Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:27
I've been thinking about and trying to become saturated with this verse over the last couple of weeks. I've been re-evaluating my ideas about what it really means to "do church". I'm thinking that Jesus never really intended for church to be a building with people meeting at designated times just waiting for the hurt and lost to come to them. It seems to me that Jesus was about going to where the hurt and lost people were. It can sometimes be easy to hide from the world in order to avoid being polluted. But how can you reach to the hurting and the lost if you're hiding? I want my religion to be pure and faultless (one translation says pure and undefiled). Therefore, I must go outside the walls of "the church". I must fortify myself with the scriptures, prayer and accountability with other Christians and reach out in a way in which God has specifically designed me to do. I came across a prayer that speaks to this:
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor. author unknown
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