Love Justice International

I'm very excited about what we're uh have to be a part of today. Uh Kirk Schwitzer is going to be with us. Uh standing right here, right next to me. Um very excited. Gotten a chance to get to know him just a little bit. Uh since they're back, they live in South Africa. They're back here for a little bit, but he's involved with the ministry organization called Love Justice. Uh you're going to hear more about that this morning. Um I won't take time to even really explain it. I'm going to let you do all of that, but I just want to say thank you. And the reason I'm excited about this among others is the fact that we as a church now we've just been going through this series um uh life unlocked. And I think part of the reason for this series is to challenge us in allowing our faith to determine our actions. Allowing our faith to really set our lives to kind of set that that uh far off objectives and goals and then bring them all the way back to how we are working to live out our faith. And as part of that, we talked about earlier uh one of the weeks is the whole concept of living with compassion. And compassion re requires for us as we were in that looking at the story of the good Samaritan. We have to see it. We got to have eyes that are open to what's going on in the world around us. We've got to be those who respond with compassion, who feel it, and then having felt and seen, we do something about it. And I think this morning we're going to be challenged in that way of how to see sometimes we see a huge big problem and we see this gap between the big problem where we are and part of what we talked about is how to bring it back down to steps and choices in our own lives that can allow us and you further and further into being those who are making a a big impact. So with that said, Kirk, thank you. God bless you. Appreciate you being here this morning. Thanks Joel. Yep. Good morning church. It's good to be with you. I'm going to just adjust a little bit here as I get started. Um, as Joel said, my name is Kirk. Sorry, I'm balancing a tablet here. I think it's going to work just fine though once I sort it out. Um, and I work with Love Justice International. My look looks like my wife is out of the room. Um, uh, but we've been in South Africa now for just over two years. I've been with Love Justice for the last just over 11 years. Um, I'll get a picture on the screen here of our family. Right there is my wife Miranda and our two kids Finn and Lucy. Finn is six and Lucy is four. And you can see that's that's South Africa right there. And if you look on the eastern coast there, if if you can see that town that city called Durban, we are just north of that about 40 40 45 minutes somewhere in there. Um and we live there with our program headquarters team that supports the work around the world that we do which I'll share a bit more about in a minute. Um before we were in South Africa we were living in Catmandu Nepal for about 8 and a half years and that is where it was Nepal where all of the work of love justice started and I'll share a bit more about that. So I want to back up just a little bit to my story. Um and I was reading in college a book called Terrify No More which is written by the president of International Justice Mission. And I can still remember to this day the moment that I I read this chapter which was the title was called Where Were You? Chapter nine. And and this book um Terrify No More. It it would alternate between telling the story of International Justice Mission's work to rescue minors out of a brothel area. And they were telling the details of this rescue mission. and and it was just this gripping story of of both learning about what was going on and and and their work to then rescue these minors out of this out of this situation. But then the alternating chapters would would kind of back away and tell a broader perspective about human trafficking and and kind of speak to the reader more directly and and you would hear more about the author himself and his journey. Um, and that's that's what this chapter was where he where he starts off and he's he's describing how when he was young and he would read history, he would have these questions that would come into his mind as he's learning about these past injustices. Questions like um questions like, oh, let me see if we can get that up there. Okay. Oh, struggling to There we go. um how would I have fared in the great moral struggles of the past? Would I have been on the right side? Would I have been on the right side? Would I have acted with courage? Would I have made my grandchildren proud? And when I read these questions, these are just questions that I immediately resonated with. Reading through history, um growing up, learning about whether it be World War II, thinking about at the height of Nazi Germany, what would I have done? Who would I have been? Um would I have said something? would I have acted out? Which side would I have said something on um at the height of slavery in the US? What would I have done? What would have been my what what would have been my response to that? Um and so I just I resonated with these questions. And um he he then proceeds to say that there are more slaves today than at any point in all of history. And then you can see you can see kind of where he's going with this. Um, you can see that where he's going is that these questions of who we might have been at a time that God didn't design us for. He didn't make us for. His purpose was not for for Kirk Schweitzer to live in that time in history, but for me to live now in this moment of history um in the context of the injustices that are going on today. And there are more slaves today than there have ever been in all of history. So, this is not just a problem of the past. There's a choice to be made now. And I remember just in my dorm room by myself somewhere just um just being so it was like a ton of bricks just hit me right in the chest and and I don't even think he needed to with that. I just immediately felt this responsibility and and it was like he didn't even have to say but it was like I now possessed information that I could just turn from where I could really let it let it um let it impact my life.

