Be AGITATED, GRIEVED, MOVED by the way poverty assaults the dignity of every poor image-bearer of God. We cannot be Christ-like and be apathetic. We cannot be Jesus-followers and be passive about the plight of the poor. Cherishing every human being is required of anyone who claims to love God—because there is a direct link between loving God and loving his image bearers.

After loving the Lord, Himself, with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, the Christian’s second responsibility is to love our neighbor as ourselves. When asked what this command meant for our everyday living, Jesus told the outrageous story of a man walking down the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, being attacked, robbed, and left for dead but how the good Samaritan, at risk to his own safety, stopped, bandaged his wounds, transported him on his own donkey to an inn where he spent the rest of the day caring for him. The next day he left a considerable sum of money with the inn keeper to continue to care for the wounded man, saying, “if this is not enough, I will cover the extra costs when I return.” Commenting on this passage, author/pastor Tim Keller writes:
“Jesus commands us to provide shelter, finances, medical care, and friendship to people who lack them. We have nothing less than an order from our Lord in the most categorical of terms, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Our paradigm is the Samaritan who risked his safety, destroyed his schedule, and became dirty and bloody through personal involvement with a needy person of another race and social class. Are we as Christians obeying this command personally? Are we as a church obeying it corporately?” (Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road). This episode seeks to look at poverty through a biblical lens, understanding it’s causes, misguided attempts to solve it, and especially what fulfilling our responsibility to care for the poor looks like.
God’s Design for Mankind to Flourish Econimically
As we saw in the first episode in this series, God’s design to provide humans with the sustenance they need to flourish was not just a lush garden full of fruit trees; it was a plan for them to “subdue” the earth. The command “to subdue” implies that, although all that God made is good, it is, to some degree, underdeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that humans are to unlock through our labor. Tim Keller elaborates:
We are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space but preserve things as they are. Nor are we to “pave over the garden” of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance towards their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it to make it more fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is rearranging the raw materials of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people, in particular, thrive and flourish (Every Good Endeavor).
The development of creation’s potential is built upon and requires shalom—the OT word for harmony and flourishing in relationships. God’s design for economic flourishing as described above in Genesis 1 requires harmony in the four basic relationships of life:

Right relationship with GOD—My mission is to exercise dominion over all of life for him, out of love for him.
Right relationship with SELF—My worth and dignity are eternally assigned to me by God who made me his image bearer and equipped me with the abilities to do the good works he planned for me to do from eternity.
Right relationship with OTHERS—My responsibility is summed up in the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Right relationship with CREATION—I am to be its steward developing the potential God placed in it for God’s glory.

The Cause of Economic Poverty
In his book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers describes the fundamental nature of poverty, “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.” Due to the comprehensive nature of the fall, every human being is poor in the sense of not experiencing the flourishing of these four relationships in the way God intended. Every human being is suffering from a poverty of spiritual intimacy with God, a poverty of internal wholeness and emotional health within himself, a poverty of community, and a poverty of stewardship. Let’s dig deeper.
Adam and Eve were designed to be God’s image bearers, reflecting his nature as a worker and moral ruler. As moral rulers who had the law of God written on their hearts, they were to exercise dominion in a way that pleased God as culture developed and diversified. Human flourishing was the result of shalom in the four relationships of life: 1) Walking in harmony with God’s righteousness, they would have respected private ownership (theft forbidden by the 8th commandment), honest business practices (lying forbidden by the 9th commandment). 2) Experiencing pre-fall wholeness–internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, insecurity, competitiveness, or envy. Sinful selfishness has not exerted itself—and their call to vocation was the call to use their talents, innovation, and resources to make products to serve others. 3) Experiencing pre-fall harmony in their horizontal relationships with each other; their hearts were not governed by greed, selfishness, cheating each other, or jealousy. 4) There was harmony in the created order. There was no poverty that had resulted from natural calamity like earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. Let’s use this lens to consider the holistic, biblical approach to alleviating poverty in our cities—restoration.
A. Overcoming the poverty of being. Only God knows how profoundly slavery and racism have crushed black men and women’s dignity. I wonder how many centuries it may take to undo such evil attacks on the self-esteem of those who bear the image of God. I’m told by those engaged in city ministry that this shattered self-esteem is linked to many outward symptoms of this brokenness:

a teen boy’s desire to prove himself a man through his sexual prowess.
a teen girl looking for love in the arms of a male who just wants sex.
a teen girl who wants to feel needed by getting pregnant and having a baby who needs her and, to some degree, loves her back.
a boy committing violence to win the respect of the others in his gang.

