20/20 Vision Series -- Biblical Justice = Gospel Fruit

Father, we thank you for the steadfastness of your spirit. Lord, who else do we have but you? Lord, you are hope. You are our refuge. You're our strong tower. You hem us in behind and before. Lord, we praise you and honor you for sustaining us. Thank you for preserving our church over this last year. Thank you for the ways that we've had to grow. Thank you for the ways that we've had to learn. Lord, thank you even in our grief that you have been present with us and to us. Lord, we pray that you would continue, Father, to work that deep in us. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Vision Statement Overview

So we're on a preaching series that'll finish up in a couple of weeks on our vision statement as a church that the elders drafted a little over a year ago. If you look in your bulletin, there's a picture there of an apple tree. That's sort of a summary picture to help orient you to what we're doing.

Our elders, over the course of 2019 and January 2020, drafted a vision statement that goes like this: By God's grace, we want to become people transformed by the gospel. That's the tree putting its roots down into the soil. And bear fruit in three ways—that we would plant churches, that's the first fruit. We would become cross cultural disciples, that's the second fruit. And we're on the third fruit today, which is biblical justice. We would pursue biblical justice.

Word Association Game

Now last week, I started with a game and so it feels like I got to do that again. But today we're going to play the Word Association game. I'm going to say a word and you're going to answer back to me what comes to mind.

Let's try this out. Easy one first: peanut butter.

All right. Good. Buzz Lightyear? Okay. Good. You're hanging in. Let's try a couple hard ones. Alexander Hamilton? Dead. Aaron Burr? Okay. Good. Let's try a harder one. Bald? Eagle. Yeah. Beautiful. Alright. 50? The new 40. Okay.

So y'all are with me this morning. The funny thing is that right now in our society, we're playing the word association game all the time and it's not very fun. We have a hard time even having conversations right now because you say something and someone hears something very, very different. And that's particularly true with this phrase that we're talking about: biblical justice.

When I say biblical justice, people hear all kinds of things. I say biblical justice and people hear Karl Marx. Or I say biblical justice and people say, politically correct. Or I say biblical justice and you say the upending of social systems as the oppressed become the oppressors. But people are playing this word association game all the time. It's very confusing. It's very hard to even have conversations right now.

It's hard to even use this word justice because it's got so much freight on the boxcar. There's so much extra freight on that right now, that what we say and what we mean and what we're trying to communicate mean very different things. Some people are like, we should just stop using that word. We should abandon that word. And yet your elders, the leaders of our church have said, no, we want to reclaim that word. That's God's word, justice. That's a Bible word.

We went over this last week looking at the Old Testament, the book of Amos, but you could find this all over the Old Testament prophets. Read the first section of Isaiah, read Micah, read lots of the Old Testament prophets who came proclaiming God's justice.

Jesus and Justice

Today, we're going to look at the New Testament, Jesus's words about justice. We're looking at Jesus's teaching this morning from the Olivet Discourse. We're going to look at the sheep and the goats from Matthew chapter 25 verses 31 through 46. Would you join me? Would you find that? We're going to read this aloud together.

When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, come, you who are blessed by my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. — Matthew 25:31-34

For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. — Matthew 25:35-36

Then the righteous will answer him saying, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?"

And the king will say to them in reply, "Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." — Matthew 25:37-40

Then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. Naked and you did not clothe me. Sick and in prison and you did not visit me." — Matthew 25:41-43

Then they will also answer saying, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to you?"

Then he will answer them saying, "Truly I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." — Matthew 25:44-46

He has told you, O man, what is good? And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? — Micah 6:8

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

The Connection Between Justice and Judgment

Now, you may hear this and say, "What in the world does this passage, this parable of Jesus have to do with justice?" I mean, he doesn't say the word. Did you notice? He doesn't even say the word justice in that entire passage. You may say, "Well, is this really about justice? Isn't this a parable about mercy, or a parable about charity or compassion or empathy?"

And the short answer to that is no. Actually, what you see in this passage is not about mercy, charity, compassion, empathy. It's about justice. And how do I know that? Because Jesus is telling this parable in the midst of a whole series of parables in what's called the Olivet Discourse, which is all about his second coming. And this parable even features in it the Last Judgment. Jesus is connecting two ideas that we disconnect. He connects the day of the Lord, this judgment day, with how you treat your neighbor. He's connecting the day of justice with how you treated the people around you, people in need. So this is a parable about justice.

