Trendy Acts of Service
These thoughts are in reflection and summary of a sermon by Jeff Ramsey of Visio Dei Church in Raleigh, NC.
At the heart of my faith, I find a terrible dilemma within my own ability to be who I should be. Within the Western Christian church in general, there is a great pendulum swing between what you might call an emphasis on personal righteousness and conversely on Social Activism. You could also call Social Activism the performing of beautiful deeds to the world around us. These types of things are exemplified in drilling wells, caring for orphans and widows and so on. Few communities of believers have been found to exhibit a healthy balance of the two.
Over the past few years, our particular church community as a whole has become much more concerned with doing the great things around the world and within our community rather than be concerned about behaving perfectly in a personal righteousness sense. Honestly, some of us have enjoyed this position for quite some time, but as months turn into years we find ourselves facing an old problem with a slightly different face. We realize that our attempt to bring God’s goodness to the world around us, the projects in Africa, India, and Nicaragua simply become less and less cool. People stop caring or getting as excited about it. What is happening is that we are beginning to realize that it was all about ourselves in the first place. As we discuss this problem, and really get honest about it, we find that it was a road we had to walk and that ultimately, this new realization is a good one to have. The only problem is that the orphans at the Africa Hope Center are still orphans. The people in the Chinandega region of Nicaragua are still dying from the conditions in which they work, and people are going hungry and thirsty all over the world.
The good side to our problem is that swinging to the “doing beautiful acts” side of things only brings us back to an understanding that it is indeed WE who are broken and seeking to validate or even save our own selves. We find that there is some elusive balance to our lives that we can’t seem to correct, and so we experience God’s grace through Jesus once again in a new way. It is only with this grace that we can pick ourselves up and find center, or at least pursue center once more.
Titus 3:14 speaks of LEARNING to DEVOTE yourself to beautiful deeds. When the author speaks of learning to devote ourselves, He has to be talking about something we could call Conviction. Once this trendy good feeling wears off, you can either quit your efforts and go do whatever makes you happy, or you can revisit the true reason why your formerly trendy mission is in fact a good and beautiful thing and that perhaps Jesus Himself may have loudly or even with subtlety called you to this work.
I’m pretty convinced that any person who follows Jesus will come to this Crossroads at some point in their life, maybe even several times.
May we take the road towards maturity and allow our trends to become CONVICTIONS.
At the heart of my faith, I find a terrible dilemma within my own ability to be who I should be. Within the Western Christian church in general, there is a great pendulum swing between what you might call an emphasis on personal righteousness and conversely on Social Activism. You could also call Social Activism the performing of beautiful deeds to the world around us. These types of things are exemplified in drilling wells, caring for orphans and widows and so on. Few communities of believers have been found to exhibit a healthy balance of the two.
Over the past few years, our particular church community as a whole has become much more concerned with doing the great things around the world and within our community rather than be concerned about behaving perfectly in a personal righteousness sense. Honestly, some of us have enjoyed this position for quite some time, but as months turn into years we find ourselves facing an old problem with a slightly different face. We realize that our attempt to bring God’s goodness to the world around us, the projects in Africa, India, and Nicaragua simply become less and less cool. People stop caring or getting as excited about it. What is happening is that we are beginning to realize that it was all about ourselves in the first place. As we discuss this problem, and really get honest about it, we find that it was a road we had to walk and that ultimately, this new realization is a good one to have. The only problem is that the orphans at the Africa Hope Center are still orphans. The people in the Chinandega region of Nicaragua are still dying from the conditions in which they work, and people are going hungry and thirsty all over the world.
The good side to our problem is that swinging to the “doing beautiful acts” side of things only brings us back to an understanding that it is indeed WE who are broken and seeking to validate or even save our own selves. We find that there is some elusive balance to our lives that we can’t seem to correct, and so we experience God’s grace through Jesus once again in a new way. It is only with this grace that we can pick ourselves up and find center, or at least pursue center once more.
Titus 3:14 speaks of LEARNING to DEVOTE yourself to beautiful deeds. When the author speaks of learning to devote ourselves, He has to be talking about something we could call Conviction. Once this trendy good feeling wears off, you can either quit your efforts and go do whatever makes you happy, or you can revisit the true reason why your formerly trendy mission is in fact a good and beautiful thing and that perhaps Jesus Himself may have loudly or even with subtlety called you to this work.
I’m pretty convinced that any person who follows Jesus will come to this Crossroads at some point in their life, maybe even several times.
May we take the road towards maturity and allow our trends to become CONVICTIONS.
posted by Alan Wilser at 8:27 AM
2 Comments:
Thanks for the summary. I showed up to church at 11 this morning, but Jacob Singer convinced me to turn right around and eat lunch with him. Instead of church, I got crazy stories from OBGYN rounds.
Nice thoughts though.
Hey Shaggy, thanks for reading. I didn't even know anyone read my blog anymore.
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