Doing What's Easy - Doing What's Right!

Doing what’s right – It seems so easy doesn’t it? We like to think of ourselves as immensely fair-minded people. We like to think of ourselves as always, OK – almost always, doing the right thing. The problem is we have a skewed standard of right and wrong; we like to go by our own standard of justice and fairness, a standard that is more likely to be able to indentify when we are wronged according to our rules than when we have wronged somebody else!

Something as “innocent” as driving – someone drifts over in our lane or cuts in front of us to be able to make a turn and they are an “Idiot”, a “Fool”, or something you don’t generally see printed on the pages of a church bulletin! However, let us commit the same act and we seek to defend ourselves. We motion that we are sorry, justifying in our own mind that we would have had to circle the whole block to come back and make that turn if we didn’t do it now! Really a rather minor point when it comes to justice.

Take some issues that may take a little more research on our part to even find out if they are “just” or not, we give little or no thought to the clothes we buy, who made them, and the conditions under which the people work. We don’t know and prefer to remain ignorant of the fact that the button on our shirt may have been sewn on by a child under 10 years of age who worked 10-12 hours sewing other buttons on other shirts that same day.

We stuff ourselves on dozens of holidays that involve food or B-B-Q, throwing away enough food to feed a starving family for days, and never think about it being unjust or unfair. Some things we just prefer not to know.

We blindly invest in a company because we get an excellent return but fail to question the value, morality, ethics, or quality of the same company. We tend to focus on what we do without rather than the enormous amount of useless convenience items we spend billions of dollars on every year. We get “needs” and “wants” reversed. We base the quality of our lives on how close we come to obtaining the things on our “need/want” list rather than on our inner qualities as a person.

The Old Testament (Leviticus 25:25-38) tells us that we should return things to those in need, that we should give without the thought of getting paid back, and that we are among the lowest of the low if we would even think about charging interest on a loan to an impoverished person. What would happen to our economy if we acted like that, either as a nation or personally?

The parable of The Good Samaritan in the New Testament speaks to justice as helping someone, ANYONE, in need even our worst enemy. The relationship between Samaritans and Jews was not on good terms. Think of it as an Israeli/Palestinian issue and it begins to come into focus. Yet, the Samaritan stopped to help, paid for the treatment out of his own pocket, used his time and resources, and offered to pay anything extra that the recovery process might incur. It doesn’t say he loved the Jew. It doesn’t tell us he is a God-fearing individual. It only speaks to a person doing the right thing regardless of who the right thing was for and without regard for what it might cost the Samaritan personally.

May our vision be improved and our sight be diminished that we might do the same!

Pastor Craig