Questions.......

The past few weeks have been particularly full on. I've found myself struggling to cope, not so much with the physical demands, but with the emotional needs around me. I've been made to think and pray a lot and talk to friends in a similar position to me (for whom I am profoundly grateful) about how we should prioritise needs, when and if we should say no, meeting physical versus spiritual needs (not that they're necessarily opposed) etc, etc. There's so much to do and so little time and manpower and energy. I've been thinking about the hierarchy of needs and what Jesus would have done, said etc when asked to do more and more. I'm beginning to get a little bit of clarity and I want to find time to write it down, but for now I just want to share my excitement over a book I discovered the other day: Tim Keller's Generous Justice. I've only read the Introduction and first chapter but I'm already gripped and am really thankful to God for showing me this book, which I think is going to be a huge help as I think through these things.

For now I want to just share a couple of things from Keller's Introduction which struck me,

"As a pastor whose church is filled with young adults, I have seen this concern for social justice, but I also see many who do not let their social concern affect their personal lives. It does not influence how they spend money on themselves, how they conduct their careers, the way they choose and live in their neighbourhoods, or whom they seek as friends. From their youth culture they have imbibed not only an emotional resonance for social justice but also a consumerism that undermines self-denial and delayed gratification."

This has been something on my mind a lot- we live amongst many people struggling to make ends meet, especially the thousands of refugees. But we're not struggling. Careful, yes (very!), but not struggling. Am I separating my life into compartments? Am I saying yes, I'm concerned for the poor but actually it doesn't affect my day-to-day living, what I choose to spend my money on etc? I visit a refugee then come back to my nice house. Is this right/wrong/neutral? Is the guilt I can feel about it a right guilt pointing out sin or something else? I have so many questions!

Keller continues:

"There is a direct relationship between a person's grasp and experience of God's grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor. As I preached [in Virginia and New York] the classic message that God does not give us justice but saves us by free grace, I discovered that those most affected by the message became the most sensitive to the social inequities around them. One man in my church...went through a profound transformation. He moved out of a sterile, moralistic understanding of life and began to understand that his salvation was based on the free, unmerited grace of Jesus. It gave him a new warmth, joy and confidence that everyone could see. But it had another surprising effect. 'You know,' he said to me one day, 'I've been a racist all my life.'..... He had put it together for himself. When he lost his Phariseeism, his spiritual self-righteousness, he said, he lost his racism.....I have observed that when people see the beauty of God's grace in Christ, it leads them powerfully towards justice."