There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that tell us we must be committed to protecting the poor and the oppressed... There is no concern of Scripture that is addressed so often and so powerfully as reaching out to the poor.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the moral obligation to support and protect those who are marginalized and in need.
Tony Campolo's quote highlights the significant emphasis placed in Scripture on the importance of compassion, social justice, and commitment to helping the poor and oppressed. By stating that there are 2,000 verses dedicated to this theme, it underlines the moral imperative for individuals and communities to actively engage in efforts to address poverty and injustice, suggesting that such actions are central to ethical living and spiritual practice.
In practice
This quote can be used in a church sermon to inspire action towards social justice.
When in fact we live in a society that makes life hell for gays and lesbians, this community has got to stand up and say, ‘We’re on your side as you struggle for dignity,’ and, ‘Yes, we will defy anybody who says otherwise, even if we have to go to Disneyland to prove it.’
Your past is important but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.
Sadly, we do a much better job of making people feel guilty than we do of delivering them from the guilt we create. We need to confess this and change our ways.
Those issues are biblical issues: to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to stand up for the oppressed. I contend that if the evangelical community became more biblical, everything would change.
I don't know how your theology works, but if Jesus has a choice between stained glass windows and feeding starving kids in Haiti, I have a feeling he'd choose the starving kids in Haiti.
Jesus never says to the poor: ‘come find the church’, but he says to those of us in the church: ‘go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Vice does not lose its character by becoming fashionable.
God's address is at the end of your rope.
Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.
Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be.
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