Justice, why do I even care? Why should you even care? If I had a quarter for the amount of times I have had conversations about this issue I would have a a couple of bucks, OK, that doesn’t seem like much, but it has been asked of me multiple times. Most of the conversations have been from churches and missionaries who were asking me where Jesus fits into my passion for justice. I guess it is time to come out of the closet and come clean. Why do I care about justice? Well because Jesus does. Isaiah 61:8 (the theme verse for Steps of Justice) say’s “For I the LORD love justice.” There you have it, I love justice because I am a follower of Jesus and Jesus loves justice and commands us to “do justice’ (Micah 6:8).
Honestly, that is it. Jesus says the greatest commandment is to Love God and to Love others. He also says that true religion is this, to look after orphans and widows and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27). So I see the greatest way to love others is by introducing them to Jesus and in His name caring for them, weather they are a lonely widow in the church, a homeless man/woman on the street in your city, or one of the millions who are currently suffering and dying in Somalia as a result of the famine.
As a follower of Jesus I care about the things that Jesus cares about. When Steps of Justice takes people on trips, like the last one that we went on to Cambodia we have a few objectives:
1. Meet the needs of the people in the region we are serving. Weather that be the long term workers or the people that the long term missionaries/churches are serving.
2. We want people to meet Jesus. Yep, we believe that if you die with a full belly but without Jesus that you go to hell. We also believe that if you introduce someone to Jesus but don’t meet their physical needs that you are not giving them a real representation of who Jesus is, which is also an injustice.
3. We want to ruin peoples lives. We want the people who come with us on the trips to go home wrecked and ruined. I want their lives to change. I don’t necessarily want them to change the direction of their lives, just the reasons they are going in the directions that they are.
So there you have it. We are unashamedly and un-apologetically all about Jesus. We believe this is the only way to do true justice, as followers of the one who says “love others as you love yourself.”
Written by Phil Cunningham
