At some point, we have- perhaps unconsciously- decided that the particularly raggedy, piss smelling man who haunts the corner of Telegraph and Derby, the one who swings his arms at you and stumbles in what must be a drunken stupor, muttering what sounds like angry dementia but garners the suspicion of an incantation- that man, he is beyond hope. Or perhaps we would not willfully admit to ourselves that we think him to be beyond the hope of Jesus, not with that phrasing, but we certainly fear him and cannot imagine him having a "normal" life in any capacity at any point in the future. We have already decided that he will not become the next John Piper or Martin Luther; this man will not marry or raise a family in a God-center home, or travel overseas as a missionary that our local church sponsors. No, in our minds he is confined to the street corner where his stained slip of cardboard and sleeping bag stay. He is imbedded, static, and his only change will either be death or deeper descent into un-personhood. The idea of a full and meaningful recovery, of spiritual victory and an intimate relationship with Jesus that would allow this man to speak at your retreat or become your favorite youth pastor, does not enter your mind. You see the shadow of a human, and God's image is all but obscured, and the stench of danger is making you clench the straps of your backpack a little tighter and finger the plastic grip of your pepper spray with a slight tremble.
What do we lose, what violence do we breathe out, what truth are we blind to, if we realize that we have allowed our flesh to determine which people are too far gone? Did you make a judgment independent from God? Did you assume His decision? Have you decided that you know for certain whom He will have mercy on and whom He will not? Did this pronouncement come from the Lord, His Spirit, or His Word, or did it originate in you?
The same God asks, when you struggle with your insecurities, "Who told you that you were ugly? Did I? What have I told you about yourself, you who I call 'Joy of My Heart' and 'My Delight is in Her' and 'Beautiful Child'?" He then asks, with firmness coated with unexpected gentleness, "Who told you that this one was ugly or beyond hope?"
Perhaps you acknowledge that yes, God is of course capable of lifting that man from his squalor and yes Jesus has promised to save all those He has chosen to be His, no matter where they come from. But does that objective knowledge and truth translate into any sort of subjective experience for you? Does it become a conviction that moves your heart into alignment with God's? Are you suddenly caught up in God's urgent desire to rush up and pull His beloved into His arms as a husband would when finding his wife shaking after being sexually assaulted at work, or after she has fallen into another spiral of self harm and soul crushing anxiety after some months of progress? Do you feel God's righteous anger at the Enemy or His outpour of gentle love as Mother Theresa might have when she found the babies that had been tossed into the sewage drains and trash bins of Calcutta?
It may not even just be the homeless man. It's the delinquents from your high school, the frat boys and privileged snobs. It's the classmates who are a little too far right or far left. It's the Trump supporters or the socialist fanatics. It's your unbelieving and abusive parent, it's the friend that suddenly turned into a druggy and was now "too worldly" for you to really consider, it's the ones you cut off and the ones that left, the ones you forgot about and the ones who forgot about you.
Do you feel the pain? Or do you feel the indifference to your indifference? I have. There is an acute sense of your own heart's inability, so numb that you know you should fear God or have some sort of emotional experience of the weight of your sin but feel that to be impossible. Is there a lack of concern that sparks some hint of concern?
But maybe you think: not everyone is called to be a volunteer at the food bank or serve in homeless ministry. Not everyone has that calling. I tithe and the church can decide to feed and minister to the lost. I'm more of a "have conversations with the unbelieving friends I care about" type of Christian, or a "mentor the other Christians in my college ministry." It's not about feelings, and someone else will get it done. I have my own struggles, my own mental health, and my own life with too much in it to figure out and deal with.
God cares about all those struggles in your life, big or small. You are right to attend to them, or rather ask God to lovingly attend to them. And if you are more specifically called to other types of ministry, if God has uniquely shaped you and led you to teaching or witnessing in your company or art, by all means ask the Lord to carry you towards His wonderful plans for your joy and His delight in your joy! It is true that God may not call you to be a Mother Theresa, to dedicate the majority of your time to feeding the poor.
But consider this: God wants your joy to be full. Jesus told His disciples in John 15:9-11,
"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full."
I have written before about the notion that God loves us by allowing us to enjoy the very things that make Him supremely happy (see article "Enter Into the Joy of Your Master"); He invites us into the things that make Him smile, things that will make our hearts full of joy. Jesus explicitly expresses His desire for our joy to be full; He cares about your happiness and your joy because He says HIS JOY IN US! He delights when He sees us fully happy in Him, when we gratefully accept and savor the ice cream He handed us after we've had a really bad day at school, when we allow Him to hug us and love us back to life in the darkest hour of loneliness and depression.
