For the Weak and the Powerless

Matthew 13:33

My Heavenly Father,

Thank You for sending Your Son, Jesus Christ, to be the Savior of the world.  Your Gospel has transformed, lives, cultures, nations, and history.  Jesus brought a transformational Gospel that gave hope and direction to a broken civilization.  The Gospel, like leaven in a loaf, has spread to the nations.

Thank You for the social transformation which Your Gospel has brought to the downtrodden and rejected.  Wherever the Gospel of Jesus Christ has gone, it has transformed the lives of women, the sick, the elderly, and children.  Often, these weakest of society are the most exploited, but the Gospel brings genuine care, love, and transformation. 

The power of the Gospel is greater than a socialist revolution in its care for the powerless.  The Gospel is greater than a social justice movement in its care for the weak and ignored.  The Gospel brings more than a reversal of the flow of power into the brokenness of sinful culture.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ brings hope, joy, and love.  Genuine transformation.

But when the weakest of Your Creation are shown the care of genuine love, they are suddenly and somehow empowered.  A broad social movement to empower women, children, ethnic minorities, or impoverished can only occur in a civilization that has a Christian basis.  Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ demands that sort of compassion from its faithful.  Socialists have twisted and distorted these Christian virtues until they are hardly recognizable, but the truth remains that only in a civilization graced by the power of Gospel virtues, can any sort of care for the marginalized germinate into a transformational social movement.

Barclay wrote:  "It is abundantly true that there is nothing in this world so disturbing as Christianity; that is, in fact, the reason why so many people hate it and resent it, and refuse it, and would wish to eliminate it" (William Barclay in The Gospel of Matthew, vol. II, p. 92).

Help me to hold Your mirror to the face of the world I encounter today.  Steady my hand, strengthen my voice, steel my will, and sustain my resolve.  Help me to demonstrate the compassion of Your Son, Jesus Christ, to men, women, and children caught in the sex trades, human trafficking, and war's devastation.  May I not waver in calling my Christian friends to abandon the fornication of pornography.  Help me to call the church to repent of business dealings that fund the exploitation of the innocent.  I desire to join the succession of the faithful who have opposed institutionalized cultural practices promoting sins against the weak.  I will be leaven in the loaf to advance Christ's Kingdom in the world, loudly, silently, faithfully.

In the Name of my Lord and Savior who still changes nations,
Amen.