“And I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse.” Jagger, Richards
We didn’t step up visibly enough back in the days of civil rights demonstrations in the early 60s. We could have. Our theology gave us every right to, and urged us to. But we didn’t. We were blind. And now our silence at that noble moment in American history is embarrassing to us. More of us could have been there and should have been there. But so many of us lost that opportunity forever. We still regret it.
But God, in mercy, is giving us a new opportunity.
If you are an American Christian who believes that the justice of God has direct implications for how we must treat one another, if you are offended that other Americans, including some you don’t warm up to personally, are treated inhumanely, if you long for revival and the moral renewal of our nation, if you don’t mind not knowing fully in advance where your next step of obedience to Christ might take you, but you’re fine with that, because you do know where disobeying Him will surely take you, if it’s okay with you to be publicly identified with some co-belligerents who disagree with you and you with them on other important questions and you might be misjudged by some of your friends because of that linkage, but you’re fine with that because you’re the only one who has to live with your conscience, if you’ve been mistreated yourself and you know what it’s like to be humiliated and excluded and shamed and rendered less than fully human by people whose lives have been so privileged they don’t even understand what they’re doing, but you’ve been rubbed so raw that by now your heart is too free to care what those people say or do, if you’re the kind of Christian who longs for your generation to see the beauty of the real Jesus publicly displayed with such clarity that he cannot be ignored any more, then you have a new opportunity. It’s 2014, not 1964, but you haven’t missed your chance.
The first step you can take, right now, is to settle the matter in your mind, as in the presence of the living Christ, that you will not stand idly by but you will consider it an honor given by Him to rise up boldly for justice, even before all your friends appreciate what you are doing, because your stepping forward first could well be what finally cracks their hearts open to the glory of the Lord being revealed, so that all flesh can see it together.
But you must decide now. In your heart and conscience, you must cross the line from resistance to readiness. If you will, the Lord will see, and he will graciously arrange your opportunity to prove it.
