A few weeks ago, She Reads Truth finished a series about Justice. This specific series really hit a nerve in my heart due to our experiences living in China. The group of people we were serving had encountered countless amounts of injustice and it broke our hearts and made us appreciate the freedoms that we have living in the States. Although culturally Americans don't typically experience the same types of injustice that we witnessed first hand, unfortunately people are mistreated, abused and subjected to violence daily in every country around the world.
As we got to know the people we were serving and heard their stories, our first reaction was anger, at the government, at the people who had hurt them, at the calloused heart of the culture and we had to instead choose daily to surrender the anger and love the people we were serving like crazy.
It is not an easy task to love the unlovable, but Jesus asks us to. It is not easy to forgive when you have experienced an unimaginable amount of unfairness, but thankfully Jesus can help us to forgive. Thankfully we have been given an incredible example to follow through the life of Jesus. He loved the unlovable, he healed those who were cast out from society, he dined with the least of these and he sacrificed himself in order to have a relationship with each of us.
I thought that this quote beautifully led me into a place of deeper healing and forgiveness, "The cross is the place where we throw 'deserve' and 'fair' out the window because we realize what true justice would mean for any of us". In Romans 5:20, Paul writes, "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more". All of us deserve death, but Jesus came to give us life.
I love these definitions of justice and injustice, "Seeking justice-bringing right order and exerting life-giving power to protect the vulnerable- is a command that the God of justice gives to us all. But fighting injustice - the abuse of power that oppresses that vulnerable through violence and lies- can be excrutiatingly hard work, so seeking justice begins with seeking our God who created justice".
It IS had work as you are working on behalf of those who do not have a voice, but thankfully,
"we are free so that we can be part of God's work of setting others free".
*To study the She Reads Truth Justice series yourself, visit their website: http://shereadstruth.com/category/plans/justice/
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