In 1928, a very interesting case came before the courts in Massachusetts. It concerned a man who had been walking on a boat dock, when suddenly he tripped over a rope and fell into the cold, deep water of an ocean bay. He came up sputtering and yelling for help and then sank again, obviously in trouble. His friends were too far away to help him, but only a few yards away, on another dock, was a young man sprawled on a deck chair, sunbathing.

The desperate man shouted, “Help, I can’t swim!” The young man, an excellent swimmer, only turned his head to watch as the man floundered in the water, sank and came up sputtering in total panic, and then disappeared forever.

Living Like Cain Or Like Christ?

The family of the drowned man was so upset by that display of callous indifference, that they sued the sunbather. They lost. The court reluctantly ruled that the man on the dock had no legal responsibility whatever to try and save the man’s life. In effect, the law agreed with Abel’s brother Cain: “I am not my brother’s keeper, I have every right to mind my own business and to refuse to become involved.” The Christian faith is diametrically opposed to this kind of attitude and thinking.

We are so blessed that our Lord did get involved when he saw us drowning in our sin and brokenness. In Philippians 2:6-8, we read these words:

(Jesus) who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient to death – even death on a cross.

The Christian God did not hide behind some vaulted door in heaven, oblivious to human suffering. He came right in our midst as a human person. God’s Son was incarnated in the person of Jesus, the Christ.

It is no surprise that the Lord calls us to reveal the reality of our faith and love in practical and costly ways with those who are in need. For example, in James 2:20, we read that “faith without works is dead”. And in James 1:27, we read that our God accepts our faith as pure and faultless when we “look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world”.

The genuineness of our love for God is also revealed in practical and costly ways with those who are in need. In  1 John 3:16-18, we read these words:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

According to the Lord, we are our brother’s keeper. We have a call from God to love Him by loving our neighbor.

Faithful To The End

On June 18, 1956, in upstate New York, Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Christian discipleship ministry, Navigators, drowned as he saved a young girl from drowning. Billy Graham spoke at Dawson’s funeral and said this of his last act of heroism, “Daws died the same way he lived – holding others up.” What a great epitaph of a faithful servant of Jesus. He was full of faith and love right to the very end. Trotman was born in 1906, the same year that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born, another servant of Christ who was faithful to the point of death.

May we be convicted and spurred on by our Lord’s example and the examples of faithful servants like Trotman and Bonhoeffer. May God’s Spirit empower us to get involved in ministries that cost us something. May we use our spiritual gifts in and through a community where we sacrificially invest our lives. We will have no regrets at the end of our life with such a Christ-like commitment. We will lose our lives only to really find them.  May the Lord find us faithful.

QOTD: Are you living like you are your brother’s keeper?