Broken People, Love, and Cowardly Passivity

See, if you watch their faces. If you watch them walk along, if you see their eyes. At least that’s what they say, if you look into their eyes, there it is. It’s visible, tangible almost. It’s tangible around them, in them, like an aura.

You see them, and what do you do?

There’s the kid who sits alone, wanders the halls, walks with his head down, and he’s verbal, verbal about his depression. He says, “I’ve got no friends.” He says, “I always **** everything up.” Nobody talks to him. They shrug it off. Ignorance is bliss, right?

And there’s the girl who sits there and smiles, talks with you. She laughs at times. Other times, she says something surprising, something like, “Yeah, my mom hates me.” She says it, more serious and undramatic than you’ve seen. She goes on, “I really hate myself too.” Casual as ever, not a hint of comedy in her voice. And then she continues with her life, same old, same old. You see her laugh, study, letter in three sports, and graduate with honors. No one speaks a word. Passivity is comfort, ain’t it?

You go to work and there’s that guy there again, the high up boss-man who never speaks a word to you. And one time you see him, there he is, over in his office, tears in his eyes. He closes the blinds. Everyone hates him anyway. Keeping your mouth shut keeps you safe, isn’t that it?

I’m tired of cliches. My head sometimes seems like a ready-to-burst dam of cliches, spinning around like nothing else. I don’t want repeats of old articles and rewriting of old theses that take the same shape as modern “Christianity” and the hybrid of “Church” and pop culture. Our sociological, political agendas and their antics and tactics are items I wish to discard.

I simply wish to tell you the truth. God’s words are truth (John 17:17).

If we just stop and look around ourselves. If we’d just forget ourselves for one second. Just one freakin’ second.

Then, maybe, maybe we could see the people we oughtta see. And what we’d see is either stumbling blind men or hope-filled forgiven men.

And if we are what we claim to be, then how could we let the blind and broken and poor stumble around with no hope, with no truth of God spoken to them, no Gospel preached to them?

So, if you watch their faces, what do you see? In the faces of your coworkers, your friends, your peers, your teachers, the fast-food worker, the people in the bar lines? In their faces, there it is. As a part of them, as their whole being, there it is: their brokenness.

For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died;and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation;that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:13-21

So there it is. Need I even say a thing more? I have presented some thoughts, and now right above this is the truth, the Scriptures, the words of God Himself.

What else have I left to say, but “we must do this”? We must live to be ambassadors of Christ, to tell people that God has made a way for them, a way of reconciliation.

You see, the faces of those people, the brokenness of their souls, the hopelessness of their lives, it’s all made very clear to us why we see this in them. It’s all now very clear what we must do, isn’t it?

In the midst of all this wickedness of mankind, we recognize that it was quite definitely the same wickedness of our old self. We recognize that that was us.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sinsin which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Ephesians 2:1-3

That WAS us,

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
Ephesians 2:4-7

So what else could we possibly do besides share the Gospel and reach out to hurting souls? We recognize the state of man, the evil of his heart and the wickedness of his soul, and we realize that we were the exact same way.

That is why Christ’s love compels us. It compels us because we have experienced it so lavishly, so incredibly, that to not speak of it would be an absurdity.

We have the ministry of reconciliation because we know mankind is in the kind of state that is beyond reconciliation apart from God.

We know that we are criminals before God by breaking a single law of His.

We know that the payment we must make for our criminal acts is death (Romans 6:23), and that means death in Hell for eternity.

It is because of this knowledge, and what has happened to us, that we must speak, we MUST speak. For the God of the universe to become sin for us that we might become His righteousness, how could we live without speaking?

To know the only way for the Judge to pardon you, and not tell others? To not beg them to be reconciled to God? What kind of people would we be?

And what kind of person am I then?

Ignorance may be bliss, but it is not what we should seek and can get us so far away from bliss we’d wish we’d never been born.

Passivity may give us comfort, but the comfort will fail us in the end and give way to death.

And keeping our mouths shut may keep us safe, but then we may very well watch someone else die at our expense and before our eyes.

I’m tired of passivity, I’m sick. Yet I live with it, I abide in it at times, and it is not right. Cowardice is a path we must not take.

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.’
Revelation 21:8

Forgive me, Father, for my cowardice and passivity. May I act like a man (1 Corinthians 16:13) and bring glory to You. Amen.

All direct verse quotations are taken from the ESV