What good is theology in the mind if that is where it ends? If in thinking through the revelation of God (the Bible) it stays in our heads and doesn't pass through to the heart unto the hands and feet, how will anyone know it has affected us? The mouth is not a sufficient instrument; God's impulse and motivation must move to the hands and feet. Without action the mouth just makes noise. What good is theology if it is just sentiment, or sentimental? What good is the emotion created by truth if it doesn't move us to more than tears?
I believe in the power of the Word, I believe in the power of the gospel; when received by faith it transforms the heart. There is no substitute for gospel preaching in this lost world of ours; no apology for believing the truth, for proclaiming the truth, for disseminating the truth. The poor especially need the good news preached to them. God's Word is creative in that in and of itself (by the work of the Holy Spirit) makes hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. Yet, words (from us) are not enough if that is all there is to our religion.
Personally I don't like religion without emotion, and to tell the truth I find it hard to believe you believe unless you can feel it. It is hard to imagine the world without music. It is hard to imagine enjoying God without passion or an emotional soundtrack. There is a joy in the sadness and pain of repentance; joy in the hope of a forgiving God who will cleanse me, and fix me, and restore me. Singing a new song to God just makes sense as a constant reaction to him, and his mercy, and his grace. Yet, emotional response to truth is not enough.
Knowing and feeling are not enough, not if we seek to be biblical, and if we seek to make an obedient impact on the world. "We were created in Christ Jesus to do good works" (Eph. 2:10). "In view of God's mercies present yourselves to God as a living sacrifice"(Rom. 12:1); "in the same way let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 5:16) (italics added).
You believe? Good, now go out and do something about it. Don't just believe your faith or think about your faith. Don't just know a lot about the faith and feel it so intensely that you would weep or shout for joy. Do you feel your religion? Good, but again I say, go out and do something about it!
How? "How should I live out my faith?" I hoped you would ask. I want to emphasize that the Scriptures move us beyond a simple personalization of religion. If we understand our religion simply to be a moral change, or a change of personality so that we become "nice," or a spiritualized change where now we have personal meaning and relationship with God, then we have missed what true religion is supposed to be. Yes, the gospel can and does all of the preceding things mentioned, but it calls us to more. It calls us personally to "weightier matters of the law, like justice and mercy"(Matt. 23:23). It calls us, both as individuals and corporately as congregations, to help the poor (James 1:27, 2 Cor. 8-9, Matt. 25: 31-46).
There are some who may question a call to congregations to help the poor. Some believers may feel that if there is a call to help the poor (and though it sounds amazing there may be some Christians who simply don't know what the Bible teaches about preaching the gospel to the poor [Luke 4:18], or feeding the hungry [Matt. 25:31ff], or doing good to all men [Gal. 6:10]), then this is a mandate to individual Christians to do it when they have opportunity, not a mandate to congregations.
There are also some who think that we should help only the Christian poor, and those who are within our own congregations. I have always found the argument to only help the poor in the church largely irrelevant if we are obeying the Lord by preaching the gospel to the poor. Was this not his mandate (see Luke 4:18 as mentioned above)? Is it not ours as well? If we are evangelizing among the poor we will have them in the church, and what every poor community in the world needs is a gospel-preaching, holistic, and vital local church in its midst. Poor people need to be saved; they need a whole new set of cultural values built upon the Word of God. They need the practice and experience of the love of the saints and then their families will be rebuilt. And they will have hope, which is the absolute most powerful engine of economic change.
I would submit that such negative arguments spring from an undeveloped theology of the church, a defective theology of missions, and the absence of a theology of mercy. We are called to be a new community, to be a body of believers. We are called to help the widows in our midst (1 Tim. 5:3-16); we are given the example of sharing with other congregations who face hard times (I Tim. 6:18); and pastors are instructed to "command" those who are rich in this world to be rich in good deeds. We are given the model in Acts 6 of an ethnic and pragmatic solution to a mercy need within and by the local congregation. We see the community of Israel, as a nation, condemned for a hypocritical practice of religion by not sharing their food with the hungry (Isa. 58). How can we be seen as a "city"(Matt. 5:14-16) if we do not do good works corporately? Congregations are designed by God to be public entities that people see, and unfortunately many of our congregations are "cities" which are seen to do nothing but for themselves.
We are called upon to do good, and there are various ways of doing good in this world. We can individually do good by obeying the Ten Commandments and thereby not harm our neighbors. We can do good by a personal practice of compassion and kindness, thereby loving our neighbors. These things give us a personal good reputation, often no better than a decent pagan might achieve. Our churches call upon us to live as godly people in a wicked world, and they should. Many churches ask us to help the institution of the church and serve within it, to bless the other members through acts of service inside the institution, and of course they should do that.
Unfortunately, if that is all they do, our congregations then achieve a reputation of being only self-serving, of caring only about what happens within the four walls of the church. Few churches give us a program to perform deeds of goodness outside the institution as a collective force. It takes imaginative leadership (tied to faith) to help us do that. Yet if Jesus teaches us to do "our" good works so that they can be seen, then that means that corporately we are demonstrating the power and love of God among those who need good done to them and for them.
There is much to be done, and once we understand what there is to be done, well, there is our opportunity. Our Reformed churches have become centers of knowing and we have often left the doing to others, even to organizations begun by Christians who no longer speak the gospel. We somehow expect our missionaries to be doers, but all too often our missionaries look and act just like the people who sent them. They go out to create more "knowers." They have a defective theology of good works.
We need to encourage and pray for our elders and deacons to help us know what needs to be done, outside the walls of our church building, and then show us how to do it. They need to lead us to make an impact on our neighborhoods. Can we build somebody a Habitat for Humanity house? Can we throw a block party for an apartment complex? Can we go into a poor neighborhood and set up a bike fix-it station on a Saturday? Can we organize a mothers day out for mothers of small children? Can we invite all the seniors in a neighborhood to a bus tour somewhere? Can we paint a widow's home? Can we install fire detectors in the old houses of a neighborhood? Can we build a medical clinic in an underserved neighborhood? Can we plant trees or flowers in a bare patch of public ground? Can we help get people to a medical fair, or provide flu shots? Can we change the oil in cars of single moms? Can we just give a visible demonstration of the love of Christ?
Yes, we can do those things, and we can do more. We can create tutoring programs, and job partnership programs, and prison reentry programs, and care for people with HIV/AIDS, or provide hospice care. We can incorporate development agencies under the spiritual authority of the church (we do that for schools, don't we?), and we can build housing, create jobs, and change whole neighborhoods. We can establish and send disaster response teams. We can train and equip our deacons, maybe even employ one full time, to do effective mercy with accountability and escalate that into true economic development-all the while preaching Christ and the need for Holy Spirit regeneration. I know we can do these things because our congregation has done it, by the grace and mercy of God.
None of us individually, nor our churches, can do everything. We are not asked by God to do everything, only the good works he has prepared in advance for us to do. Doing good does not save us, but it ought to flow from being saved. The practice of doing good causes even unbelievers to give glory to our Father in heaven. Doing good can never replace articulating the gospel of grace, but it certainly does authenticate it. One might even use the word "incarnational." What I am advocating is simply more of Jesus, in us and through us, to the world.
