Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Friends and Associates”
Our Bible verse for today: “Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.” Matthew 11:5 (NIV)
Our thought for today: “Don’t shun those in need.”
As we draw to the end of our month of considering the important issue of who our friends are and who we choose to associate with, I’m remembering a conversation I had with a fellow Pastor more than twenty years ago. The church he was the pastor of consisted mostly of middle-class white families. Those families were financially secure and most had both a mother and a father in the home.
However the church also had a van ministry which targeted a low-income housing project on the other side of town. Those people were almost exclusively poor Mexicans, many from single parent homes, and there were a few low-income African-Americans in the neighborhood too. The church van would go to that neighborhood and bring many of the children, and a few of the adults, to church.
During our conversation I commended the pastor on his church’s efforts to reach-out to that needy and neglected segment of our town’s population. But I’ll never forget his response. He shrugged off my compliment and replied, “Well, you really can’t build a church with people like that. They don’t have any money.”
I nearly swallowed my tongue when he said that. Of course I understand the need for a church to be able to pay its bills but under no circumstances should that be a determining factor regarding who we minister to and who we don’t. I came to realize that his church was involved in that van ministry not because they had a particular love and concern for those people, but because they felt it was their Christian duty to be doing something like that. After all, other churches did things like that and therefore they probably should too. (That ministry didn’t last long by the way. That church soon abandoned it.)
If we look to Jesus as our example, we discover that He spent the vast majority of His time, and focused most of His ministry efforts, on people exactly like those low-income Mexicans in that housing project. But more than just running a bus ministry to bring them to church, Jesus went out into the neighborhoods and into their homes to actually be with them. He walked among them, talked with them, ate meals with them, and told them the Good News of the Gospel. Why did He do that? Was it because it was His Christian duty to do so? No. He did it because He genuinely loved them and cared for them.
Jesus chose to associate with those who needed Him the most, and we must do the same. Richard Foster, in his book “Freedom of Simplicity”, accurately noted that individual Christians and even entire churches often become involved in ministry to the poor for all the wrong reasons. We do often approach it as a matter of Christian duty or, we do it because it’s the trendy cause of the moment and so we want to be a part of it too. Foster writes:
“The Christian must advocate the cause of those who are truly poor and forgotten. So often it seems as if Christians have a particular knack for joining causes that are nearly over and championing issues that have thousands of champions … We must go beyond newspapers accounts to find the truly dispossessed.”
Jesus “chose” to associate with and to spend lots of time with the down and out – those in greatest need. He was with them because He genuinely wanted to be with them. As we consider who we will associate with, perhaps we would be well-served to consider who it was that our Lord associated with the most, and then go and do likewise.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 