Too often, our ministry does not relate to the real needs of those we are attempting to minister to. The power of Jesus Christ is the power to relate to where we are and where we hurt. Jesus said in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” If this was His ministry, and if He asked us to follow Him, then the Church ought to be doing the same thing. We need to be responding to the real needs of our society. Too often, when we prepare sermons, we do it to share the particular ideas that we feel are important but which may have nothing to do with the needs of the people. We share concepts of doctrines and principles that may be important in a scholarly discussion in seminary, but, for a young mom who is struggling to raise her children, they are irrelevant. So often, we explain and proclaim as if we were motivating other clergy rather than laity who live in a very secular world where most of the vocabulary of the Church is misunderstood or irrelevant.
We are called to respond to the needs. In Matthew 25, Jesus said, “If you have done it for the least of these, you have done it for me.” The standard of being okay with God is to be a sheep instead of a goat – meet needs.
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