I want to tell you a bit about Love Justice. Um I I love this organization. I've as I said I've been with it for over a decade now. And the the thing that I might love the most is our mission statement. Okay. It's I worship you. Nope. It looks like I'm I'm not able to control it with this. Um so our mission is sharing the love of Jesus Christ by fighting the world's greatest injustices. And there's just a couple things there that I'll draw out. One is that we're a Christian organization. Um every staff that works with Love Justice is motivated by the gospel. We want to share the gospel of Christ. We want to share the love of Christ and we are focused on the world's greatest injustices. We um we want it to be our specialty to search out and to find to understand and then to fight the world's greatest injustices. And within this mission we find what we would call our our core values. What should we do here? And should I abandon the tablet? Okay. Um I'll cue you with the slides here. So our next our the next are the core values here which the first one here is be the kingdom and we consider it our primary identity as part of the body of Christ first and foremost. All of our work is done through local churches and Christians. It also means that we believe in sharing the gospel with words and ultimately souls are more important than physical needs. And even though we're ultimately focused on justice work, that's because we believe that if the church is sharing the gospel, but not doing so with an act of love that meets the needs of those around them, it's not the gospel they are sharing. Because the gospel is a gospel of love and love is not idle in the face of people's sufferings. So we see ourselves then as calling the church to love justice and equipping the church around the world with tools to fight against injustice. And then our last sorry not our last our our next core value there is help those who need it most. Jesus says that it's whatever you do for the least of these. There's preferential treatment for the least of these. Whatever you do for the least of these brothers of mine you've done for me you do for me. And so we want to be focused on those who need it most. The least of these. The world's greatest injustices. That's who we want to help. And our last core value is to do much with little which is what it sounds like. We are entrusted with resources and we want to steward those well to create the greatest possible impact that we can. And part of how we live out this mission and core values and come to the next here is through our family homes and um our children's ministry work. All of our work started in Nepal by caring for orphan and abandoned children. We still do that today. Um the mission of our family homes team and our children's ministry team is that these kids would grow up to live flourishing lives in Christ connected lives in their country. Um we used to talk about and and use the phrase a lot of we want to see them become difference makers for Christ in their country. Part of this work is that we started a school and it's called the dream school. It's in Poker, Nepal. And the the aim of the school is to provide an excellent education to help them achieve this mission of living flourishing and Christ connected lives. We've we've had around 23 kids who have graduated from the homes and almost all of them have gone to college. Many have gone abroad and we're just starting to see the fruit of this work and it's been so incredible to see. Now I want to talk a bit um about human trafficking. Um I started off by sharing that note on human trafficking. I want to talk a little bit about human trafficking. Um there I mentioned we used to live in Catmindu Nepal. There are thousands of Nepali girls that are trafficked from Nepal into India Gulf countries every year.

There's one woman, Mina, who was brave enough to share her story. And I want to just take a couple minutes to play that for us now. [Music]

[Music] Um the agent first went to their house and said that she will be going to Lebanon and she will be earning lots of money and they took at that time took 40,000 from her family and saying that she will earn more than this and and to see if they all lived. And that when she reached there, there was not live normally.

And then when she asked for salary, those two ladies um greet her. And then she was taken to a office where there were more than people and asked her why she did not work in that place. And she said work is nice. They gave me food and everything. But when I asked for salary, they start feeding me. And then they brought me here. And then those guys in the office, they started feeding her. And then they put her in that office for me.

