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Is Jesus the Surgeon or the Scalpel?

I was using Jesus as a means to an end in my ministry.
Is Jesus the Surgeon or the Scalpel?
Image: Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Envato

In the mid-2000s, I spent several years as a youth pastor. One of the most rewarding aspects of working with teens was seeing their eagerness to bring about positive change in the world. On almost a weekly basis, they would share with me about some new global crisis they had discovered and their wide-ranging ideas for how we could do something about it. Wanting to empower our students, we often took their ideas and ran with them.

One of these events was a march through the downtown area of our city to raise awareness about the atrocities being done to children in northern Uganda. To help our teens promote the event to our church, I leveraged the story of Jesus and his family fleeing to Egypt in Matthew 2:13–15. With as much oratory and poetic skill as I could muster, I emphasized that if Jesus’ family had to walk all those miles from his home to Egyptian territory because of the impending threat of genocide, surely we could walk a few miles together to stand against the evils ...

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