Well, I did it! I spoke at our school assembly today and I've decided that I want to post what I wrote here too. I'm not sure why - but meh! 
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Impact Your World With Christ
I know this wonderful story of a man who saw all the pain and suffering in the world and in his anguish, he cried out to God, “Oh Lord, you can see all the hurt in the world – why don’t You send help?!”
To which the Lord replied, “I did – I sent you.”
I’m sure you know the connotations involved with a ripple…the decisions you make impact those around you. I want to challenge you with something today – I want to challenge you with impacting the world. It’s time to know the truth about this little bubble we live in.
World Vision India. A ten-year old girl by the name of Kanmani lives in a little village in Tamil Naidu (a state in India). From 8am until 6pm every day, six days a week, she sits in a small space on the floor and manufactures cigarettes. Her job is to close the ends with a little knife and she has to finish 2000 cigarettes a day. If she doesn’t manage that, her overseer strikes her on the head. She gets a half-hour lunch break, which I guess is decent – we get about the same here. But she’s been doing this for five years to pay off her family’s debt from back then when her brother needed medicine, but it couldn’t be afforded. At the end of the week she gets paid, and do you want to know how much? 75 cents for the week of work. But her family needs the 75 cents and there’s no way they’ll ever manage to pay back the $50 they borrowed. Without somebody stepping in from outside, she’ll spend the rest of her childhood closing the ends of cigarettes.
Her story isn’t rare – it is that same story that affects millions of families in India and throughout the world.
It seems hopeless. We don’t know how to have the prisoner set free, how to have the widow’s land restored to her or how to get the child slave released and the oppressors brought to justice.
15 million children in the world are child laborers. That’s a lot to process. What are we, as teens, meant to do about it? How can we impact a world that seems to only exist on TV and in the occasional newspaper? And even if we could get there – how are we meant to stop something so giant as child labor? Stop the eleven year old orphans from being kidnapped? It’s insane. I’m one small person – it’s not my job to save the world. Especially one where there is so much hurt, so much suffering. The effects of sin are so overwhelming that we don’t know where to start, but Christ knew we’d face these choices one day and He tells us in John 16:33 to ‘Take heart! I have beaten the world”.
On any given day I am so busy trying to order the stress and vulnerability out of my own life that the notion of remembering a torture victim in Indonesia or a child laborer in Honduras seems beyond the core of my Christian calling. But what is the core of our calling? It is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. (Matthew 22:37-40).
The Christian life isn’t boring – and I want to tell you it’s not soft either. It takes courage – a courage that we don’t possess alone. As C.S. Lewis puts it: Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. I’m reminded of the song Hero by Superchick - Heroes are made when you make a choice. You could be a hero. Heroes do what’s right. You could be a hero. You might save a life. You could be a hero, you could join the fight for what’s right.
Throughout the Bible you can see that we are asked to live the Christian life and not just talk about it. Revelation promises the future where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. But at the moment Isaiah tells us to seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. In Ezekiel we’re instructed to “intervene” and to “seek justice”.
Impact your world with Christ. We have been called to be witnesses in a hurting world – bright lights in the darkness. We need to understand that this world – a world of assignments and relationship problems and soccer on the weekends – this world doesn’t exist for most people. So how do we prepare for battle then? Do we put on the armor of God, swallow a teaspoon of courage and yell, ‘Charge!’?
Maybe.
One boy knew the answer though. He was going home with dinner for his family – five loaves of bread and two fish. The he hears that the Jesus guy needs food to feed the people who’ve come to hear Him talk. This poor kid: he knows he can’t possibly feed that many people, but he still gives Jesus what he has. Christ fed 5000 men with the small offering the boy gave Him. 5000. We don’t need to fight this battle against the injustices in the world alone – when we give what we have for God’s purpose, He will use it and multiply it so many times over that you’ll be left looking in awe. Each of us has different talents that can be used. Some of you will make money that you can donate to organisations such as World Vision, Asian Aid or Compassion. Others will be in the heart of it all, treating the sick and defending the poor. Wherever you are though, let God use your gifts. Impact the world. Impact the world with and for God.
In the end, it can be summarised into one sentence. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
You don’t need to wait until that terrifying time when you’ll be ‘all grown up.’ You can impact right now. Start with the first steps of helping those around you and before you know it you’ll be half-way along an adventurous journey. You’re not too small, you’re not too young, you’re not too weak. You can change the world – one step at a time.
Each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made – we all have different backgrounds and different circumstances, but at stewards of Christ, we all have a job to do on this earth. All we need to do is be willing. In the words of Isaiah 6:8: Here I am. Send me!
