Article February 15, 1999 Issue

PRAY DAILY FOR GOOD GOVERNMENT

Sara Terry Gabrels

I'm a journalist and have been doing a lot of writing lately on some of the cultural and political issues that have been raised at a national level. In praying about some of these issues, I've realized that it's fundamental for each of us to be able to determine right from wrong. I look to Christ Jesus as a model for this. The Bible tells us that he "loved righteousness, and hated iniquity" (Heb. 1:9). Now, the interesting thing to me is that Jesus is known to have spent much of his time with sinners. Many of them reformed as a result of their contact with him. They repented. They wanted to live better lives.

Evidently, Jesus was able to love them in such a way that he saw their righteousness. He saw their fundamental, God-bestowed identity, which couldn't be taken away from them. He was able, at the same time, to "hate" the sin or wrong behavior or diseased condition. He was able to "hate" those things as something that a perfect God, a loving Father-Mother, would never create. But he wasn't condemning the people themselves. He was able to hate iniquity so clearly and love righteousness so perfectly that people responded to it and were transformed. I think it's very important for us to do the same—to love righteousness and to make a distinction between the iniquity and the individual.

To me, loving righteousness means spending time in prayer with what I understand to be true of God and His creation, which, in turn, helps me see what is not true about Him and His creation. This helps me try to make the kind of healing distinctions that, through his example, Jesus taught us to make. Living one's life in this way fosters self-government, which I think will ultimately create a government that we can depend on. True self-government acknowledges man's relation to God. It recognizes that the government of the world rests in the hands of an all-powerful, all-good God, who determines our behavior. There's a yielding to a higher authority in that kind of government.

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Tending mankind
February 15, 1999
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