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MEDITATION:

Written by Max Lucado, a contemporary pastor, author, and speaker. This is an excerpt from his book “Outlive Your Life.”

Jim Wallis took some scissors to his Bible. He was a seminary student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School when he and some classmates decided to eliminate a few verses. They performed surgery on all sixty-six books, beginning with Genesis and not stopping until Revelation. Each time a verse spoke to the topic of poverty, wealth, justice, or oppression, they cut it ou. They wanted to see what a compassionless Bible looked like. By the time they finished, nearly two thousand verses lay on the floor, and a book of tattered pages remained.  Cut concern for the poor out of the Bible, and you cut the heart out of it. God makes the poor his priority. When the hungry pray, he listens. When orphans cry, he sees. And when the widows in Jerusalem were neglected, he commissioned his best and brightest disciples to help them…Jesus had a target audience. The poor. The brokenhearted. Captives. The blind and oppressed. His to-do list? Help for the body and soul, strength for the physical and the spiritual, therapy for the temporal and eternal.

PRAYER:

The  prayer is written by Max Lucado, author of today’s meditation.

Dear Lord, you promised we would always have the poor among us. Help me to make sure that the reverse is also true, that I am always among the poor – helping, encouraging, and lending a hand wherever I can. Enable me to love the invisible God by serving the very visible poor in my corner of the world. Help me to be creative without being condescending, encouraging without being egotistic, and fearless without being foolish. May the poor bless you because of me, and may my efforts somehow reduce the number of the poor. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.