Now Jesus is echoing what we saw in Amos last week: there are two dimensions of God's justice. There's retributive justice and restorative justice. And these two are things that we don't connect, but like train cars in the Bible, they are connected. So retributive justice is day of the Lord final judgment justice. Restorative justice is "this ain't the way it's supposed to be" justice. Like caring for the vulnerable—what I called last week the quartet of the vulnerable: the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger. Jesus is connecting those teams and he marries them together. And just like if I was doing a wedding up here, we would say, "Know what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," right? So we don't want to separate what God joins.

So this morning, I've got only two points. It's not even really a Presbyterian sermon, right? So I want to talk about the ugly divorce and a beautiful marriage.

The Ugly Divorce

Now, if you grew up in the church, it is very likely that you have heard one of two passages at the end of Matthew's Gospel preached a lot. And I could tell you a lot about the church that you grew up in by which of these you heard more. Both of them are sort of last words of Jesus. This passage, the sheep and the goats, are the last teachings of Jesus before he goes in Matthew's Gospel to the upper room with his disciples to celebrate the Last Supper, and then the garden and the cross and the empty tomb. Last teaching.

There's also another last word, which is Matthew 28, which is the last words of Jesus after he's resurrected before he ascends into heaven.

Go therefore into all nations, baptizing them, teaching them to obey. I am with you always. — Matthew 28:18-20

This is often called the Great Commission. And here's the funny thing: I can tell you a lot about the church that you grew up in by which of those two passages was preached more. See, conservative Bible-believing churches major on the Great Commission. Like, it's all about the Great Commission. All about the Great Commission. All about sharing the gospel, bringing people to Christ. We want people to be saved.

If you grew up in a mainline, more liberal church, you would have heard as I did, never hearing the Great Commission or very rarely hearing that, and hearing lots and lots about the sheep and the goats. Lots and lots about caring for those in need. And what's funny is that almost nobody preaches both or at least not with the same fervor and conviction. Right? Like we choose and there's a reason why that is.

Maybe your family has a divorce in its history, an ugly divorce in its history. And that ugly divorce sort of still has effects on how the family behaves today. Maybe there's stories that you just don't want to talk about, some family history you don't want to talk about. And that's true in the Christian body of Christ. Can I tell you about an ugly divorce in our history that nobody wants to talk about, but deeply affects how we read the Bible?

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Split

It's called the fundamentalist-modernist split. It happened in the 1920s in this country. The early part of the twentieth century was a time of great upheaval. There were a number of things going on in these areas.

One was the popularization of Darwin's evolution of the species. This is where evolution comes and it's a huge deal in the scientific and church communities. Big uproar over that. Then Sigmund Freud psychoanalysis—understanding of the ego and the id, what makes us people, how do we behave, and why do we do what we do. That also rocked the world. Then you had the Great Depression. You had the Spanish flu. You had the First World War. It was a time of great upheaval.

But there was another strand going on in the church, which happened in the academy: higher criticism of the Bible, which came from Germany. It was looking at particular parts of the Bible and saying, is this really true? Did this really happen? Higher criticism looked at the five books at the beginning of the Bible called the Pentateuch and said, were those really written by Moses? Looking at the text, people said, I don't know. It questioned the dating of the book of Daniel. It questioned a number of things regarding whether Jericho really happened, did the flood really happen. All kinds of this poured into the church, and it was a lot of anxiety over the reliability of the Bible.

And so began a split in the church as part of our family history, known as the fundamentalist-modernist split. Now, fundamentalism is where this word comes from, but fundamentalist has connotations of backward, uneducated people. When we talk about somebody being a fundamentalist, it has negative connotations of someone who's uneducated. But actually the fundamentalist split happened in the highest universities in our country. The flashpoints of these two places were Princeton and Union—Princeton in Princeton, New Jersey, Union in New York.

