Video – Evil Requires More Than a Spiritual Response

Posted on February 22, 2013 by tdillmuth

Pastor Tim challenges us to look at our faith as more than a spiritual, “touchy-feely” experience.  He continues by quoting Jay Adams as saying that our feelings can often be nothing more than the result of an “unfortunate combination of pickles, bananas, ketchup, and the weather.”  It’s important to remember that God created us to be spirit, soul and body and the physical nature of our faith is extremely important to understanding God and to the Work of Mercy of Doing Good.

For all of the latest podcasts on Doing Good and on past Works of Mercy visit our Seoul USA Podcast Page!

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Justice is an Attitude

Posted on February 20, 2013 by tdillmuth

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Post by Pastor Tim – In Micah 6:8, justice goes hand in hand with the attitude of mercy.  It says, “He has showed you, O mortal, what is good.  And what does the LORD require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

TheInternational Standard Bible Encyclopedia says,

The Scriptures most often conceive God’s justice, or righteousness, as the action of His mercy. Just as with man justice means the relief of the oppressed and needy, so God’s justice is His kingly power engaged on behalf of men, and justice and mercy are constantly joined together. He is “a just God and a Savior” (Isa 45:21). “I bring near my righteousness (or “justice”) …. and my salvation shall not tarry” (Isa 46:13).”

Justice and mercy not only go hand in hand, but mercy is the attitude that animates justice.

Jonah is a great example of justice without the attitude of mercy.  In Jonah 4, Jonah is chided by God for pitying a plant, instead of pitying human beings.  Jonah was most interested in the Ninevites being shown judgment, but he was not so interested in any mercy that God would give.

This is further amplified by stories like Les Miserables (which I love by the way), in which the policeman Javert, exercises strict justice without so much of a hint of mercy.  As readers, we are almost left to feel that Javert’s mercy-lacking justice borders on injustice!

This idea permeates the Old Testament with justice being tied to a special concern for the poor and the vulnerable in as far as it relates to their God-given rights (for a good explanation on these rights see the book In the Shadow of the Cross).  Passages like Jeremiah 5:27-28, Psalm 146:7-10 and Amos 2:6-7 show God’s justice towards these groups, but Psalm 68:5 gives us a picture of the attitude of justice.  It says, “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.”   Not only does God care about the orphan and the widow, but he identifies with them.

For my children, wanting justice when they are wronged comes much more easily than feeling mercy when others are exclude.  That’s why my wife and I encourage them to seek out the other kids in school who don’t have many friends.  I tell them to talk with them, to eat lunch with them and to defend them.  My wife and I are also extremely careful about how we model our attitudes towards the elderly, the homeless, and those that are generally different than us.  Our children soak up our words, our actions, and our feelings, and we don’t want them to see attitudes of indifference or superiority.

As a church, we are studying the Work of Mercy of doing good, and I’m reminded how foundational the attitude of mercy is to doing good.  This seems rather obvious, but what might not be so obvious is that mercy is equally foundational to Biblical justice.

The most important picture of the action of justice with the attitude of mercy is Jesus on the cross.  At the cross, salvation, mercy, justice and doing good meet without a hint of disagreement or separation (Isaiah 53:4-5).

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Richard Baxter’s 14 Directions For Loving And Doing Good To Your Enemies

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Pastor Foley

WLO_doinggoodThe older I get, the more I value what might be termed “practical divinity” over “spooky spirituality.” The Christian life, in other words, is a whole lot more everyday-ish than we give it credit for, culturally wired as we are to treasure personal spiritual highs over the inglorious grind of growing to be like Christ while we wait in supermarket checkout lines and toil away in our work cubicles.

(I think Wesley had this in mind when he said that the only holiness worth having was social holiness. I don’t think he was reaching here only for vaunted concepts like “social justice” and “human rights.” I think he was primarily indicating that if your religion didn’t show out from under your outer garments when you were just sitting in a room with somebody–anybody–it probably wasn’t a religion that was worth much, anyway.)

To the end of growing in practical divinity, give a few minutes’ consideration this week to Puritan Richard Baxter’s fourteen “directions” for loving and doing good to enemies. The whole list is actually less than a page long, but there’s more than enough here to permanently transform both your supermarket checkout and office cubicle experiences with enemies. You may even end up with a personal spiritual high, to boot.

Consider Baxter’s Direction V:

Study, and search, and hearken after all the good which is in your enemies. For nothing will be the object of your love, but some discerned good. Hearken not to them that would extenuate and hide the good that is in them.

Rev. Michael Phillips convicts not only himself but me with his comment on Baxter here:

It is possible, in other words, to hate someone without becoming a devil. Your enemies may have many good qualities. You’re obliged to recognize these good traits and to admire them. This is the opposite of what I do. If someone does me wrong, I tend to magnify his every fault and minimize his every good trait. If he’s a loving husband or hard worker or honest man–that’s nothing to me! If he did me wrong, he’s a two-fold child of hell!

Equally convicting is Baxter’s Direction VIII:

Be not unnecessarily strange to your enemies; but be as familiar with them as well as you can. For distance and strangeness cherish suspicious and false reports, and enmity; and converse in kind familiarity, hath a wonderful power to reconcile.

Much easier to fire off an indignant email than to pick up the phone; much easier to rehearse harms to sympathetic listeners than to call one’s enemy and begin to try to work things out over lunch.

Yet while you are working through problems with your enemy over a spinach salad don’t neglect Baxter’s Direction XIII:

But stop not in your enemy’s corporal good, and in his reconciliation to yourself; for then it will appear to be all but a selfish design which you are about. But labour to reconcile him to God , and save his soul, and then it will appear to be the love of God, and him that moved you.

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