Why Seeking Justice Is Central to the Gospel

It’s not an optional add-on

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Back in the 1970s, the founder of the Sojourners community in the US, Jim Wallis, and a friend decided to conduct an experiment. They wanted to find out what the Bible said about poverty and injustice.

So they took a Bible, and a pair of scissors, and proceeded to literally cut out all the verses they could find that spoke of those concerns.

As Wallis later described it, what they were left with was a “holey Bible”.

It was a Bible full of holes, such were the vast amount of verses they found and cut out. The point he’s since made is that too many of us metaphorically cut out what the Bible says about the poor. We ignore it because it makes us too uncomfortable.

It has since been well documented that there are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that speak about God’s concern for the poor. From the creation story in Genesis, right through to new creation in Revelation, there is an unmistakeable theme of God’s heart for treating the poor well and for justice to be done.

When Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, found this out himself, he couldn’t believe how he could have missed all those verses after all his years in Christian leadership.

Christians throughout the ages have followed the call of Jesus to go where he was sent and serve those living in poverty. For the first 300 years of the church, they were known for their care of the poor and destitute. History shows that it’s one of the main reasons for the explosive growth of the church in the first few centuries. In Acts 2 and 4, we see how the early Christians lived, that they shared everything they had, that no one was in need.

In the church I grew up in, memorizing Bible verses was everything. I’m hugely grateful for that as it gave me a great love of the Bible which I still have to this day.

The most famous verse we were taught was John 3:16: “For God so loved the world…”. But what we were never taught to memorize was the equivalent chapter and verse from John’s first letter, and the couple of verses following. They ask the confronting question of how the love of God can be in us if we don’t provide materially for our brothers and sisters in need.

Photo by Ev on Unsplash

What does our faith even mean?

What does our faith mean if we don’t live it out in action and love of others?The greatest commandment is not to preach the Gospel, but to love God and neighbor. Jesus said the entire law and prophets are summed up in those two commands.

What we’ve called the ‘Great Commission’ is really the Great Omission.Matthew 28 says we’re to make disciples. A disciple is someone who sits at the feet of their master, learns from them and follows them.

Jesus sent his disciples to go where he was sent. Where was he sent? He was sent to the poor, the outcast, the ‘sinners’, the tax collectors and prostitutes, all the people who no one else thought were worthy of being loved. But Jesus showed them they were blessed and loved. That’s why they flocked to him.

Don’t get me wrong though. Preaching is still equally important. I’m an evangelical, and part of my job used to be to preach in churches about 30 times a year. I loved it; I came alive when I preached Jesus. I still do it today every month or so.

But verbal proclamation is not all there is to being Christian.

This is also not about being a ‘leftie’ or a ‘liberal’ or any political label that people might put on it. I deliberately avoid labels like that. This is about being Christian, a follower of Jesus. No less than 87 times in the gospels does Jesus say “follow me”. It was of central importance to him.

Photo by Luis Alberto Sánchez Terrones on Unsplash

What the original altar call really meant

It was also of central importance to millions of Christians throughout history. One of them was Charles Finney, inventor of the altar call.

What many people don’t realize is that when Finney called people up the front to give their lives to Christ, he also made it compulsory for them to commit themselves to the anti-slavery cause. For Finney, being Christian and seeking justice were inseparable.

Seeking justice for the poor is an expression of our relationship with God.Jeremiah 22:16 says that this is what it means to know God. And in the end, that’s how we’ll be judged. Matthew 25 is the only description we see in the gospels of the last judgment. The questions we’ll be asked on that day concern how we treated the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoner, the refugee.Because Jesus identifies so closely with them, he says that when we do it to them, we do it to Jesus himself. Jesus wants us to see him in the poor and the outcast, and to feed them, to love them.

Commitment to the poor and seeking justice is simply not an option for the Christian. Serving the poor has to be in our very DNA, as it was for Jesus and the early church. Let’s be sure to keep our Bibles holy and not holey.

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