A man named J. Gresham Machen was a professor at Princeton and wrote a book called Christianity and Liberalism. He said, look, in order to really be a Christian, you've got to agree with about five things at least. You've got to agree with the virgin birth, Christ's atonement, His bodily resurrection, the reality of miracles, and the promise of His coming back. This immediately went on the bestseller list, but it was also a bomb. This kind of just blew everything up. Machen left Princeton to start Westminster Seminary. Interestingly enough, I started at Princeton unbeknownst to me and then transferred to Westminster. I just followed this whole historical trend in my own training.

But here's what's sad and to my point: one of the casualties of that split was a divide in the church over whether we're about saving souls or whether we're about doing biblical justice. Are we going to be churches—and this is what happened, the fallout ever since then—are we going to be churches who are about the Matthew 25 sheep and the goats, taking care of people's physical needs, doing justice? Or are we going to be churches that are about Matthew 28, about saving souls?

Just like a family in a divorce, what's sad is that the church felt like it had to choose. And this is part of our history. This is why there's still such a divide in this country between those two types of churches. You can almost guarantee that you grew up in one church or another that preaches one or the other.

Now, which do we get rid of? This is what the church has done. So let's think about Jesus without justice or justice without Jesus. Because that's where we've ended up. There are those who push for a Jesus without social justice, emphasizing saving souls, emphasizing

Matthew 28

This is conservative, evangelical, Bible-believing churches from the last century. And they have emphasized what's called the doctrine of the spirituality of the church. We care about people's spirit, their spiritual life. We don't care about their physical life. They wouldn't say it that way, but that's what's happened. But to do that, you actually have to do violence to your Bible.

Jesus's inaugural address in Luke 4—he shows up in a synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he picks up the scroll of Isaiah. And what does he read?

I've come here to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release of the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free, proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. — Luke 4

This is fulfilling in your hearing right here. So to say Jesus without justice is actually to begin to take a pair of scissors and cut parts out of your Bible. Cut the words out of Jesus.

Because Jesus came fulfilling the cries of the prophets. And they were crying out two things. They were saying, Look, doesn't God see what's happening to us? All the ways that we're oppressed, all the ways that we're suffering, all the ways that we're in captivity and bondage. Where's God? Doesn't he see? Will not God act and deliver? They were asking those two questions.

When they heard Jesus say these words of Isaiah, they weren't thinking this is just about an individual thing. They were thinking about their whole people. And Jesus comes saying these words of Isaiah—I am about saving souls, but I'm also about healing and bringing wholeness to people. You see Jesus doing this in his miracles and in his engagement with people.

There's the woman who's bleeding, and Jesus not only heals her, but he does it in such a way that he brings restoration to her socially in the community. He brings justice to her life. There's a man who is allied with Rome, a tax collector. Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and he climbs up in a tree to see Jesus. And Jesus not only deals with his sin, but deals with his injustice in culture. Jesus is about both.

So we can't have a Jesus who saves souls without justice and ignore this part of his earthly ministry.

Justice Without Jesus

Now the opposite is true as well. There are those who push a justice without Jesus. We need to go and help those who are vulnerable, but we don't need all this saving souls stuff. Mainline churches have chosen this—we're going to preach Matthew 25, we're going to ignore Matthew 28. And in neglecting that people are lost without Jesus, they are dying in their sins without Jesus who comes to bring us and make us right with God, who atones for our sins, who makes us right before God.

What's funny about this is the world is saying, Oh yeah, we're all about a justice without Jesus. We don't need Jesus. We can do this. But justice without Jesus is, as someone said this past year, just us. It's not real justice.

Because Isaiah is not promising that God's going to come and bring economic fairness and end oppression and physical restoration without also restoring your relationship with God, the relationship between God and His people, bringing us to Him. This is what is also promised in Isaiah's prophecy—this is who your Savior is going to be.

So to say God's about justice, but He's not about personal salvation is to commit another secular anachronism. One of the most striking aspects of Jesus's ministry is that He does save souls. And attempting to bring justice without Jesus, you may not even get justice. Because it's not whole.

A Whole Bible Church

We don't want to fall into the family patterns. The ugly divorce was a tragedy. There were some good things that were preserved through that, but there was a lot of damage done. And we've inherited a family history that makes us either/or churches. Either Matthew 25 or Matthew 28.

