Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. … Take hold of the life that really is life. — 1 Timothy 6:12-19
Pursue … love … gentleness. Loving with gentleness can be a struggle in the world of today. “Natural selection,” a term associated with evolution, is a reality in our economic world.
Whether we like it or not, our free market economy inevitably creates winners and losers. Competition, the very premise of capitalism, recognizes that because some will compete more readily, heartily and vociferously than others, losers will be “naturally selected” and will be forced to drop out of competition. Small businesses and entrepreneurs contend with this daily.
David Jordan
Most understand this process of competition to be the very engine that fires new innovation and continues the need for a competitive edge in a global economy. And many agree (to varying degrees) that since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), the Western world, and now increasingly international markets, appear to benefit from this same process of eliminating the weak at the behest of the strong.
For the Christian, however, this economic reality creates problems. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to pause from our frantic pace of buying and our desperate need to compete — and remember. We are called to love, to be compassionate, to look out for one another, to lift up the downtrodden and bring in the outcast, to bind up the wounds of the afflicted, to welcome the stranger and to maintain proper perspective on “life that is truly life.”
So while our culture continues in competition unabated, engulfed by the necessary efforts of fending off the latest efforts from competitors, or catching up with competition so as not to get passed over, Christians must remain reflective of Jesus, disenthralled from culture, un-coerced by marketing, non-anxious within competitive surroundings, at peace with who we are, content with what we have, thankful for God’s blessings, aware of our shortcomings, open to God’s love and be ready channels of that love to others.
This is particularly true and sometimes at its most difficult during the Christmas season. But do your best today to try to love as God hopes and expects.
For God so loved the world …
David Jordan serves as senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga.