God works in and through vocation, but he does so by calling human beings to work in their vocations. In Jesus Christ, Who bore our sins and gives us new life in His resurrection, God saves us for eternal life. But in the meantime He places us in our temporal life where we grow in faith and holiness.
In our various callings — as spouse, parent, church member, citizen, and worker — we are to live out our faith. So, what does it mean to live out our faith in our callings? The Bible is clear: faith bears fruit in love Gal.
Here we come to justification by faith and its relationship to good works, and we also encounter the ethical implications of vocation. God does not need our good works, Luther said, but our neighbor does Wingren, Luther on Vocation , Our relationship with God is based completely on His work for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Justification by faith completely excludes any kind of dependence on our good works for our salvation. We come before God clothed not in our own works or merits, but solely in the works and merits of Christ, which are imputed to us. But having been justified by faith, we are sent by God back into the world, into our vocations, to love and serve our neighbors. Though we may speak of serving God in our vocations, we do not, strictly speaking, serve God. He always serves us. Rather, we are to serve our neighbors, the actual human beings whom God brings into our lives as we carry out our daily callings.
Regarding the monastics who insisted that they were saved, at least in part, by their good works — the prayers, devotions, and acts of piety they do in the cloister — Luther asked, in what sense are these even good works? Who are they helping? Luther criticized monasticism not only for separating from the world, but, in the cases of the hermits and the anchorites, for separating from their neighbors. For Luther, good works must not be directed to God; rather, they must be directed to the neighbor.
He was good because he possessed the ability to engage in excessive altruism. He got down from his beast on the ground, bound up the wounds of the man with his own hands, and set him on his own beast. It would have been much easier for him to have pay an ambulance to take the unfortunate man to the hospital, rather than risk having his neatly trimmed suit stained with blood. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity one in need, it is the capacity to sympathize. Pity may be little more than an impersonal concern which prompts the sending of a material check.
But true sympathy is personal concern which demands the giving of ones soul. Pity may arise out of a concern for a big abstraction called humanity. Sympathy is feeling with the person in need—his pain, his agony, his burdens.
Our missionary efforts have often failed because they were based on pity, rather than true compassion. Instead of seeking to do something with the African and Asian peoples, we have to often sought to do something for them. This expression of pity devoid of genuine sympathy leads to a new form of paternalism which no self respecting person can accept. Millions of dollars.
Dollars may be wonderful, but unless they have the potential for helping some wounded child of God on life's Jerico Road, but unless those dollars are distributed by compassionate fingers they will enrich neither the giver nor the receiver.
Millions of [ Missionary? Million of Peace Corp dollars are going to Africa as a result of the votes of some men who would fight unrelentingly to prevent African Ambassadors from holding membership in their diplomatic club or establish residency in their particular neighborhood. The Peace Corp will fail if it seeks to do something for the undeveloped peoples of the world; it will succeed if it seek creatively to do something creative with them.
Soon we will come to see that money devoid of love is like salt devoid of savor; it is good for nothing but to be trodden under the foot of men. It may buy material bread, but the bread that it buys will soon decay. True neighborliness requires [ strikeout illegible ] personal concern. The Samaritan not only eased the hurt of the used his physical hands to bind up the wounds of the robbed man's body, with his physical hands , but he released an overflowing love to bind up the wounds of his broken spirit.
Another expression of the excessiveness of the Samaritan's altruism was his willingness to go far beyond the call of duty. Not only did he bind up the man's wounds, but he put him on his beast and carried him to an inn. On leaving the [ strikeout illegible ] inn he left some money and made it clear that if any other financial needs arose he would gladly meet them. He went not only the second, but the third mile. Harry Emerson Fosdick has made a most impressive distinction between enforceble and unenforceable obligations.
These are the obligations which are spead out over spelled out on spelled out on thousands of law book pages, and if they are the broken breakage of which has filled numerous prisons. But then are those unenforceable obligations which the laws of society cant reach. They deal with inner attitudes, genuine person-to person relations, and expressions of compassion which law law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. They are obligations which can be dalt dealt with only by ones commitment to an inner law, a commandment written on the heart.
Man made laws are needed to assure justice, but a higher law must is needed to produce love. No code of conduct ever written by man can make a father love his children and a husband have affection for his wife. The law court may compell him to provide physical bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love. A good father must be obedient to the unenforceable.
The good Samaritan will always remain the conscience of mankind because he was obedient to that which could not be enforced.
No law in the world could have made him do what he did. No made man made code could have produced such unallayed compassion, such efflorescent love, such thorough altruism. In our nation today a mighty struggle is taking place. It is a struggle to conquer the reign of a evil monster called segregation and its inseparable twin called discrimination—a monster that has wandered through this land for well-nigh one hundred years, stripping millions of Negro people of their sense of dignity and robbing them of their birthright of freedom.
A great deal of our so called race problem will be solved in the realm of enforceable obligations. Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees can play no major roll in bringing about desegregation.
It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it [ strikeout illegible ] can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.
Recently arrested was Martin Luther King, Jr It is there in that jail cell that he writes this letter; on the margins of a newspaper he pens this defense of nonviolence against segregation. Martin Luther King, Jr. King in which he prophetically articulates his vision for a better America and world For the first time ever, these messages are being released to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The title of this message is "Lost Sheep. If you wish to hear Martin Luther King Jr. Or maybe you want to educate someone else about what happened that day and what the speech meant to black people at that time in history?
Whatever your reason is, this skill is something you will want to hear again and again. King in which he prophetically articulates his vision for a better America and world. The title of this message is "Civil Rights At Crossroads. The title of this message is "The Future of Integration.
In , Dr. In this prophetic work, which was unavailable for more than 10 years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering. By: Coretta Scott King - foreword , and others. The title of this message is "Is The Universe Friendly. But we never thought about it or talked about it.
In the white community, no one did. We were all on the same path. As a teenager, I started to ask some questions about all that, about why people seemed to live very differently and separately in white and black Detroit.
If I really wanted to find the answers, I realized, I would need to step outside of the boundaries of my path and ask the same questions elsewhere. My questions took me into the city of Detroit, where I worked low-paying summer jobs alongside other young men my age—but they were black, and I was white, and I began to realize that was what made all the difference.
While we were all born in Detroit, we had been raised in different countries. I was making money for college and they were supporting their families. I also sought out black churches, which I had never been to, nor had black Christians from those churches come to ours. The reason I believe stories from black parents today is that I found a place, outside my path, where I heard those stories a long time ago.
Changing my pathway and the places I go has continually changed my life—over and over again. This is what Jesus meant when he said to love our neighbor—to get outside of our tribal pathways and listen to the lives of those whose pathways have been so different from ours.
They are the test of loving our neighbor. That biblical and spiritual reality has never been truer in my lifetime than it is right now. When asked by the religious leaders of his day, What is the greatest commandment? Loving God and loving your neighbor sums up both religion and law; everything starts with and goes back to these two great loves. These vital questions must not be reduced to political and partisan issues between left and right, liberals and conservatives.
They must become matters of faith that can bring us together across political boundaries. Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary.
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