Enough excuses

Recently I bought a shirt.

Like most of my shirts it’s checked. However, this one is a little special.

I got up to preach one Sunday and noticed these words embroidered on the placket:

“Enough excuses. Get the job done!”

These words remind me of a time when my wife and I were at a local beach in Melbourne. We were enjoying our lunch when we noticed two guys in the distance standing near the water’s edge. One of them had just thrown a crutch in the water.

He’d thrown the crutch because there was an elderly lady who had lost her footing in water about 10 metres from the shore. She couldn’t get up and was on the verge of drowning. His “solution” was to pick up her crutch and launch it in. Creative? Yes. Helpful? No.

When I got to the women she could barely talk. She was scared and humiliated. As I walked her back to the beach, passed these two guys, one of them had the nerve to say: “Hey mate, I would have gone in but I didn’t want to get my pants wet!”

Sadly, that is something of a picture that describes far too many people today.  No courage. No commitment. Just excuses.

I think Martin Luther King had it spot on when he said: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamour of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Melbourne is the most liveable city in the world. And yet our need is great. Violence against women is growing at four times the growth of our population. We are intoxicated with sex, living in a city with twice as many brothels as McDonald’s restaurants.

In Australia we house 20 per cent of the world’s pokie machines. 115,000 Australians are classified as “problem gamblers”, amassing a social cost of $4.7 billion per year There is upwards of 100,000 people who live on the streets. What do we do with that? How are we to respond?

We make excuses.  We deny the need. “It can’t be that bad. I’m sure they’ll be ok.”

We abdicate responsibility. “This is a mess, but this is not mine, surely someone else will deal with it.”

We cast blame. “This is their fault. They should fix it.”

We feel hopeless. “I know this is not right, but it’s way too big for me.”

We have to find a different way.

Recently, our church journeyed through the book of Nehemiah, and I was struck by how the prophet responded to the needs of his city.

Nehemiah was an ordinary man who heard that his hometown, the city of Jerusalem, was in ruins: the walls were down, the gates were burned and the people walked in shame. This was not new news; it had been that way for 141 years. In other words, all this generation knew was loss.

If anyone had a “right” to make excuses it was Nehemiah. Yet he chose a different path.  He wept. He prayed. He moved in faith.

Leaving his comfortable job in Persia he stepped out in God’s strength. He was not entirely sure how it was going to go, he didn’t know the extent of the adversity to come, but he stepped out.

Why? Because he’d encountered a God who loves this world and can do immeasurably more than we ever think or imagine.

Nehemiah is a foreshadowing of the perfect leader Jesus Christ, who weeps over his people [Luke 19:41], prays on behalf of his people [John 17] and moves into action for his people [John 1].

Jesus saw us in need and at great cost to himself entered the stage of human history to live a life we couldn’t live (a life without sin) and die the death we should have died (the death for sin).

Jesus did not make excuses. He showed courage, conviction and compassion. Jesus is the ultimate and true sacrificial servant who loved his own to the end [John 13:1].

Jesus is a leader to trust and our example to follow.  This is our time. This is our moment. This is our city. Enough excuses. God is with us. Let’s get the job done.