Do Something Beautiful - A 5 Day DevotionalSample

DOING RIGHTEOUSNESS IN AN UNJUST WORLD

Doing righteousness often creates an opportunity for something unusual and beautiful to happen. Most people in most places of the world most of the time are not experiencing anything near righteousness. If they are lucky, people live in a just community where things are relatively fair and even. Even this, however, rarely exists. We create artificial communities of fairness in places like sporting arenas, university classrooms, and toll-based freeway systems. In these contexts, people play by the same rules, have equal access to learning, and pay equal amounts to share the same road. Like high-end hotels, however, these spaces are artificial, and we eventually realize that even in these places created to be fair, things like wealth, race, family background, and other factors create inequities from the beginning that then may grow into injustices. Injustices are almost always about bounty. Earlier in Isaiah’s prophecy, we read of how God is uniquely angered at the injustices the “bounty-less” of the world face from their oppressors,

The needy and poor, widows and orphans . . . these are expressions of the “bounty-less.” When they are prevented from experiencing the bounty of God, God is angered. Wherever there is lack or want around resources, injustices flourish. Our world is broken by sin—inside and outside. We are all seeking bounty, but the bounty of this world often comes at the expense of someone else. That’s why one of the first requirements of doing something right is working to ensure that all people have access to bounty.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people in our world today, this kind of justice is a luxury—things are not fair, wrongs are never righted, and bounty seems like something reserved for storybooks or movies. How can we live righteously in a world where even justice seems out of reach? While we do not live in a fair and just world, we can help others get to God’s table of bounty. For thousands of years in the church, women and men have learned the secret of experiencing bounty while they and others around them are living in places of inequity. This is the secret of the story of everything, that we can have something more in a world continually plagued by inequities and injustices. We have bounty that can’t be stolen and that is bought without money. Your place in the story of everything can be found in doing righteousness, particularly in a world of injustice—this is how you create beauty in the lives of those who’ve yet to come to God’s family dinner table. You can point them to Him.