.Impact Your World With Christ
I know this wonderful story of a man who saw all the pain and suffering in the world and in his anguish, he cried out to God, “Oh Lord, you can see all the hurt in the world – why don’t You send help?!”
To which the Lord replied, “I did – I sent you.”
I’m sure you know the connotations involved with a ripple…the decisions you make impact those around you. I want to challenge you with something today – I want to challenge you with impacting the world. It’s time to know the truth about this little bubble we live in.
World Vision India. A ten-year old girl by the name of Kanmani lives in a little village in Tamil Naidu (a state in India). From 8am until 6pm every day, six days a week, she sits in a small space on the floor and manufactures cigarettes. Her job is to close the ends with a little knife and she has to finish 2000 cigarettes a day. If she doesn’t manage that, her overseer strikes her on the head. She gets a half-hour lunch break, which I guess is decent – we get about the same here. But she’s been doing this for five years to pay off her family’s debt from back then when her brother needed medicine, but it couldn’t be afforded. At the end of the week she gets paid, and do you want to know how much? 75 cents for the week of work. But her family needs the 75 cents and there’s no way they’ll ever manage to pay back the $50 they borrowed. Without somebody stepping in from outside, she’ll spend the rest of her childhood closing the ends of cigarettes.
Her story isn’t rare – it is that same story that affects millions of families in India and throughout the world.
It seems hopeless. We don’t know how to have the prisoner set free, how to have the widow’s land restored to her or how to get the child slave released and the oppressors brought to justice.
15 million children in the world are child laborers. That’s a lot to process. What are we, as teens, meant to do about it? How can we impact a world that seems to only exist on TV and in the occasional newspaper? And even if we could get there – how are we meant to stop something so giant as child labor? Stop the eleven year old orphans from being kidnapped? It’s insane. I’m one small person – it’s not my job to save the world. Especially one where there is so much hurt, so much suffering. The effects of sin are so overwhelming that we don’t know where to start, but Christ knew we’d face these choices one day and He tells us in John 16:33 to ‘Take heart! I have beaten the world”.
On any given day I am so busy trying to order the stress and vulnerability out of my own life that the notion of remembering a torture victim in Indonesia or a child laborer in Honduras seems beyond the core of my Christian calling. But what is the core of our calling? It is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. (Matthew 22:37-40).
The Christian life isn’t boring – and I want to tell you it’s not soft either. It takes courage – a courage that we don’t possess alone. As C.S. Lewis puts it: Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. I’m reminded of the song Hero by Superchick - Heroes are made when you make a choice. You could be a hero. Heroes do what’s right. You could be a hero. You might save a life. You could be a hero, you could join the fight for what’s right.
Throughout the Bible you can see that we are asked to live the Christian life and not just talk about it. Revelation promises the future where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. But at the moment Isaiah tells us to seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. In Ezekiel we’re instructed to “intervene” and to “seek justice”.
Impact your world with Christ. We have been called to be witnesses in a hurting world – bright lights in the darkness. We need to understand that this world – a world of assignments and relationship problems and soccer on the weekends – this world doesn’t exist for most people. So how do we prepare for battle then? Do we put on the armor of God, swallow a teaspoon of courage and yell, ‘Charge!’?
Maybe.
One boy knew the answer though. He was going home with dinner for his family – five loaves of bread and two fish. The he hears that the Jesus guy needs food to feed the people who’ve come to hear Him talk. This poor kid: he knows he can’t possibly feed that many people, but he still gives Jesus what he has. Christ fed 5000 men with the small offering the boy gave Him. 5000. We don’t need to fight this battle against the injustices in the world alone – when we give what we have for God’s purpose, He will use it and multiply it so many times over that you’ll be left looking in awe. Each of us has different talents that can be used. Some of you will make money that you can donate to organisations such as World Vision, Asian Aid or Compassion. Others will be in the heart of it all, treating the sick and defending the poor. Wherever you are though, let God use your gifts. Impact the world. Impact the world with and for God.
In the end, it can be summarised into one sentence. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
You don’t need to wait until that terrifying time when you’ll be ‘all grown up.’ You can impact right now. Start with the first steps of helping those around you and before you know it you’ll be half-way along an adventurous journey. You’re not too small, you’re not too young, you’re not too weak. You can change the world – one step at a time.
Each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made – we all have different backgrounds and different circumstances, but at stewards of Christ, we all have a job to do on this earth. All we need to do is be willing. In the words of Isaiah 6:8: Here I am. Send me!
