God’s desire is for His fullness, completeness, peace, provision, image, and nature to cover us as individuals, to fill your community, the city and the ultimately the earth.
There is a song by a band named Leland. In this song “Tears of the Saints” the singer cries out because of the brokenness and desperation all around. The opening line sets the stage for the entire song, “There are many prodigal sons, on our city streets they run searching for shelter”. He yearns for God’s glory, in essence his Shalom, and calls the ‘saints’ to guide the lost home. The pre-chorus grips my heart as the singer repeats “this is an emergency, this is an emergency”.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of today’s issues. We can sometimes find ourselves asking, “How change can occur?” We see shootings, drugs, crime, and severe fractioning of the family and we may be inclined to back down, or isolate ourselves. Why fight? What will change? Worse yet, we may have become so desensitized that we find ourselves slowly boiling like a frog in a lukewarm pot of tolerance-“is it getting hot in here”? Forgetting truth we may slowly become desensitized.
So what does this mean for us, what are we to do?
You see, the ‘world’s systems’, its ways of doing does not lead to peace, it usually leaves sorrow. But God’s system his way of living and doing adds no sorrow and leads to peace, or Shalom. Our ways of living, thinking, and doing is often not how God intended it to be.
Shalom can be defined as comprehensive peace. It is a Hebrew word that means far more than the absence of conflict or strife. According to Clifford Green “this rich term fills out the word community by embracing well-being, contentment, wholeness, prosperity, safety, and rest”. So then, ‘shalom’ in the city can in part mean being a good neighbor. However, it is not just random acts of kindness that brings this shalom. In fact, we find that it is a matter of the heart that leads to change. It is only change that happens inside of us, leading to change outside and then through us that brings the true Shalom into the city.
The story of Christianity is the story of God bringing redemption to his creation. Pastor and writer, Rob Bell stated that he once “heard a teacher say that if people were taught more about who they are, they wouldn’t have to be told what to do. It would come naturally. When we see religious communities spending most of their time trying to convince people not to sin, we are seeing a community that has missed the point. The point is not sin management”. Instead we should be illuminating what is good, and exemplifying the choices and ‘story’ of how to live. We live the Shalom found through God’s story and it then changes the city.
For further reading check out the following:
Proverbs 10:22 Rob Bell- “Velvet Elvis”
Psalm 122 Andy Crouch- “Cultivating Culture”
Jeremiah 29 Philip Graham Ryken-“Jeremiah & Lamentations”
Romans 1
I John 2:16