One of the ways God shared His joys with Jesus while He was on Earth was to allow Him to care for the lame, the poor, the untouchables that society had labeled as too far gone. If you read carefully and allow the Holy Spirit to minister to you, you'll see Jesus' joy and intense delight in helping and deeply, personally loving such people. For Him, it was deeply satisfying and He even says that the opportunity to love and share the Gospel with the Samaritans, another group of "untouchables", is satisfying enough to replace a physical meal in a time of bodily hunger (John 4:31-36). Indeed, He here notes that He and God the Father, the reaper and sower, will rejoice and celebrate together at the love and care they get to pour out on these people, on the new intimacy they'll get to share with these supposedly unwanted humans- to them, it's as good as a feast.
So perhaps now we see why Jesus urges us to also follow God's ways and keep His commandments- that in doing so, we may also taste the joy Jesus Himself tasted. Jesus makes the radical statement that God loves us even as He loves Jesus (John 17: 23, 26)- it almost sounds blasphemous. Yet we are invited to experience deepest pleasure alongside God and in God because, as John Piper says,
"God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him."
God is Love, and when we recognize how good He is, how wonderful His Love is and how sweet it is to receive personal and insurmountable riches of love, then He is glorified because we see the beauty of Him as Himself. He is recognized as beautiful because His love is beautiful. And so, in the nature of love as effusion and intensely joyous desire in pouring out everything wonderful onto the Beloved for the sake of the Beloved's joy, in smiling in deep satisfaction when the Beloved is satisfied, God invites us to join Him in His enjoyment of caring for the poor.
Most of us don't even realize, imagine, or fathom such a satisfaction and inexpressible joy that could come out of this. We may not trust that this is truly the way to happiness. We think we know what will make us happy and God must be forcing us to take a path for His own glory with disregard for our true contentment. Wrong! Our flesh and our hearts are deceitful, and they lead us to dissatisfaction, emptiness, lack of purpose, and great sorrow. Beg God to help you trust His love for you, trust the way He provides for your joy, for the reception of the intimacy and love and attention you crave. Do what Jesus does, and you will abide in Him and find your joy.
In this light, we may consider God's insistence that we remember the poor (Psalm 41:1, Galatians 2:10, Deuteronomy 15:7-8, 10-11) as the call to not miss out on an aspect of His deep, personal love for you, as well as an expression of His love for others.
I will close with two Scriptures and one snippet of Mother Theresa's testimony, as well as a quote from the lesser-known Saint Maria of Paris.
James warns us that we are not to show partiality or bias between rich and poor when we are serving, for in doing so we spurn the very mercy God has shown to us. James 2:2-6, 8-9, 12-13 reads,
" For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, 3 and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” 4 have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? 5 Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court?...If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9 But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment."
Mother Theresa often quoted Matthew 25: 34-40:
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[f] you did it to me.’
In Eric Metaxas' biography of this beloved daughter of God (found in his book Seven Women), he notes, "Mother Theresa said that she saw Jesus in every man, woman, or child she met, and she treated them accordingly. She thought the biggest problem on earth was being unloved...She wanted to show the love of Christ in all she did- in helping the malnourished child and the woman dying in the gutter. To her, all these were simply 'Jesus in His distressing disguise,' as she put it" (p.168). Can you imagine treating the poor and the unloved the same way you would treat Jesus if He were standing before you in the flesh? Do we take Jesus' statements in Matthew 25 as seriously as we should? I know I don't, and I am asking God to help me with that.
Metaxas' also emphasizes Mother Theresa's horror at the "indignity of passing away in the gutters, being gnawed on by rats", sharing that "She wrote in her diary about helping an ill woman she found on the street get to the hospital. The woman was refused care because she could not pay. 'She died on the street. I knew then I must make a home for the dying, a resting place for people going to heaven...We cannot let a child of God die like an animal in the gutter'"(p.175).
Similarly, Saint Maria of Paris (also written of in Metaxas' book), said this in response to those her criticized her unorthodoxy and "too extreme" commitment to helping the unclean and destitute: "'At the Last judgment...I will not be asked...how many bows I have made before the divine altar. I will be asked whether I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and the prisoner in his jail. That is all that will be asked" (p.98).
I challenge us all to invite God to open our hearts to the poor, that we might have a ravenous hunger to give and be generous, that we might greatly desire to see God touch the lives of the hopeless, that we might share in His joy and not miss out, by grace and grace-given willingness, not our own willfulness. Ask trusted brothers and sisters to keep you accountable.
Note: According to Calvinist tradition (and, I would add, the Bible), it is true that not everyone is chosen for Christ's salvation. Some will experience the wrath of God and be given up entirely to the passions of their flesh (Romans 1:24, Matthew 13:47-50). But all the same, we are still called to love our enemies, serve the poor, and share in God's joy by obeying His commandments. We must also be wary of assuming that one who may be one of His sheep is, according to our standards, too far gone. This article stresses heart examination, encouraging readers to seek the Lord that He may reveal and destroy the sins of lukewarmness, pride, partiality, and indifference in their lives so that they may enter into His joy with a new heart that matches His.