Description
How can we change our world? As we meditate on Amos 5:14, we see it’s much easier than we might think – and so much hard… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
Amos chapter 5, verse 14, Seek good and not evil, that you may live, and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. This little verse is utterly radical and transformational, if we apply it. Seek good and not evil, that you may live. It sounds so simple!
In the situations that we find ourselves in life, sometimes we don’t actually want to seek good. If somebody’s offended us, what we want to do, instinctively, is to retaliate, or to take revenge. We may not call it that, but that’s what it feels like. Something swells and grows in us, there’s this anger. But is that how we seek good?
Seeking good does involve justice. But it also involves forgiveness.
So in a situation where somebody may be being bullied at work, we want the bullying to stop. We do. That must stop so that the bully can’t go on to hurt other people. But we also seek good. And this means forgiving the bully. Forgiving the bully is the same as saying I will not hold this against you, and I will not seek evil for you.
That’s not the same as saying, I don’t want you to go to prison if you’ve done something so wrong that our laws demand prison. But it does mean saying, I forgive you, and I want you to come to know Jesus. I want you to be with me in the next life. It’s radical, isn’t it? This is subversive. This could change our entire society if we all did this.
God, sometimes it seems like you ask a lot of us, but we know that you’ve empowered us to live this way by placing your Holy Spirit in us. So please help us, please help us to seek good and not evil because we want to live. We want to live with you. Amen.
