The Place To Begin When Learning About Social Justice

Tim Challies: In recent days the topic of social justice has received much attention within the church and without. As Christians we are committed to living according to God’s Word, and so we have rightly been turning to the Bible to learn how it would guide us. We have been scouring its pages to see what it says about matters of justice. That is well and good, but I have become convinced that even as we’ve done this, we may have overlooked one important resource. In fact, we may have overlooked the one book that is explicitly and specifically intended to give us wisdom for this very topic. We may have skipped over the best place to begin when learning about social justice. The book of Proverbs is about training the mind in order to live a God-honoring life, for right living follows right thinking. It exists so the reader can “know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight”

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How Do We Work for Justice and Not Undermine Evangelism?

D.A. Carson: (1) By doing evangelism. I know numerous groups that claim to be engaging in “holistic” ministry because they are helping the poor in Chicago or because they are digging wells in the Sahel, even though few if any of the workers have taken the time to explain to anyone who Jesus is and what he has done to reconcile us to God. Their ministry isn’t holistic; it’s halfistic, or quarteristic. (2) By being careful not to malign believers of an earlier generation. The popular buzz is that evangelicals before this generation focused all their energies on proclamation and little or nothing on deeds of mercy. Doubtless one can find sad examples of such reductionism, but the sweeping condescension toward our evangelical forbears is neither true nor kind. To take but one example: The mission SIM has emphasized evangelism, church planting, and building indigenous churches for a century—yet without talking volubly of holistic ministry it built, and still operates,

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Social justice and young evangelicals: encouragement and concern

Matt Smethurst:   Human trafficking. Racial prejudice. Health care. Immigration reform. Same-sex marriage. Environmentalism. Poverty. Abortion. What comes to mind when you think of social justice? In this new video, John Piper talks with Matt Chandler and David Platt about this trendy, vital, and often blurry topic. Piper has contended that Christians “should care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering,” Similar, Platt notes, is his own church’s informal motto: “As we work for justice in the world, we speak clearly about the Judge of the world.” Opportunities for social action will inevitably spring up as members are holistically discipled in the faith according to Matthew 28:19. “Church elders should so minister a robust gospel—a full-blooded, deep, sanctifying, transforming, humbling, radical-making gospel,” Piper says, “that these sorts of [social justice ventures] naturally happen.” As Platt adds, “A robust commitment to the gospel and the Great Commission will inevitably lead to encounters with the impoverished, the orphaned, and so forth.” “Be where

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