Courage to stand against injustice

This post is totally lifted from the intro to a brilliant book - Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen (the founder of the International Justice Mission). If reading this, God stirs you about the injustice that is rife in our world, then read the book - you won't be the same again.

"CS Lewis said 'courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.'

As Christians we have learned much about sharing the love of Christ with people all over the world who have never heard the gospel. We coninue to see the salvation message preached in the far corners of the earh and to see indigenous Christian churches vigorously extending Christ's kingdom on every continent. We have learned how to feed the hungry, heal the sick and shelter the homeless.

But there is one thing we haven't learned to do, even though God's Word repeatedy calls us to the task. We haven't learned how to rescue the oppressed. For the child held in forced prostitution, for the prisoner illegally detained and tortured, for the widow robbed of her land, for the child sold into slavery, we have almost no vision of how God could use us to bring tangible rescue. We don't know how to get the 12 year old girl out of the brothel, how to have the prisoner set free, how to have the widow's land returned to her or how to get the child slave released and the oppressors brought to justice.....we sit in the same paralysis of despair as those who don't even claim to know a Saviour.

It need not be this way. We can recover a witness of Christian courage in a world of injustice. We can rediscover our Maker's passions for the world and for justice - passions which may have grown unfamiliar to us. We can come to know the compassion of Jesus like never before as we go with Him to look into the eyes of those who are in need of rescue. We can be restored to the conviction that God is prepared to use us to 'seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow' (Isaiah 1:17).

Our God is a God who spends His days weeping beside children in brothels, prisoners in pain or orphans in trauma - a God whose core hatred of injustice is rivaled only by His hatred of idolatry."