Step In Like Jesus

If you went on a YouthWorks trip this summer, you heard all about how Jesus demonstrated how to live, love and serve. At home, we hope you’ll keep thinking about ways you can live like Jesus every day! That’s why, each Thursday for 5 weeks, we’ll post a new reflection helping you apply the same ideas you heard on your mission trip to your everyday life back home.

 

I remember sitting behind Victoria in eleventh grade English class. I remember her big-city personality feeling out of place in small-town Minnesota. I remember that her “slip” and “slope” sounded more like “thlip” and “thlope.” I remember the taunting singsong way some of the guys in my class would say Victor-i-a. I remember that, by her choice, she moved to a different school after two months. For all the things I can remember, there are two things I do not remember:

 

1. Ever joining in the taunting.

2. Ever stepping in to stop it.

 

Over ten years later, I still regret that Victoria felt so out of place at a Christian high school that she chose to leave. And I regret that I didn’t step in when my friends devalued and discouraged her. Even though I avoided joining in, simply avoiding didn’t feel like enough.

 

If you’ve purused the last few posts, you’ve read about how Jesus is a demonstration worth following. As our best Demo of how to live, Jesus didn’t do wrong, but he certainly did encounter wrongs in the world around him. And unlike me in eleventh grade, Jesus didn’t avoid the wrongs he encountered.

 

As you read about how Jesus responded, keep in mind that the setting is a place of worship. God had the temple built to represent God’s presence in the midst of the people. Whenever someone entered the temple, they were to be reminded of God’s splendor and majesty and love. But the temple had become something else…

Read John 2:13–17.

At first look, Jesus seems very different than the guy who kneeled to wash his disciples’ feet or reached out to heal blind men. In this story, Jesus disrupted people’s businesses and sent cattle and sheep into the streets. At a glance, Jesus does seem different, but I think Jesus is actually doing the exact same thing in all three of these stories. Before I explain why, let me give you a little background.

 

Like I said before, the temple was meant to be a place of worship. Part of worship during that time was to bring in your best animals and kill them on the altar; this sacrifice represented payment for your sins. But some people didn’t raise their own animals and others had to travel a long way and couldn’t tow a cow along, so many people purchased animals once they arrived. The local businessmen saw an opportunity and moved their business of selling animals right into the temple. To make even more money, they only accepted certain currency, so travelers had to pay to change their money for the right currency. Then, for the convenience of buying an animal right inside the temple, they might have to pay a little extra. The whole process could get fairly expensive, and some people even got cheated out of their money!

 

This is not what God intended for the temple. As I said earlier, God wanted people to have a place to worship and be reminded of a good, loving, faithful, holy God. But the temple had become something less than what God had planned.

 

Enter Jesus.

 

Knowing what the temple was meant for, I wonder how Jesus felt when he saw how it was being used. Saddened? Disappointed? Angry?

 

The Bible never directly says what Jesus felt in this passage, but it does tell us what he did. Jesus kicks all the businessmen out of the temple in a very controlled way – not destroying anything – just making it impossible for people to continue conducting business. He shoos away the cattle and sheep (so their owners have to follow them out), tells the people with the doves to leave (not causing any birds to escape their owners), and tips over the currency tables (so the moneychangers must stop trading money). Here’s how I would summarize this story:

Jesus saw that something was wrong – that something was falling short of God’s purpose – so he stepped in and did something about it.

I would use this summary to describe what Jesus did in the temple when people turned it into a place of business instead of worship. I would also use this summary to describe what Jesus did when blindness was causing two men to suffer and Jesus healed them. And I would use it again to describe what Jesus did when his disciples needed to see what humble service looks like and Jesus knelt to wash their feet. In each of these stories, Jesus saw that something was wrong, and he stepped in.

 

When I was eleventh grade and Victoria was sitting in front of me in English class, I wish I had realized that I could also step in and do something about the wrong being done. I missed that opportunity. But I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to do something in many other situations.

 

We are all given these opportunities to step in when we see things going wrong. Take a moment and think about what your opportunities to step in are. To help you get started, here are two broad categories of situations that fall short of God’s plans:

 

1. Global Crises:  Orphaned children, hunger, war, discrimination, poverty, human trafficking, homelessness, corruption, abuse, sickness – these are just a few of the ways people are suffering around the world. As advancing technology continues to make the world smaller, you have more and more opportunities to do something about these big concerns.

 

2. Close-to-Home Troubles:  Bullying, cheating, broken relationships, grudges, cliques, loneliness, low self-esteem – these are some of the wrongs you might run into on a given day, along with those global crises that might exist in your own backyard. When these problems arise, sometimes without warning, you have an opportunity to step in.

 

As we follow Jesus’ example of stepping in, we cannot separate the way we respond from the love and goodness Jesus demonstrates. Stepping in might look different for different situations, but it should always honor God.

 

Also, it’s OK to recognize that it is impossible for you to do everything – to solve world hunger or even to perfectly fix someone else’s broken relationship – but that should not stop you from doing something. We can all do something.

 

Take some time to think about what your “something” will be. In what ways will you step in like Jesus?

 

CONSIDER…

Who are a couple groups of people that you deeply care about? (e.g. immigrants, teenagers, single mothers, etc.)

 

What issues do you especially care about? (e.g. addiction, low self-esteem, the AIDS pandemic, etc.) How are these issues evidence of things falling short of God’s plan?

 

What are some ways you can step in to help with the people and issues you have listed?

 

How can the ways you step in honor God best? How can your response to wrongs in the world be like Jesus’ response?

 

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Sam Townsend helps write training, programming and marketing materials for YouthWorks mission trips. When he isn’t hanging around teenagers at church or digging into seminary homework, he is generally looking for a good conversation and a hole-in-the-wall restaurant to have it in. Sam still considers his first couple summers working for YouthWorks in Virginia and Pennsylvania communities some of the most transformative times of his life.