Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just is a great and inspirational. Here are some of the highlights I made while reading the book back in 2012.
Why should we be concerned about the vulnerable ones? It is because God is concerned about them.
God is the defender of the poor
Just as Israel was a “community of justice,” so the church is to reflect these same concerns for the poor.
It is clearly God’s will that all societies reflect his concern for justice for the weak and vulnerable.
God gave humanity authority over the world’s resources but not ownership.
In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.
Therefore, if you have been assigned the goods of this world by God and you don’t share them with others, it isn’t just stinginess, it is an injustice.
Our sins create a barrier between God and us, but by his grace, the Lord makes a provision for sin.
Grace makes you just. If you are not just, you’ve not truly been justified by faith.
Faith without respect, love, and practical concern for the poor is dead. It’s not justifying, gospel faith.
Vulnerable people need multiple levels of help. We will call these layers relief, development, and social reform. Relief is direct aid to meet immediate physical, material, and economic needs.
To act “in line with the gospel” is to live consistently with the truth that we are sinners saved by sheer grace.
The church is a support system.” It is a place of healing and grace.
God is a craftsman, an artisan.
God created all things to be in a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted, webbed relationship to one another.
The world is filled with hunger, sickness, aging, and physical death. Because our relationship with God has broken down, Shalom is gone—spiritually, psychologically, socially, and physically.
In most societies, physically handicapped people are forced to adapt to the life patterns of the non-handicapped,
The strong must disadvantage themselves for the weak, the majority for the minority, or the community frays and the fabric breaks.
It takes an experience of beauty to knock us out of our self-centeredness and induce us to become just.
In Jesus Christ, God identified not only with the poor but also with those who are denied justice.
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