Active Obedience

Why do we refrain from helping when we know that help is so needed? Why do we remain silent when our voice should be lifted for a cause we believe in?

Our error is that of omission rather than commission, and for some reason that makes us feel okay about it all. We judge our own and other peoples' actions by the element of badness in them, but good is not merely a lack of badness. Just because we are mostly inert and inactive doesn't mean we are behaving as we ought. There is an active element to well-doing.

Sometimes we are not being outright law-breakers. We have no obligation to join in an activity, or to speak to this person we don't know, or to give our time to a mercy ministry in our area. We don't need to join the cheesy song and dance in order to serve God. We already do what we are told to do, explicitly, and seriously, this extra stuff is just for the really outgoing and extroverted people, the ones who are 'good at' it. This poetic piece talks about loving orphans in a way that costs us nothing. Yet how many of us are just this way? We think being of Northern European extraction exempts us from participating, or we think that getting into the motions is too immature.

James tells us: "To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin." (James 4:17) Sometimes, showing God's love to the world might call for some embarrassing and inelegant moments that make you terribly self-conscious and red in the face. We must be willing step up and live as lights to the world, lights that are not under a bushel but reaching into the far corners of darkness. We must be willing to look silly to the world, for the world laughed at Christ and it will laugh at us as it laughed at Him. We need to be ready to look silly to ourselves, to be awkward for the sake of Love. We need to be willing to be fools - fools for Christ.