Practical Resources to Equip You to Start Changing the World Orphan Advocacy - They are hungry, sick, scared, and alone. They are in desperate need of advocates. It is our heart’s cry to stand for them, rescue them, and offer them something beyond mere human compassion, something that will give them hope for this life and the life to come. This is God’s heart – His passion. He sees each one of those precious lives. And He searches the whole earth to find someone who will stand in the gap for them. We are the Body of Christ. We are His hands and feet. What do Christ’s hands and feet do? They bind wounds. They set captives free. They heal the sick. They minister to children. They seek out the sinner. They drive out evil from the temple of God. They walk the road to Calvary. And they are pierced through that we might be saved. If you have chosen the set-apart path of a woman who fears the Lord, your life is not your own. The Spirit of Christ has a claim upon you. You have a call upon your life; you have a job to do. He has called you to minister His love to those in need. This sacred claim is the highest privilege we could ever receive. We can never repay what Christ did for us on the cross. But because He has made us His hands and feet to this world, we have the incredible opportunity to give the very same astounding, transforming love to others that He gave to us. Our act of worship is to offer our bodies to Him as living sacrifices. This is not just sitting in our comfortable church buildings and singing about how much we love Him. It is demonstrating our love for Christ by practically giving it to those in desperate need. James says: “If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:15-17). The world is absolutely flooded with those who are destitute of daily food and clothes. About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes (according to the United Nations), and a huge majority of them are children. That is one person every three and a half seconds. In Latin America and Africa, countless children are addicted to inhalants as a means of deadening their senses to their bodies’ desperate cries for food. In Cambodia, Haiti, and South America, over 2 million girls are trapped in forced prostitution – many die from AIDS before they ever reach 20 years old. Every 14 seconds, a child is orphaned by AIDS in Africa. These precious little ones have a claim on our lives. They are a priority to Christ and therefore must become a priority to us. If we are so preoccupied with self that we will not show the practical, life-changing, hope-giving love of Christ to them, our faith is dead. “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” (James 1:17) The word visit in this verse means to “look upon in order to help or benefit.” We are not to live self-focused, self-indulgent lives with a little Christian morality tacked on. We are to pour out our lives for the least as living sacrifices unto our King. This is just as crucial to the Gospel and the set-apart life as keeping ourselves “unspotted from the world.” Sisters, no matter how many things pull for our attention – let us never forget the cry of the orphan. Click here for practical ways to start changing the world... Start changing the world
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 23:29:41 +0000
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