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Mom.

[Music] And then the other guy came and came to the office and he looked at other girls and he said I'll take the little girl and then she was taken from that guy and then she was taken to that house and she was abused there. She was beaten. She was abused. She was not beautiful. And she was tortured a lot. She was there.

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and then she was again taken back to the office and there was another man there to buy her again and that repeated for a while just and he was saying that I was sold like animal again and again and people were treating me as animal and torturing me again and And

stop it right there.

Mina's story of what can happen to a Nepali girl who is trafficked across the border to the Middle East or into India. Um, and these are innocent young girls who are deceived by false jobs or false marriages and end up in a situation like she is she was.

I want to talk to you a little bit about the the strategies that are being used to fight against human trafficking in the world today. We can go to the next slide here. Um there I would I would describe the strategies that that are being used to fight against human trafficking in two different categories. One is pre-traicking trying to stop this before it happens. And then the next category is post trafficking which are organizations in in teams that are rescuing people in slavery and and providing after care for them. Um and the the one limitation to the the pre-traicking side is that um you it's often hard to have really tangible impact. Tangible in the sense that this is someone maybe you're sharing with somebody about trafficking and this is someone that would have otherwise been trafficked but for your intervention. And and that's probably the biggest limitation. The goal is to get on the other side of this, but that's the biggest limitation to much of the pre-traicking work that is done on the post-traicking side. This is work that needs to be done. People need to be rescued from slavery. Um, and you know, the staff at those organizations would say the same, which is that what if if only we could have stopped this from ever happening? How much better would it have been if we could have stopped this? It's long, difficult work to work with somebody who's been in a situation like this and provide that care. And so what we've realized about transit monitoring here on the next slide is that it kind of cuts right through the middle. Kind of cuts right through the middle of both of these strategies and attacks human trafficking at the at what we think is one of the most strategic times at the moment it's taking place. We have staff that are monitoring at key transit points like border crossings, bus stations, airports. Um, and they are trained to identify human trafficking. They're trained to question individuals. They're trained to to draw out stories to find out what is going on. Is this a false job? Is this a false marriage? And uncover what is going on. And in that way, it's it's tangible. It's taking somebody who is on their way to going to that final destination and preventing them. It's it's preventative as I just said. It it stops it before they reach that final destination. It's extremely costefficient. It's um and we've realized in the process as well that this is a strategy where every time that we make an intercept, we're we're learning about what happened to that potential victim. We call it a potential victim because they didn't reach that final destination. and we learn about how that potential victim was lied to, how they were lured up until this point. And so in that way that all that data goes into our human trafficking database and we're able to learn about how traffickers are operating yesterday or two days ago. Um

let's go to the next slide. I want to tell you a bit about our history. Back up a little bit then. This is time. This is when I joined the organization 11 years ago. In 2006, I wasn't with the organization, but I will speak as if I was because I just take great pride in this history. Um, we we first started this work in Nepal as I said and it was border monitoring. It was primarily border monitoring aimed at intercepting Nepalies being trafficked into India. In our first station, we call it a station which is a just a team of staff that are overseen by a local subcommittee. The first thing we do when we go to work in a new area is trying to identify um a subcommittee chairman, oftentimes a pastor, somebody just with with just a burning desire to stop injustice in his area. And then we equip them with the tools they need to do so. And so on the left here, you you see Jay Pos, who's our first subcommittee chairman who oversaw the couple monitors that worked at this border crossing. Just behind them, you see a beam across the road. This is the border crossing between Nepal and India. You can see how informal it is in many ways and how freely people cross. And so our team in 2006 were first stationed in Jonikur, Nepal. And they we had our first intercept there and I think it was actually two girls maybe even three girls that were intercepted as a group. This was so incredible that we could that we could stop two maybe three girls from being trafficked from you know hearing the story of Mina potentially avoiding a story like that. Um, we've always as an organization just internally, we've always felt that what we do is about the one and yet we're trying to scale it. We're we're trying to have a greater impact. Do much with little. And yet everything if if all I could do with my life is just prevent one person from being trafficked, that would be enough.

