we're all bastards, but God loves us anyways

another post already. but this is important stuff. delicious food for thought. :]

we are reading Mere Discipleship for MI. its a tough book, but when you pay attention and understand what he is saying...it's crazy. i feel like half of my pages are underlined and i have writing all in the margins.

this section on worship, talked about war and loving your enemies.
the beginning talks about why Christians should oppose war. i have been struggling through this idea for a while, whether or not to support war or not. jill and i were talking and she said its hard because we are supposed to love our neighbor, but at the same time, we are called to support our brothers and sisters fighting for our freedom. so. some quotes from the book.

' confessing 'Jesus is Lord' means taking Jesus seriously as Lord, as the authority for the believer: Caesar commands us to kill our enemies, but Jesus cammands us to love them...Jesus calls us to forgiveness and holiness...it is for this reason that Christians ought not to kill thier enemies. christian nonviolence is not rooted merely in a few proof texts from the Sermon on the Mount or other Gospel accounts of the teaching of Jesus. Much more, Christian nonviolence flows out of the entire narrative of redemption and floows immediately from worshiping the God revealed in the slaughtered Lamb. disciples do not advocate nonviolence because of an 'optimistic' assessment of human nature. Christians do not advocate nonviolence becauser they naively believe that 'being nice to people' always makes people 'be nice' in returen. nor do Christians advocate nonviolence because they simply assume that we can 'all get along.' the narrative of redemption is more realistic than this... we do not fight wars because the kingdom of God has come, in which war is banished, in which it is possible to order our lives according to the justice and peace of God. Christian nonviolence is always rooted in the narrative of redemption.'

good stuff.

then. he goes on to talk about loving our enemies...which is very hard for me. studying trafficking and prostitution this year had been good in that i am gaining knowledge and developing a passion to help girls. but i get so angry at these men who take advantage of young girls and think that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing...

'the point of the gospel is not that we love the 'good people' and hate the 'bad people,' but that we love as God loves, unclusively, extravagantly.' the fear deep within us rebels at such love, balks at such indiscriminate grace, recoils at such wholesale forgiveness. such love appears to cut across the grain of our souls..such love refuses to take sides, refuses to play the power games, refuses to simplistically see one class of people as 'good' and the others as 'evil.' such love...is the hard owrk of self-sacrificially giving for the true good of another, who desperately needs to be loved...victory comes only through love.'

you know what this means. Jesus love those men who abuse women, who hurt kids, who sexually expliot young girls. they are sinners just like me. i am called to love them. but, gosh, it is hard!

ultimately though, for trafficking and prostitution to stop, we must deal with the demand. we can teach the girls all we want, work tirelessly to keep them safe and help as many as we can, but unless we love the men like Christ does, nothing will change. it is so easy to help the victim, but so much hard to help the abuser...but they need Christ just as much as the victim. ah. sometimes i hate when God hits me on the head with a 2 by 4. so. im praying that walls and barriers, I PUT UP, will be knocked down and that i could have a Christ like love for these men and women. it's hard...

'the opposite of love, for John (1 John 2:4-6, 4:20), is not apathy --pointing us yet again to the fact that 'love' out not to be construed as a feeling, but as an action, self-sacrificially acting for the good of another.'

peace.