it-or die!” For when it comes to prayer: “No man can do more than that for God or for man.”

Let us never underestimate the power behind prayer.

For “no heart thrives without much secret converse with God; and nothing will make amends for the want of it.” – Berridge.

As followers of Jesus Christ, our heart should imitate his own. It is HIS heart to rescue the oppressed, to bring peace to their ever-wearied souls. If your heart is molded to His as he desires, I urge my generation to not sit by simply wearing a cause like a designer label to make ourselves feel like we’re playing a part. This is not simply about awareness. Awareness is nothing without setting a fire under the feet to produce movement.

Often times we forget that change is not found in the face of those oppressed. It isn’t found simply in gun slinging organizations that physically remove the chains of those enslaved. In fact, it often feels so very far away from us, and many of us don’t even realize that we are in fact that cause of much of the slavery in our world today. One of the largest contributors to slave labor is found in the coffee and chocolate industry, an industry that is in immensely high demand due to those of us that will pay $4 for our coffee fix each morning.

We speak of seeking freedom, but we’re not even willing to give up these meaningless novelties for which the rest of the world is being beaten and killed and enslaved to produce. (There are organizations in action such as the Fair Trade Foundation that research a product from it’s origin to see that it is ethnically made, all laborers paid fairly. They then slap on their Fair Trade label to encourage consumers to purchase and support only those products that are produced ethnically.  You can look it up online.)

So my question to you is this: what role are you playing?

Will you wear your fad on your wrist, mention it to your friend, and feeling like you’ve played your part? Or will you earnestly seek the redemption of God’s people on your knees, through your wallet, with your voice?

The choice is yours.

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you God.”

-Micah 6:8