Christians should always be pursuing social justice, but never for the sake of social justice. Social justice is one of many different stepping stones towards seeing the Good News come alive, but without following the other stepping stones[1] all to the end of our Father’s glory—without the Holy Spirit as our motivation, our purpose, our passion, our guide, and our sustenance—all of our efforts for social justice are in vain. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:3 that “if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.” If we are running the race, then we are running the race to win—to the finish line, not to anything that we pass by on the way. Social justice will be passed through on the way to the finish line but it is never the finish line itself.
We can do extreme things, but we can never become extremists. We should never tie our hands with an excess of words[2]. And we should never become sold out to an ideal or a movement instead of the Great I AM. We should never seek to do extreme things, we can only seek the way of Jesus and leave it up to the world to determine whether or not what we do is radical or extreme. As Shane Claiborne says, “The only reason God’s cultural refugees seem so peculiar is because of how far the world has moved from God’s dream for it.” It doesn’t appear that Jesus sought to be extreme or radical, He simply lived out the will of His Father in heaven, and it was seen as radical by the world. We are not rebels, we are simply alien residents.
Our purpose is not to fight against the world but to bless the world. Much of what we do might clash with the world’s ways, but this is never our sole intent. The Gospel is good news to all people, and anything that is not good news is not the Gospel. This is not to say that it will all be easy…but it certainly will all be freeing and hopeful.
Let us live lives set apart from the ways of the world, and let those set apart ways never drive the world into further darkness but rather draw it up toward the everlasting light of Jesus Christ.
- Sharing the Gospel, prayer, personal and intimate relationships with Jesus, fellowship, sharing of possessions, breaking bread together, etc.
- As Thomas Merton says, “If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, we will never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.” And as one of my friends has said, “We must do with our hands what our mouths are itching to say.”