Don't we want to be a whole Bible people? I'm called as a pastor to preach the whole council of God, not just the parts that I like. We're called to be a whole Bible church, a both/and church. Matthew 25 and Matthew 28. And we should preach them both with the same conviction. We should study them and try to apply them with the same conviction.

We started off this whole series with Matthew 28, the Great Commission. And now we're here at Matthew 25. We need both of these. We want to hold on to both of these.

In fact, Matthew 28 has been called the Great Commission. This little passage we read from Micah—what does God require of you—has been called the Great Requirement. And we want to hold on to both of them. The Great Commission and the Great Requirement.

Let's get rid of this ugly divorce and try to hear the beautiful marriage. What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. So Jesus and justice. Saving souls and doing justice. Let's look at this together. What is God telling us in this passage? Jesus and justice.

Now, I know that most of you do not have experience with sheep and goats except for in petting zoos. Anybody probably have any exposure beyond that? Right, a couple of you. But most of us don't grow up around sheep and goats.

Shepherds in the first century, and to this day in Israel, graze sheep and goats together in the same flock. And they do that for two reasons. One is that sheep and goats eat two different things entirely. The sheep need grass and are kind of picky about what they eat. Goats will eat everything else. So they can graze them together without competition for resources.

The second is for crowd control. Sheep will follow a shepherd, goats will follow a sheep. They will not follow a shepherd. This is very true to Jesus's words:

My sheep hear my voice and follow me. — John 10

Goats are like, "I ain't following you. I follow sheep, but I ain't following the shepherd." So this is why Jesus tells this parable. He's going to separate at the last day the sheep from the goats. They're all part of one flock. He's going to separate them.

We're going to look at six things from this. They all begin with the letter P and we're going to pop through them. Six marks of Jesus in justice.

First P: Proof

Doing biblical justice is not a way to earn salvation. It's proof of salvation. We need to say that because sometimes the way this passage has been misused makes it sound like we earn our salvation by the way we care for other people, by our care for the quartet of the vulnerable. But that's not what's going on here.

You can see this because notice, in this passage, both the sheep and the goats don't seem to be surprised that they're talking to Jesus. Both of them claim him. The goats aren't like, "Wait, who are you?" They both know who Jesus is. But what separates the sheep and the goats is not knowledge about Him, but a lifestyle and relationship with Him.

The goats are characterized by not doing things that show they're not really sheep. It's not to earn anything. It's about proof of your salvation.

So a flight attendant one day found out there's an extra seat in first class going to Europe and she jumped on it. Well, as the plane's loading, an emergency occurs and they need more help. She says, "Look, I'm a flight attendant, I'll volunteer." Now, why does she do that? She's not volunteering to serve on that transatlantic flight to pay for her ticket. The ticket's already paid for. This is a perk of her job. She was already going to go to Europe. But she gets up and joyfully serves the other people on the flight just because she gets to go. She has joy in serving because she thinks, "I'm not paying for this. I'm just willingly and graciously serving."

In the same way, it's unfortunate today when people think they're getting brownie points by serving God, that they're doing something that earns His favor. Christians who get the gospel are people like, "Man, I'm so grateful for the free ride. I'm happy to serve. It's a demonstration of my faith." I worked this out: Man, God has been so abundantly generous to me. How could I not be generous to other people?

That great social justice warrior, John Calvin—remember him? Sixteenth century French reformer. He had much to say about social justice. This is from his little book on the Christian life:

Our true doctrine is not a matter of the tongue or life. Neither is Christian doctrine grasped only by intellect and memory as if truth is grasped in other fields of study. Rather, doctrine is rightly received when it takes possession of your entire soul. In order for doctrine to be fruitful in us, it must overflow into our hearts, spread out into our daily routines and truly transform us within.

That's from John Calvin, social justice warrior.

Second P: Proximity

Doing biblical justice means that you must be proximate. You must be proximate. Notice what the sheep say and the goats say: "When did we see you?"

So they're asking the question—neither of them can remember seeing Jesus. Both of them are like, "I don't remember this. I don't remember when I saw you. I don't remember missing you." But the difference is that the sheep were putting themselves in a location, in a pathway to be able to see need, to see the vulnerable, and therefore act. The goats didn't see injustice because where they live, they couldn't see injustice. They couldn't see it because of lack of proximity.

