Happy Sunday,
The following is a draft section of my book, scheduled for release in ~Fall 2027.
I add/revise/cut content based on feedback from this newsletter each week, so if something stands out as wrong, confusing, or wow-that-actually-helped-please-don’t-change-it… hit reply and let me know!
Scriptural Basis
“If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, stay warm, and be well fed,’ but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it? In the same way faith, if it doesn’t have works, is dead by itself.”
James 2:15-17
Pray. But don’t only pray.
When you give a hungry kid a sandwich, you have personally helped combat childhood hunger. When you call your senator and tell them to support a bill that would unlock more funding for feeding hungry children, you have asked someone else to combat childhood hunger.
These represent two types of action we can take in response to the news:
Delegated Action: Petitioning or helping someone else to address the need
Personal Action: Directly addressing the need
Both are good things to do. But we should not confuse them.
Throughout Scripture, followers of Christ are commanded to take various forms of delegated action, including prayer (asking God to do something) in 1 Timothy 2:1, giving money generously in 2 Corinthians 9:7, and encouraging others in Hebrews 10:24-25. But we’re also sternly warned against failing to take personal action in places like James 2:15-17 (read above).
Moreover, Jesus’s life is a near-endless model of personal action: He didn’t send a representative; He personally came to save us (Philippians 2:6-8). He spent an enormous amount of time personally caring for the individual physical needs of people directly in front of Him while on earth (Mark 1:41). God could have commanded legions of angels to feed the hungry, but He didn’t. He personally fed them.
Jesus also delegated, so I’m not advocating that you totally remove delegated action from your life; I’m simply saying that you shouldn’t delegate away all of your service. Don’t just write to your senator when you see someone who is hungry; feed them. Don’t let “I’ll pray about it” be a fence around your actually serving when your church says it needs volunteers; raise your hand.
If God Himself found the time to respond personally, we can too.
Was this valuable? Was this heretical? Do you have a rebuttal? Should it not make the book?
Please hit reply and let me know! Your replies are genuinely a huge help and are massively shaping this book. I don’t have time to respond to each one, but I personally read every email.
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