There are times when it is appropriate to seek justice and times when it is best to bear injustice. The grounds for when to do what seem to always be centred around the gospel. Will this matter serve the cause of the gospel as I seek justice or will this matter bring the gospel into disrepute? Will I be able to serve the cause of the gospel better by seeking justice in this case or will I serve the cause of the gospel better by bearing this injustice patiently and leaving it with the Lord to judge one day? So rarely in our quest for justice do we ask these sorts of questions.

Injustice, without question, exists. In our broken world, it exists all around us. It exists in society, it exists in our denominations and gospel partnerships, it exists in the church and it exists in our own hearts. Sinful people will cause injustice. Injustice, simply, is opposed to whatever is right. It is the inverse of righteousness, which is concerned with rightness. Injustice is the absence of what is just and right; it is unfairness and wrongness made manifest.
But what do we do about injustice? Options range from setting up campaigns and waging unrelenting war against it right the way through to actively encouraging it ourselves. But what should be our response as believers? I think there is a time to pus back against injustice and there is a time to wear it. The big question is, how do we know when to do either?
Helpfully, I think Paul offers us some pointers both in how he responded to injustice on a personal level and how he directed the church to address injustice. Let me land on four examples which, I think, give us some helpful guidance.
First, there is Paul’s imprisonment and beating in Philippi. You can read the full story in Acts 16, but the two pertinent sections are Acts 16:16-24 and Acts 16:35-40. The short story is that Paul and Silas are followed around by a girl with an evil spirit whom some men are exploiting for profit. She begins disrupting their efforts to share the gospel so Paul exorcises the demon in the name of Jesus and the girl is restored to her right mind. Her “owners” are miffed at the loss of profit so make up stories about Paul and Silas which led to them being beaten by the magistrates and chucked in prison. The next day, they are released without charge and Paul tells the magistrates they are Roman citizens who have been beaten and detained unlawfully and they expect a fulsome, public apology with an escort out of prison, which they duly did to stop word getting to their higher ups.
The second example comes later on in Acts 21-26. It kind of goes on longer than that, but you can get the main points in those chapters. This time, Paul is arrested unjustly in Jerusalem. Some Jews from Asia wrongly incite the crowd against Paul leading to a riot. A Roman Commander came down to sort matters out and again Paul cites his Roman citizenship. Only, this time, he doesn’t cite it to get out of prison, but in order to stay in! From chapter 22 to the end of Acts, Paul keeps appealing up the chain of command. He doesn’t demand release but speaks to the Roman commander, then to the Jewish Sanhedrin, then to the governor Felix, then because he as been left in prison so long, to his successor Festus. After that, Paul appeals to Caesar – to whom he goes next – but before he gets there he speaks to King Agrippa. At the end of Chapter 26, they are all agreed that had Paul not kept appealing up the chain of command he would have been released.
It seems prudent to ask why, in one case, does Paul take a beating and claim his rights as a Roman citizen after the fact while in another almost identical case he claims his rights beforehand to avoid a beating? Why, in one case, does he demand his release from unjust imprisonment and in the other keeps doing things that he knows full well will prolong his time in prison? In each case, Paul is unjustly imprisoned. In each case, his rights are being trampled all over. But he responds differently in both cases. Why?
As far as I can see, the answer seems to be for the sake of the gospel. In one case, the gospel was being maligned because of his false imprisonment. He wanted it to be made known that Christianity is not opposed to civil obedience.
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How often in your sermon—actually in the midst of your preaching—does your teaching drive you to simply, and vocally, offer up your own doxology? When we study for our sermons, when we pray for our sermons, when we prepare our sermons, when we deliver our sermons . . . we ought to be driven to praise the Lord.

When considering how to preach, we often think about certain words: faithfully, exegetically, expositionally, passionately, clearly. I’d like to take this post to encourage you to preach doxologically. Preach in a way that drives you and your listeners to unbridled worship.
Consider the example of Scripture.
Paul, after discussing the faithfulness of God in using Israel’s hardening to extend salvation to the Gentiles and in preserving a remnant of Jewish people, breaks forth with words of praise:
Oh the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became his counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom 11:33–36)
Paul ends the entire epistle, this epic treatise on the gospel, with another doxology:
Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom 16:25–27)
Paul breaks out into doxological praise in teaching the Corinthians about God’s care for him in hardship (2 Cor 11:31). Many times he opens his epistles (his specific teaching to those local congregations) with doxologies (Rom 1:25; 2 Cor 1:3; Gal 1:4–5; Eph 1:3). He introduces his teaching to Timothy, a teaching directly addressing the form and function of the local church, with an explanation of the Lord’s work in salvation, which leads to lofty doxological praise: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Tim 1:17).
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Our culture has been shaped by the godless notion that compassion means the abolition of consequences. Addicts should be given a free home and a safe place to kill themselves. Career criminals should either be released, or sequestered away in a resort prison where he can think about what a bad boy he’s been. Corrupt politicians should be allowed to weasel their way out of straight answers and accountability structures. But God will not be mocked, nor can the fixed order of his creation ultimately be undermined.   

What would you do if I told you that the most important part of wealth generation was . . . generating wealth? Would you be surprised? Would you look at me like I’d just told you that the wheels on the bus do, in fact, go round and round?
One might hope.
Sadly, we no longer live in times where we can assume general agreement on basic facts. Thus, instead of the time-tested formula for prosperity, otherwise known as labour → wages → reinvestment, we must languish under the auspices of “progressive” math, which looks like labour → taxation → redistribution. Which really just looks like an approaching renaissance of soviet-style living blocks.
One of the results of this new formula rollout has been the steady acceptance of what might be called “bailout culture.” Bailout culture develops when half-dead businesses, organizations, and institutions are supplied with indefinite transfusions of government money. What revived my attention on the topic was recently learning that Ontario has pledged 1.2 billion dollars towards “beleaguered colleges and universities,” but the truth is that most of Canada’s infrastructure has been consuming snowbank-sized quantities of government sugar for decades. Which explains why it’s so inefficient, unproductive, and hard to watch climb the stairs.
Part of the problem is that a hungry state never wants to let go of its vested interests, even when its skin is falling off in sheets. They also know they won’t have to. You see, it doesn’t matter how unproductive your interests are, so long as everyone is forced to use them. So good luck trying to sell milk outside of the Canadian Dairy Cartel — I mean Commission; which incidentally received 4.7 million of your tax dollars in 2021.
The other part of the problem is that most of us have been conditioned to believe regulated bodies can do a better job of running stuff than private-sector bodies. And we only believe that because we’ve been conditioned to believe the government is a lean, mean, organized machine, when really it’s more like the first UNIVAC computer, which spent thirteen hours trying to spell “hat.” Thomas Sowell puts his finger on the problem: “[R]ight now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must ‘do something’ to get the economy moving again.”
What’s the government going to do about the housing market? What’s the government going to do about rental prices? What’s the government going to do about understaffed hospitals and schools? What’s the government going to do about the fact that I only had seven dehydrated carrots in my instant soup-powder mix? If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, you know the conditioning has worked.
How did we get here? As with everything, it starts with sin, which in this context looks like a dark and perverted desire to avoid responsibility. If people can be convinced that such a desire is justified, all it takes is some benefactor, in this case the state, to come along with an offer of “help.”
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