Doctors have a life-quote long admired for its' wisdom: First Do No Harm. What progress we could make in being heard above roar of the shouters? How many of the hurting and the hopeless would eagerly gather around us as they did our Savior during His walks in the Holy Land, listening not to voices seeking to imprison them in cell of our condemnation and disapproval, but rather to once-broken-now-healed souls whispering the Words of freedom's eternal ringâ?¦the freedom of the overcomer, a title bestowed on us by He who overcame for us.
We are more than peacekeepers; referees who sit among danger to point at evildoers. From the moment God made Abraham THE PROMISE, and then grafted the rest of us into Abraham's line as "heirs of salvation�., we have been expected to free the oppressed, even when that oppression is self-imposed, as in addictions and sins in direct violation of God's commands. In Isaiah 58, God even spurns holy words and meaningless fasts from those of His children who see people trapped in hunger and do nothing, or see people cowed in fear and stand guard so they feel safe, or see deprivation of any kind and toss words or tokens at the problem from a distance certain to keep our own hands clean.
We trap people in sin when we yell at them for that sin. We trap people who are hungry when we leave them hungry. We trap people in anger and hate when we spend more energy taking things from them that we do finding ways to help them. We trap people in sin when we expect them to live like Jesus when even we aren't living like Jesus. We trap people in sin when we expect them to live like Jesus when they haven't even met Jesus.