Doing Justice and Loving Mercy: Compassion Ministries, Student Workbook, SW16

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D O I N G J U S T I C E A N D L O V I N G M E R C Y : C O M P A S S I O N M I N I S T R I E S

This lesson focuses upon how we as disciples of Jesus are to apply ourselves to demonstrating Christ’s kingdom ethic of doing justice and loving mercy to the very ends of the earth. We are world Christians, striving to think globally but act locally. As members of the Church we are called to demonstrate freedom, wholeness, and justice in its engagement with the world, responding in love, obeying the leading of its head, the Lord Jesus Christ. In obedience to him, we give witness of the Kingdom’s ethic on the major issues pertaining to the world today, and in this lesson we have concentrated upon poverty and oppression, the human environment, ethnocentrism and difference, and war and violence. Listed below are the central concepts covered in this lesson on these issues. Review them carefully. As disciples of Jesus Christ and members of his body, the Church, we are charged with the duty to apply his kingdom ethic of doing justice and loving mercy to the very ends of the earth. Believers are not called to live unconcerned to the issues and populations of the world. Rather, we are called by God to be “world Christians” (not worldly ones), thinking globally but acting locally . As members of the Church, each local congregation is both an outpost and beachhead of the Kingdom, called to demonstrate freedom, wholeness, and justice in its engagement with the world, responding in love, obeying the leading of its head, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are called to engage in open and honest dialogue with others, to seek the truth and speak it to power, and demonstrate the Kingdom’s ethic as we engage the great issues of our communities and our time. We are called to engage them, even in those cases when the likelihood of changes seems small. A sampling of some of the critical issues of our time which Christ’s representatives are called to address are poverty and oppression, protection of the environment, dealing with ethnocentrism and difference, and responding to war and violence. In regards to these issues we are to act personally, congregationally, and as associations of churches together. We must respond aggressively to poverty and oppression and the protection of the environment in our own locales, grounding our responses in a biblical worldview that highlights God’s sovereignty as Creator and Lord of the earth. Doing so will allow us to freely and practically model in specific projects what it means to demonstrate the justice and mercy of God at home and abroad.

Summary of Key Concepts

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