Life’s Most Persistent and Urgent Question

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”

— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of love and, therefore, a gospel about others as much as us. We are saved if we accept Jesus as our Lord, Saviour, and King; yet we do not realise the Kingdom fullness of our salvation unless we comprehend, through our actions, the scope for helping others within our circle of influence.

There are two key truths in the King quote above: helping others who need our help needs to be done with both persistence and urgency.

Persistent, Because...

Doing what we can for other people in our sphere of influence is a persistent opportunity, because we live continuously from birth to death, and, notwithstanding sleep, we have countless opportunities to love and serve people, especially in the smallest of ways.

The blessing in this persistence of life that we call ‘our personal existence’ is we can outdo our previous marks, not that it’s a competition. We can improve upon our discernment of the Spirit. We can work on the instantaneousness of our obedience. We can reflect and learn in order that we might apply our help with increasing discernment to add more and more value.

We can bless and keep on blessing in the name of the Lord until we can bless no longer; the perfect introduction to urgency.

Urgency, Because...

Helping other people is an urgent mission, because whilst we’re here on Earth, continuously in tenure of the body, our souls are eternal and they don’t belong here.

Like the flowers and grass of the field, our season comes, and then we go, too late then to make any sort of difference. We need to make the differences we can right now, including making our plans for the future differences we might be able to make by God’s grace.

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These are serious matters we don’t often enough take with reflective seriousness.

Even if we are engaged in work that is of aid to, or in support of, others, we can fall into the comfortable rut of thinking we’ve done enough. At the same time we need to know the limits of our fatigue so we don’t get burned out.

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There is still so much need in our world. Helping people, particularly the truly needy, is both a persistent and urgent opportunity. We are here continuously, but only for a short time. We need to make it count.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.