And this is really challenging for us who live in the triangle. Man, this is a nice place to live. People are always moving here, even in a pandemic. Crazy, I know, right? But it is possible to so orchestrate and engineer your life that you never have to see need. You can go to those kinds of stores and those kinds of shopping centers. You can stay on those kinds of roads, out of that kind of section of town. You can do all those things so that your life means you never have to see vulnerability or need. And that's dangerous to our souls.

Doing biblical justice means it's proof of our salvation, and we have to get proximate to it. Doing biblical justice means it's not a program. It's ingrained in us. That's the third P—not a program. I know I'm stretching a little bit, but hang with me.

Now, there is nothing wrong with programming things. Some of you are programmers. We program things at our church. We have a schedule. We program things that are important to us. So I am not knocking programs, and I don't want you to hear this as a smack on anything we've done as a church that's programmatic with regard to justice. But look, biblical justice means it's gotten deeper than just calendars into the sheep. It's gotten into hearts. It's gotten into lifestyles.

And how do I know that? Because the sheep don't remember it. They're like, "I don't remember that I took that trip, that mission trip, or I did that thing. I signed up for that program." What they say is, "I was just following the shepherd's voice. Just doing my thing." They don't remember it. That's because the sheep are sheep. Because biblical justice is about who they are, not about what they do.

Some of you are kind of freaking out. You're like, "Oh no, this sermon is going to mean I'm going to have to add all kinds of stuff to my calendar." Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe this is a lot more about how you look at the world. Maybe this is a lot more about how this comes deep into you than it is about all your actions. It's about who you are, not about what you do.

This is my prayer for our church: that biblical justice would move outside of programs and become part of who we are. It would get ingrained in us. Participating in opportunities our church provides would be like training wheels on a bike. Do people still even use training wheels? Do you remember training wheels? Some people think that's a thing that's gotten past. But I hope that the programmatic stuff we do as a church would be like training wheels for us—that helped us become more like this is who we are. I don't have to think about it. It becomes like second nature to us. This is part of my faith. It's not icing on the cake. It's not an extra thing I do when I have some extra free day. It's not Martin Luther King Day once a year, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas offering. It's who I am.

Practical Justice

Fourth, doing justice must be practical. If there's anything that Presbyterians love to do, we like to talk about things. We like to have discussions about the right way to do things. We want to overthink everything. We are good at overthinking. We can analyze to death. And sometimes we can make the perfect the enemy of the good. We can outthink all of this, and I just think, what if we stop, get out of the realm of ideas, and just begin putting some things into practice?

One of my favorite examples of this is that I had the privilege of visiting a missionary family of our church a couple years ago in Costa Rica—Seth and Andrea Sears. They've been there since 2009. They're in San Jose, the capital city. And San Jose has a particular community in it called La Carpio. It's mostly Nicaraguans who have moved there who live in what is a garbage dump, and have made that into a neighborhood. There's electricity and people. There's a huge community of people who live there. The Sears' whole point, the name of their organization, is Give Dignity. They're all about justice and Jesus. And here's their mission statement: restoring the dignity of those living in marginalized communities.

Now, one of the simplest and most beautiful and most practical pictures I've ever seen of justice is Andrea's ministry, which she calls the Princess Ministry.

And what she realized was that women in that community were particularly sufferers in that community. So she set up a table and a chair by the bus stop with cleaning supplies and nail polish, and she began washing the feet of women and doing pedicures at the bus stop.

It's so simple. You think about it and ask: is this even justice? She's not changing the world. Gang activity isn't going down because women are getting pedicures. Economic inequality isn't being solved because she's given pedicures. But she is giving dignity to women. She's saying, you know what, you're beautiful and you're worth a pedicure. So simple. So beautiful.

A lot of times, these things are about economic equality and helping with the gang problem in that area. But sometimes the work of doing biblical justice is just simple and practical. Don't overthink it.

Biblical Justice Is a Plural Activity

Point five: biblical justice is a plural activity. The verb form in verse 40—"when did we see you?"—those are plural. It's "y'all" when Jesus says this. And they did these acts of biblical justice together. It was shared.