Read More
Related Posts:

“Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion,” [Justice] Gorsuch wrote on Monday. “Learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society, a trait of character essential to a tolerant citizenry,” the court added.

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that a public high school football coach in the state of Washington had his First Amendment rights violated after he was placed on administrative leave by the school district and banned from participating in the football program for praying on the field after games in view of students.
“SCOTUS sides with a high school football coach in a First Amendment case about prayer at the 50-yard-line,” SCOTUS Blog tweeted Monday morning. “In a 6-3 ruling, SCOTUS says the public school district violated the coach’s free speech and free exercise rights when it barred him from praying on the field after games.” The case was ruled along ideological lines.
The majority opinion was authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress,” Gorsuch wrote. “Religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
Joseph Kennedy, a Marine veteran, was an assistant football coach for the Bremerton High School (BHS) varsity team in 2008 when he started a tradition of kneeling and praying after games. Some students later volunteered to join him. In 2015, a school administrator addressed the issue with the coach after an opposing team complained.  After an investigation, Kennedy was later placed on administrative leave and barred from “participating in any capacity in the BHS football program.”
Read More
Related Posts:

You might not think you have much to offer in terms of hospitality. You aren’t a Michelin Star chef, your house would never be photographed for a magazine, and you’re not even close to having all the theological answers. However, none of these things are required for true hospitality. Only Christ is needed, and because of him, you have immeasurable impact to offer. You have the very power of Christ to offer. When you serve, God supplies you with the strength you need. The power of Christ is made perfect in your weakness.

I get home from work and walk into the kitchen. Atop the stove lie things upon which I have to imagine angels would long to look: chicken puffs and mace carrots, and a dessert to boot. It is one of many favorite dishes in our home—one that we love to share on a night like this. A couple that is relatively new to our church is coming over and we’d like to get to know them better. Most people we’ve shared this meal with have never had it before, and every time my wife Hannah prepares it, I am transported back to my early twenties and my weekly drive to the Oliver home.
Rewind to 2010. After classes concluded for the day, I drove out to the pasturelands on the outskirts of our college town with a handful of other college students. Each week we were guaranteed a hot, home-cooked meal away from home. As a broke college kid, how could I possibly turn that down?
But the food turned out only to be a delicious means to a greater end. I also received a family. With these brothers and sisters in Christ I could lose my breath in laughter, cry, and pray as we walked through life. I was invited over for dinner, yes, but even more, I received an invitation to witness up-close what a godly marriage, godly parenting, and godly service really looked like. I watched Molly pull out all the stops and sling around all the kitchenware, which Paul washed by hand at the end of dinner. I watched them raise their children in the ways of God. I watched them faithfully serve others at our church and at their workplace.
Don’t miss this: it was only through their decision and commitment to be intentionally hospitable, that I learned these valuable lessons.
Is Hospitality a Gift?
When it comes to biblical hospitality, most of us recognize its importance and will certainly value it when it is offered to us. But when it comes to the prospect of inviting others into our homes (and lives), we tend to defer to our weaknesses to get us off the hook. I’m familiar with the arguments because I’ve made them myself over the years: “That just isn’t my spiritual gift.” “We don’t have a home conducive to hosting.” “I’m not a good cook.” “My house is never clean.” “No one wants to be around all of my crazy kids.” Our protests rattle off like Moses taking exception with God’s commission (Ex. 4:1–17). Hospitality is viewed as a Christian ideal that’s simply out of reach.
It seems in the church we often limit our ministry activities to what best aligns with our perceived spiritual gifts or personality traits. We take assessments and ask questions that point us to our strengths: “What do I like?” “What comes naturally to me?” “What am I good at?” Then we let our answers to these questions dictate where and how we serve the body of Christ. If, for example, I’ve got a low score on “evangelism,” so the argument goes, then I might consider myself to be in the clear and can instead leave the evangelizing to someone more gifted. I think it is fair to say that many people fail to practice biblical hospitality because they feel an inherent deficiency in themselves to do it well.
A particularly insightful passage for our purposes is 1 Peter 4.
Read More
Related Posts: