What Should Christians Do in Response to the Current World Crises?

The Saturday afternoon service at the congregation I serve as pastor, Friendship Lutheran Church, usually brings together a handful of people. A preacher might ordinarily be depressed by the paltry attendance, but I love this service.

That's partly because it's a stripped-down affair. There's nothing fancy about it. No pomp in this circumstance.

We open with prayer and sing a song. After that, I ask someone to read our Bible lesson for the weekend and then I give my message.

What comes next is what I like best about the service. It's a segment we call, "Questions and Blessings." I ask people to respond to the lesson or the message, to pose questions, to share an insight or praise God for a blessing, or to simply bring up some spiritual issue with which they'd like us all to wrestle together.

Tonight, understandably, the discussion quickly moved to the current conflict in Lebanon and the continuing war in Iraq, as well as the ongoing threat of global terrorism.

How, one participant wondered, are we to manifest the goodness and glory of Jesus Christ, as our lesson this weekend prays that we Christians will do, in a world seemingly hell-bent on violence and death? What should we do?

Those are good questions.

My answer to both of them may seem simplistic. But I think it's the right answer: We should pray.

But what should we pray?

Honestly, I'm not wise enough to know how the current crises in international affairs are to be resolved. I have my opinions, to be sure. But the older I get, the more aware I become of the limits of my knowledge. I don't know it all.

To paraphrase the late, great Frank Laubach, even if I were miraculously granted ten minutes each day to provide advice to people like George Bush, Ehud Olmert, or even, Hassan Nasrallah, the chances are very good that my advice would be wrong. Even if my motives were unimpeachable. Even if I prayed for God's guidance over the advice I gave to them.

I would likelier give bad advice than good because I'm human, prone to error, apt to follow my own predispositions in spite of all my good intentions to the contrary.

But God is the One Whose counsel is always right. "Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, your judgements are true and just!" (Revelation 16:7)

So, this is what I pray as I consider the violence in our world:

• That God's will and not our own, be done
• That God would open the hearts and wills of leaders to make right decisions
• That Christ would go to those leaders incessantly, with His counsel and will
• That peace will come to troubled hearts and troubled nations

When I say, as I do emphatically, that prayer is the most that we can do in response to the current world crises, I don't say it with fatalistic resignation. I say it instead with robust confidence that when we turn to the God we meet in Jesus Christ and ask for His will to be done, we're tapping into the greatest Power in the universe for the purpose of seeing the very best things happen.

Pray!

[Thanks to Andrew Jackson of SmartChristian.com for linking to this post.]

[Thanks also to Matt Brown of Good Brownie for linking to this post.]