4 killed, including NYPD officer, in Manhattan shooting

A gunman armed with an assault-style rifle walked into a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper last night and began firing. He killed New York City police officer Didarul Islam, a father of two young boys who was expecting a third child with his wife. The gunman fatally shot two others as well and critically wounded another.

He then rode the elevator up to the thirty-third floor, where he killed a fourth person before shooting himself in the chest. As of Monday night, police did not know the shooter’s motive, but said he had a documented history of mental illness.

The last few days have been filled with such tragedies:

• A gunman opened fire Monday morning outside the largest casino in Reno, Nevada, killing three people and wounding three others before police shot and arrested him. The suspect remains in critical condition.
• A couple killed over the weekend on a hiking trail in Arkansas died as “heroes,” according to their family, while protecting their two young daughters. A manhunt continues for the suspect in the double homicide.
• Three young men were killed and ten others injured early Sunday at a mass shooting in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
• A stabbing in Michigan last Saturday injured eleven people.
• An ISIS-backed attack on a Catholic church in eastern Congo on Sunday killed at least thirty-four people. 

By now, you are undoubtedly saddened and may be praying for those affected by these atrocities. But part of you may also be wondering what else these stories have to do with you.

This question frames my point today.

We are God’s self-portraits

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the 1868 adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the US, including formerly enslaved people. The amendment also reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, granting them “equal protection of the laws.”

This codified a fact basic to human identity: we were created by our Father in his image (Genesis 1:27). In a sense, you and I are God’s self-portraits, making us unique among all his creation.

However, the cultural prism we have inherited competes with the sanctity of human life and the solidarity of our race. From Socrates to today, we’ve been taught that truth is individual. Capitalism has made us consumers of goods; social media has made us consumers of media. Democracy empowers us as voters whose leaders serve us. Postmodernism tempts us to believe that all truth is our truth.

In such a worldview, it can be easy to care personally about the news in direct proportion to its perceived personal relevance.

But this transactional approach to hurting people is not the spirit of Jesus.

When the Spirit “filled” the first Christians

Our Lord laid down his life for the “sheep,” including those who were not in the “fold” of his first followers (John 10:15–16). He loved rich (Mark 10:21) and poor (Luke 14:12–14), the influential (John 3:1–15) and the overlooked (Mark 12:41–44), Jews and Gentiles, men and women and children. He ministered to every kind of need, from leprosy to blindness to hunger to grief to death.

And he clearly instructed us to do the same (cf. John 13:12–17).

When his Spirit “filled” his first followers, their first impulse was to share the gospel with the multitudes gathered in Jerusalem, many of whom came from distant places irrelevant to the disciples’ personal lives (Acts 2:1–12). Before long, they began taking the message of Christ to Samaritans and Gentiles, even though both were despised by their Jewish society. By the end of Acts, they had sacrificially and courageously brought the good news of God’s love to Rome itself.

None of this would have been possible if they had been consumer Christians relating to the world through the prism of the world’s relevance to them.

When we serve those who cannot serve us

One of the best ways to measure the depth of our love for a person is to see how deeply we love those they love. You cannot love me and hate my family. To the contrary, as parents and grandparents know, the way we appreciate being loved most is simply loving our family.

Accordingly, you and I cannot love our Father fully unless we love those he loves, and he especially loves the “brokenhearted” and the “crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

Additionally, in a skeptical, secularized culture, our best way to gain a hearing for the gospel is to demonstrate its relevance to those we seek to win to Christ. The more we serve those who cannot serve us, the more we stand out in a self-centered consumeristic culture. And the more we show the change Christ makes in us and can make in our world.

If we don’t love hurting people the way Jesus loves them, we can ask his Spirit to manifest the fruit of love for them in our hearts (Galatians 5:22). Then we can pray fervently for them and for God to redeem their pain. And we can look for ways to serve them in his name as we answer our prayer for his glory and their good.

A prayer that is changing the world

When missionary statesman Bob Pierce visited suffering children on an island in Korea, he wrote in his Bible, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” God answered his prayer, leading him to found Samaritan’s Purse in 1970.

From then to now, this relief ministry has circled the globe, helping victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease, and famine in more than one hundred countries. Just since 2009, more than twenty-four million children have trusted in Christ through their discipleship course for shoebox recipients. Untold millions more have come to Jesus through the compassion of those who serve him with the heart of God.

Imagine the difference if every Christian prayed Bob Pierce’s prayer. Let’s become that difference by praying it ourselves today:

“Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.”

Now, let’s do whatever his broken heart leads us to do next, to the glory of God.

Quote for the day:

“Action with and for those who suffer is the concrete expression of the compassionate life and the final criterion of being a Christian” —Henri Nouwen

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