Self-Control: The Flipside of Liberty
“Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control” (Proverbs 25:28), for self-control provides protective boundaries and moral defenses.
Where Jesus Is Needed Most
By Dee Ann Billings
Sometimes the places no one else wants to go are exactly where we need to be.
I was walking along the sidewalk back to our main outreach, and I saw my 16-year-old son with his arm around a homeless man. No one told him to do it. No one told him to step away from the crowd and go minister to this man. He did it because we have a God who sees the needs of others and moves in our hearts to guide us to exactly where he wants us to be.
As I walked past my son, I saw another man. His face was turned away from the crowd and he was wiping tears from his face. He had just received a haircut, and I overheard him tell his friend, “When she showed me the mirror, I didn’t even recognize myself.”
I stopped and talked with him for a while. I shared how much God loves him and cares for him.
“I actually know that God exists,” he responded, “and I know he’s always been there, and I know he loves me. I just can’t see myself as being worth anything. . . . But maybe today that will be different.”
He looked down at his hat in his hand, and he said, “I don’t need to put this back on, because today I’m not ashamed.”
If Jesus were walking on this earth today, he would be with the homeless. He would be with the prostitutes and the neglected, abused, and forgotten. He would be in all the places no one wants to go, but that is exactly where he is needed the most.
Dee Ann Billings is a business owner, wife, mother of four children, and a volunteer outreach coordinator with Copper Creek Christian Church in Maryville, Ill. This essay is excerpted from a Facebook post.
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Good thoughts, but I thought this would be about missions.
Jesus said the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few.
TWO THOUSAND YEARS later, the harvest is STILL plentiful and the laborers are STILL pitifully few.
There are THOUSANDS of cultures with no churches.
But there are millions of churches. If we focus, we can reach all of those cultures in one generation!
We received a comment about this article via email from June Lowry:
It came across that Jesus would not be helping those who are not downtrodden (especially in the last sentence); this made me feel like you were saying Jesus would not care about me. . . .
Many people who are not downtrodden actually need Jesus more than those who are.