Spiritual Exercise 2: Ministry

What a great sermon today about what makes Jesus angry. I have been very much challenged this week and would like to challenge you as well with this same thought.

What is our blind spot to sin in our culture today?

You may not understand this, so let me explain it.

A blind spot is something that we are unaware of, it is there, we are just blind to it. This is common in the lives of all the people that follow God. In the Old Testament they would actually offer sacrifices for the sins that they didn't know they were committing. They were saying, "we have blind spots in our lives and we know that we are committing sins that we are unaware of, so we are going to go ahead and offer sacrifices to cover up those sins."

So what is our blind spot in our culture today?

Not that long ago, we had a huge blind spot in our culture: slavery.

Men that would attend church religiously and read their Bibles everyday were slave owners not even 200 years ago. They would purchase human beings as property and force them to manual labor, and they thought that they were being good Christians when they would give the slaves an extra chicken at Christmas. And this was accepted as a social norm for a long time.

So if devoted followers of Christ could have a blind spot as big as slavery, couldn't we also have a blind spot that we just aren't catching?

In David Platt's book, Radical,   he talks about the blind spot of our society today, and it is that of materialism.

We as Americans are the richest country in the world, while 2 billion people in the world are living off of less than two dollars a day. And what are we doing about it? We have extra closets in our houses to store our junk and we pay for storage units every month to store more junk and we actually have yard sales in which we throw all of our junk out in the driveway so that other people can buy our junk and we can take that money and buy more junk.

Yet, as we saw in Matthew 4.23-25,  a large portion of Jesus' ministry was taking care of the physical ailments of the community around him. He relieved the people with diseases, the social outcasts. I read today in Matthew 25, about Jesus dividing everyone up at the end of time like a shepherd dividing the sheep from the goats. And the sheep, the faithful ones, were allowed to go to heaven because they cared for the poor and the sick and the downtrodden and the social outcasts. And the goats were condemned to hell because they didn't.

Are we taking care of the poor and the sick and the social outcasts?

This is not just a task for the select few.

This is not a ministry that only those who are passionate about this ministry or who have a certain spiritual gift. This is part of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. The first beatitude in Matthew 5.3 states: "Blessed are the poor in spirit". Luke renders this, "Blessed are the poor." The good news of Jesus is that all the suffering, the disease filled, politically oppressed, the sinful impoverished, all of the suffering and slavery of the world that sin has brought about is being undone by the kingdom of God and what Jesus did on the cross.

So what are we doing for the poor?

How are you helping redeem or undo the evil of poverty in the world?

Here are a number of suggestions:

• Invest into the Feed the Heart ministry
• sponsor a compassion child for every family member in your household. If you can't afford it, change your lifestyle, we can live on less.
• put a cap on your living expenses. Figure out what you can live on and no matter how many raises you get, or extra money that comes in, give the rest away to the poor and to the advancement of the kingdom of God, both locally and globally
• Serve at Watered Gardens
• Buy a community a water well. Go to worldvision.org and you are able to buy communities all kinds of things, like water wells, goats, cows chickens. And these things will be able to feed the family for long term. 
• give your money as a loan to kiva.org. This is an organization that takes your money and loans it out to someone in poverty who is then able to start a business with the money that you are giving them. This money allows them to work their way out of poverty so that don't have to rely on donations from you, but are able to sustain themselves through a job. And get this, they repay you the money that you provided. 
• Pray for one family that you can help in the local area get out of poverty. Commit one year to working with them, teaching them a trade, getting them a job, a place to live, fixing up their place that they are living now. Teach them how to budget their money, provide them a Emergency Fund at a bank, get them a checking account and a savings account. Commit one year to working with one family. 

We are called to make a difference, and this starts with you changing yourself, and making a difference in your own life. 

Bless somebody.