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

In order to obtain the maximum effect from your study, you must be challenged to truly master the ideas, not merely cover them in class. In order to aid your retention of the key concepts and principles covered in this week’s lesson, you will be quizzed in your next class session on the content of video presentation . In order to prepare for this quiz, it will be necessary for you to spend ample and uninterrupted time covering your notes, focusing especially on the main ideas of the lesson. On a related assignment, make certain that you take the time to read in your textbooks all of the pages listed in preparation for the next lesson’s assigned reading. Please summarize each the readings with no more than a paragraph or two for each, and in this summary please give your best understanding of what you think was the main point in each of the readings. Do not be overly concerned about giving detail; simply write out what you consider to be the main point discussed in that section of the book. Please bring these summaries to class next week. (Please see the “Reading Completion Sheet” at the end of this lesson.) This lesson focused upon God’s character and its relationship to the world, the Church, and the Kingdom of God. As creator and maker of the earth, our God is concerned about the world and those who live within it. The Church is both the locus and agent of the Kingdom of God in the world but not of it. As such, the Church affirms that God is the God of all nature as well as the God of salvation, the God of creation as well as the God of covenant, and the God of justice as well as the God of justification. In its own ministry as the representative of the Kingdom of God, the Church is called to display and announce freedom to the world, to express God’s wholeness in the world, and to stand for God’s justice throughout the world. We also saw in this lesson how the ground for doing justice and loving mercy among the poor in the city is the affirmation of the imago Dei in all of humankind. Every human being is worthy of care because they share in God’s unmatched, unique, and irreplaceable imago Dei . Because all are made in God’s image, all humankind is unique and precious. This image constitutes the reason why we ought to do justice and love mercy among all individuals, families, peoples, and nations on earth. In our next lesson we will explore the lived priority of justice and mercy in the Church of Christ. As a people given over to the responsibility of demonstrating God’s justice and mercy in the world today, the Church is called to create and sustain ministries of mercy and love. This ingenuity in caring is rooted in the practices of justice and mercy in Israel, God’s OT community, and carries over to

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Looking Forward to the Next Lesson