We're not asking you to go by yourself and change the world. But together—and together is really helpful. It's really helpful for me to hear this as corporate, as one together aspect of our community pursuing biblical justice.

One great example is Safe Families. We've been partnered with Safe Families over years. Safe Families intervenes in families who are in crisis who have children, and they get involved before Child Protective Services or DHS gets involved. They want to help families get through a rough period. They don't want kids removed from their homes.

What's offered in Safe Families is a host family will say, "Look, we'll temporarily take your kid into your home so you can get through this hard season. We're going to keep the relationships. We're going to host your child for a temporary period of time—six weeks to six months." But it's never just that family. It's a community that comes around. I've loved watching this in our church. There's a host family, there's a family coach, there's support families, there's individuals that come around all those people. It's a community thing. We've watched whole community groups do this together. It's a great picture of the "us" of pursuing biblical justice.

Pursuing Justice

Last one here: doing justice is something we pursue. It's not something we think we're going to nail it. You know the show "Nailed It"? Started in 2018. This is a baking show where three contestants show up trying to make this incredible confectionery masterpiece cake. If you win, nailed it, and you get the prize and the trophy. I think sometimes this is our view of biblical justice—we got to nail this. But the call to us is just to pursue this, to grow in these areas.

This is why our leadership was very careful in choosing the word "pursue biblical justice." It's something we're going to strive at. We're not going to get it right. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to get taken advantage of. Who cares? We all take advantage of the Lord's grace every day. So let's stop overthinking and worrying about being taken advantage of. We're not going to get it right. We're called as people to pursue this together.

Image Bearers

I was meeting with somebody recently who helped connect some dots for me on my sermon series. He said, "I don't know what you mean by the phrase 'image bearers.' We're doing biblical justice for image bearers."

This is what we're pursuing together. It comes from Genesis 1, where we're people who are created from the beginning in the image and likeness of God. We are bearing God's image.

The fall in Genesis 3—Adam and Eve and the snake and all that—results in us being corrupted in lots of ways, being cursed. We deal with sin and pain and death. But the image of God is still in us. It's still in us.

I want you to picture a beautiful mirror, perfectly clean and really crystal clear. You can see everything in this mirror. And you're like, I don't want to see everything on my face. But you can see everything. But picture what happens in the fall. The mirror is broken. It's smudged. It's all of us. This is who we are.

We're people who are like broken mirrors and you can still faintly see the image of God in that, but the mirror is broken, it's cracked and smudged. Some of us are better at hiding some of that than others. For some people it's really, really obvious how broken they are. For others, we dress that up. We're good at faking and hiding. But to repair the mirror means you're going to have to handle broken glass. What happens when you handle broken glass, brothers and sisters? You're going to get cut.

And this is what we see even in Jesus.

He was pierced for our iniquities. — Isaiah 53

For us to become whole again, whole image bearers again, meant Jesus had to be cut deeply. That's what we see on the cross:

Pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. — Isaiah 53

Our church says pursuing biblical justice is following God's command to seek and bring biblical wholeness to broken image bearers in our society and the world. This is going to mean two things. It's going to mean sharing the good news of Jesus with people. We want people to be saved. We want the mirror to be made whole. But it's also looking at the mirror and realizing it's smudged. And part of our role in doing justice is cleaning the mirror.

Just like with Jesus, when he handles broken glass, when you handle broken glass at the edges, it's likely you're going to get cut. We're going to get hurt doing this. It's going to cost us something and maybe be painful for us at times. But isn't that the work of the church? Aren't we a both/and church? Matthew 28, Matthew 25? We want people to come to know Jesus. We want to see their lives know wholeness, shalom, fullness. We want to reunite the family again around the central callings that we're called to. We're tired of telling the divorce story. We want the beautiful marriage. And isn't the world called to reunite the family around the main work that God's called us to? Matthew 25, Matthew 28. Who's with me? Anybody? Amen.

Prayer

Let's go to the word in prayer. Father, we need you. Lord, we confess that there are ways that this is costly for us in ways we don't want to be bothered. Lord, our schedule, our time, our pocketbook. It's easier to spiritualize these things away or to avoid them. Lord, we pray that we would be people who love what you love. We would be like sheep who follow our master's voice. We go into the hard places. We're not afraid because Lord, we know you're with us. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.