JustDad.Blog

I want to tackle the first part of this passage first: Visiting orphans and widows in their distress.

Have you spent any time reflecting on this passage…. To be honest… until recently I hadn’t.

Partially, it was because when I came upon this passage I was the one who needed to be visited and my temporal distress meant I wasn’t exactly up for being the embodiment of it.

Then I think I just put the verse on the back burner somewhere.

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This all changed when one of my wife’s friends lost her husband. It became real. We aren’t super close with this family… though we have tried lately.

When someone loses someone like this… it’s messy. It hurts.

And when you have someone in your life like this… it’s messy… it hurts. It should be…Losing one’s husband…. Losing one’s father hurts… and we are called to bear one another’s burdens.

Is this the vision of pure and undefiled religion you have?

Honestly it wasn’t mine. I grew up in a small reformed church in a small town. Church… religion looked to me like suits and ties. Looking good on the outside.

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See I think you have to read the second part of this passage in light of the first. Keeping oneself unstained from the world may be easy when you distance yourself from it….

It’s not when you don’t.

What Jesus has called us to IS NOT EASY.

He describes it as “taking up your cross every day to follow him”

The man is the one who died on a cross… a humiliating gruesome bloody death by asphyxiation… AFTER being ripped to pieces by flogging. Flogging was not a lash.. it was a whip with pieces of bone and stone grabbing onto your back and ripping out your flesh…

Yeah that’s the guy we follow. And he compares what he is calling us to… to that.

If that seems hard. It is. Of course he also would probably say here: “With man this is impossible… with God all things are possible”

Make no mistake. The life Jesus calls you to will require HIM in it.

I implore you! Get Him. It is the best, most difficult, most beautiful, most agonizing, most joyful life you could ever have…

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I’ve tried to run from Him… it doesn’t work. He has chased me down…. Given me proverbial kisses and hugs. Sat me on his lap and loved me.…

There are very few days… very few where I’ve run from him and been aware of it. Like Jonah, these were some of the most perilous days of my life. Other days I have run from Him and didn’t know it. He had a ton of mercy on me…. But running got me in a bad bind.

You see I didn’t realize how much I needed Him until I wasn’t leaning on Him.

I thought I could somehow be myself. Somehow be fully loving without leaning in on Jesus… I was wrong.

I tried living a life without that love…..

And found I missed it.

I need His love people!

Everything good about me comes from Him: Comes from His love. And when I’m aware of this. I don’t care that I have nothing good in myself.

I’m just like my daughter. Resting in her Fathers arms and screaming at the very notion of being separate from Him.

And he doesn’t mind this neediness. See unlike me he has the unquenchable energy of the Ancient of Days. The eternal appetite of infancy… he wasn’t cut off from the tree of life like we were… He IS the TREE OF LIFE!

Ok… so what DOES it mean to be unstained from the world. Certainly not absence from it.

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Last night my buddy and I went down to a local park looking for people to pray for. Unlike previous times every person he had us seek after already knew Him in some capacity.

We were about to leave when my friend stopped us. We were walking by three people sitting on the bleachers.

God gave my friend a prompting to stop and pray for healing. We will call my friend Bruce.

Bruce asks these three people: “do any of you have shoulder pain?”

They all kinda looked at us like we were weird.

“You see my friend Sam and I come out and pray for people on Wednesdays, and I felt like God prompted me to stop… do you have any physical pain we can pray for”

A “young” man… probably older than me, who we will call Keith, told us that he did have Hip pain when he walked.

To make a longer story short… God healed Keith last night. Keith even went up and made a jump shot to double check. Completely healed.

Turns out Keith is a believer in Jesus who does WAY more outreach than Bruce or I ever do.

When Bruce went to exchange numbers with Keith… Keith suddenly stopped us…

He told us “ I believe in destiny… I had a dream about this moment.. I only realized it after you gave me your name… God gave it to me two years ago”

WILD!!!

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Ok back to orphans, widows, and pure and undefiled religion.

If I read the Bible correctly…. And I read it through the lens of Jesus walking this earth with us… the reason why we need a line about keeping yourself unstained from the world is this. If you do it Jesus way: you are going to be all up in the world’s grill.

Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, he took a personal interest in orphans and widows… One time when visiting a town this happens:

“As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.”‭‭‬‬

Luke‬ ‭7‬:‭12‬-‭17‬ ‭ESV

My guess is this son was the only chance this woman had for someone to take care of her in her old age…she had already lost her husband and had no other children. On top of that they didn’t exactly have social security in the first century. On top of this… she was probably pretty attached to the boy.

Jesus reached out his hand and literally pulls him back from death.

You are now called to do this. To pull people back from death…. Someone may or may not literally rise from the dead. This is one miracle I have not personally witnessed yet. Looking forward to it though.

Not someone dying, someone rising.

The question of why Jesus just doesn’t do this every time is much beyond our human understanding….BUT

I know one thing. If you are His follower.. now YOU are the answer to an orphans prayers for a father or the widows prayers for a husband. You are called to step in and love these people.

James put it this way:

“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
‭‭James‬ ‭2‬:‭14‬-‭17‬ ‭ESV‬‬

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I implore you! If you know Jesus: have living faith. Go out on the streets and pray for the sick. Go to the orphans and widows in your life and love them.

Give with no expectation of return… and Jesus Himself will reward you.

No joke. I gotta be honest. When I am able to give to someone who has need… and I am able to do it in pure motive… or I help pray for someone and God heals them.

That moment is a reward unto itself. When I see God move… I light up on fire… reminded that He is good… what he does…

So…incredibly… GOOD.

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Post-Script:

In case you need it… I remind you that Jesus’ primary examples of what it means to love like God loves… to love your neighbor as yourself…are two parables that put this to action…and the life he lived.

1. The Good Samaritan (Luke 10) the Good Samaritan gets down in the ditch with a man who was beaten to take care of him…. And provides for all his needs as he gets better.

2. The Prodigal Father (Luke 15): traditionally known as the parable of the prodigal son…. The Father runs to the son who has wished him dead, squandered his entire inheritance, and probably still has pig slop on him. I’m told that in middle eastern culture… a father such as this would never have run like he did. It would have been considered undignified. Yeah God doesn’t Care about that.

3. Jesus Life: Jesus often healed lepers. In doing so he would have been considered unclean by the Old Testament law. Not sinful… just unclean. There’s a difference.

Being unstained from the world in these instances doesn’t mean being physically clean or even spiritually unaffected….

It means.

1. (Good Samaritan) Not getting so angry that you go off and kill the peoples that put the man in the ditch.

It means

2. (Prodigal Son/Father) Not going and squandering your own wealth because of what the other person did, but instead loving him

It means

3. (Example of the Life of Jesus) Healing lepers, casting out demons… without taking on the leprosy and demons yourself. When I come home from a “healing” journey my wife and I pray over myself that I wouldn’t bring any of the evil home. Specifically when we run into demonic activity.