What Does the LORD Require of Us?

Most of you know that I am very much into Twitter. It is my social media of choice, the only one I participate in. You may also know that I am currently followed by 2, 474 people, 1, 986 of whom I follow back. I follow everyone who follows me and do not unfollow unless they are too crude, too obnoxious, spew hatred, only tweet about politics or show no signs of a sense of humor. This means that there are many in my Twitter feed with whom I often disagree. It keeps in touch with a very diverse cross-section of the population, and that is important to me. Every issue has at least two sides, and I believe one of the problems in our nation today is that people only listen to the people with whom they already agree. I am a fan of diversity. 

One of the gentlemen who followed me a couple of years ago is a well-known conservative blogger and author. While our views on political and social issues are often at odds, I have great respect for him as a family man and a human being. He listens. We have sparred a few times, and it is safe to say he considers me a true left-wing liberal both politically and theologically. While his views are often very comparable to those of Fox News and their ilk, he actually IS fair and balanced in his writing. His tweets often give me pause and stir my mind. A few nights ago he asked a great question on Twitter- "What does God want from our lives?" Unfortunately, many of the immediate responses came from his very political fan base. Apparently what God requires of us is to impeach President Obama, close our borders, kill all Muslims and stop gay people from taking over the world. I was struck with a very different answer, and I tweeted my response: The LORD requires us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with Him. I read that somewhere...

I am sure it made him smile that the first scriptural answer came not from his conservative followers but from a "liberal" like me. Had space permitted, there was more to say about how God wishes we would behave in His name. Jesus reminds us that the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:36-40) is to love God and love our neighbors- and that everyone is our neighbor! He told Peter (John 21:15-17) that if we loved him we should feed his sheep- take care of people, nurture them and love them. And in Matthew 25 Jesus gave us the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven- treat the least important people you meet each day as if they were him, showing them love and giving them hope. The answer to my friend's question has already been written. God does have expectations of us. They just aren't the ones we often expect them to be.

So for at least this one night, in the midst of a lot of conservative uproar, I was the Bible thumping fundamentalist quoting scripture and praying that we might all better understand what it truly means to turn our lives over to Christ. You gotta' love Twitter. You just never know what will happen next...

Because of Jesus,