As You Go – Pray

“The human spirit can endure a sick body, but who can bear a crushed spirit?” Proverbs 18:14

A crushed spirit seems to be a perfect description of how we are living through these first months of 2020. If the pandemic was not bad enough, during the last several weeks, newscasts have painted pictures of unwarranted deaths followed by destruction and anarchy. The ugliness of these months again raised questions about how we treat each other.  The picture painted by the world is one of despair. It offers false hope in the wrong ways and methods. When we hear the news and read the accounts of the day, we can quickly lose hope and seek to respond to the narrative in the world’s ways.

It is imperative that the church takes back the narrative that is being told. The church in America and around the world has not always responded well to race relations. We have blemishes in our history; yet when the church body is vibrant and walking closely with Jesus, the church has fought the injustice of slavery and its untold evils. We can offer the only true hope in how to care for each other regardless of race.

Andrew Murray penned the following powerful words in the late 1800s. Murray, a South African pastor and writer, knew the only hope for his nation would be in the unleashing of God’s power into the lives of the people.

“Note how God has placed the races side by side to see if our Christianity will enable us to overcome race hatred. Will we, in the power of Christ’s love, prove that “In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us (Colossians 3:11)?”

What an opportunity there is for the church to prove the power of God’s love to change race hatred into brotherly love! God has abundant power to make this happen. As Christians, we need to pray for ourselves and for each other that we would obey the Word of God and live in the power of Christ’s love.”

Evil will always seek to divide and destroy. Only as we seek to daily abide in Christ will we be able to change the narrative that is so desperately needed in our time. Each generation will face the same challenges and the same response will be given to them as to us, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” (John 15:4)

The narrative of the world will always be destruction and division. Our narrative must be one of unity and hope. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Jesus Christ did not say “Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.” The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.”

We change the narrative when we tell how from the foundation of time, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27).

We change the narrative when we proclaim, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

We change the narrative when we show the world the true church as being “a great multitude that on one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb…” (Revelations 7:9)

We offer a narrative of hope because “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

God is great,

Pastor Lynn