More than Slactivists

Social justice starts with you. Social justice starts with me. It's easy to share a video on Facebook. It's just as easy to throw a Christian fundraiser or awareness event. It's much harder to practice what we preach and to be men and women of justice. It's much harder to care about and confront the poverty, loneliness, cheating, and sexual immorality that we see around us and deal with every day.

If we say we care so much about world poverty and world hunger, why are we so reluctant to give a few dollars to the homeless guy on the street? If we say we care about the widows and orphans of the world, why is it so difficult for us to approach that girl sitting by himself at large group or sit down with that lonely guy in the cafeteria? If we say that we care about the cheated and those we take what isn't theirs, why is it that so many of us "Christians" still cheat on homeworks and projects and tolerate others cheating on exams? Yes, I'm telling you to be a rat. If you see cheating, report it. If you see your friends cheating, confront them about it, and if they don't stop, report it. Do you think the social justice workers that prosecute the oppressed aren't hated and persecuted themselves? If we can't even deal with the trouble of reporting someone for cheating, do we really think that we will be able to report criminals when the consequences are that much more serious? If we say we care about sex trafficking and child prostitution, can we not stop watching porn and contributing to the industry that drives these atrocities? Aren't we, just like those sick people we hear about, imposing our sexual will and fantasies on other children of God, created in His image?

All of these things, God hates. God hates apathy, cheating, lying, stealing, pride, sexual immorality, and he hates it as much inside of our hearts as out in the world. If we leave the sin in our hearts undealt with and claim to care about the apathy, cheating, lying, stealing, oppression, and sexual immorality of the world, are we not being hypocrites of the most epic kind?

But thanks to God, there's hope for hypocrites like you and me, and that hope is in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was born into a poor, refugee family of an oppressed people that had been ostracized from the community. Jesus was the kind of person that slactivists like us are supposed to get all riled up about - a son in a single-parent home of an oppressed people. But we didn't make an emotionally-manipulative video about him, we didn't send him a shoebox of goodies every Christmas, we didn't send $30 a month to sponsor him. No, we religious folk, we "activists", we giver of alms - we killed him. Friends, apart from the saving grace of God, we have no power to do any good or think any good thoughts, much less make a "positive difference" in the world. We ended up killing the most postive influence the world could possibly imagine! In the end, it is only Jesus that can redeem the world. It is on the cross that God's righteousness, justice, love, and mercy met, and it is only through the cross that we can have any hope for the evil, sickness, and wickedness in the world and the evil, sickness, and wickedness in our hearts.

By the grace of God, we can be more than slactivists who only care about justice when it's convenient and when it feels good. By the grace of God, let's learn to hate sin as God hates sin, and by the power of God, let's be men and women of justice, men and women of integrity.

"He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
- Micah 6:8