I want to go to the next slide here. We over the next few years, God blessed the organization immensely. There were 61 intercepts in that period of time. 61 girls that were intercepted and stopped and prevented from from continuing on. We there was a moment in May um where this leads to in May where where the team in the states called our team overseas and said, "Hey, there's so much support for this work. Can we not, you know, this is in the context of we know that there are thousands of Nepalies that are trafficked every year into India. Can we not do more? Can we not um scale this work in Nepal more? Is there more that we can do? And it was it's just it was hard work up until this point. Nothing was easy about doing this work. But our team came together and and said, you know what? Let's dedicate ourselves to prayer and fasting. And they called this initiative project 58 after Isaiah 58. Isaiah 58 tells us to loose the chains of in set the captives free to break every yoke. And then there's these wonderful promises that follow. If you have a chance this afternoon, look it up. Isaiah 58. It's an amazing piece of scripture. And I want to just show you in in response to that prayer and fasting how God responded and answered those prayers. On the next slide here,

there was this breakthrough. there was this breakthrough in our teams to be able to increase the impact that we saw in border monitoring and and in many ways that has been the trajectory then that we've followed. Um our monitors here on this slide you can you can go to that next one there. Um our our monitors are the true heroes of this work and I'm just going to read this. They stand at the front lines of the fight against human trafficking. You can see our two monitors. This was in Benin. They're questioning these individuals on this motorbike. They're persistently keeping watch in a variety of unpleasant conditions. These border crossings, these bus stations, these are not fun places to be. They're out in the heat, in the dirt. They boldly intervene in the lives of strangers who are more likely to be angry or annoyed than to thank them for it. Encourageously fight to protect and bring justice for the most vulnerable against some of the most vicious criminals in the world. They daily carry a burden of responsibility that most of us go our whole lives without experiencing. immersed in opportunities to meet an unimaginably precious human being in a moment between freedom and slavery and to be that difference. I'm going to show one more short video this morning and this is a video that tells the story of a real intercept that we made a few years back um and of two girls. And so we'll we'll show that now.

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foreign. [Music]

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I for [Music] them.

She she became a transit monitor and worked with us for a few years and then went on to intercept more girls in similar situations. Um it would be really hard to explain how difficult this work has been in in growing this work from one station to the next, from one country to the next. How many pitfalls we've fallen into, how many failures there have been along the way. It's a history just full of failure, obstacle pitfalls. We've often said that the problems on the edge of the world's greatest injustices aren't there because they're easy to solve. These are really difficult things happening in very difficult places. But we've spent the last decade honing this work, honing this strategy, transit monitoring, honing the core processes that we use to execute this strategy around the world. And we've we've learned how to scale this work today. You can go to the next slide. We've intercepted more than 90,000 people to prevent them from being trafficked. And more than 1,800 arrests have stemmed from that work. On the next slide here, that has been in the last 12 months, we look to see how much are we spending to achieve this work. And and look, over the last 12 months, this is what we call a fully loaded number, which includes fundraising, overhead, all of that. And it cost us around $112 to intercept one person from being trafficked.

And and I would say that is that's the direct impact of this work. Um that's taking somebody that was going to be trafficked and preventing them seeing that there are arrests that follow of traffickers that are engaged in this work which sends a deterrent effect. Um but I want to tell you about another recent discovery within our organization. Just a couple months ago, we we realized on the next slide here, there's an organization called WalkFree Foundation. They they put out a report called the Global Slavery Index. I mentioned earlier that there are I think I mentioned that there are 50 million slaves in the world today. That comes from this report here. This is the only this is the only organization that seeks to to to understand prevalence of slavery around the the entire world in every country. And they don't do a report every year. It's a lot of work that goes into it, but every few years they they update and put out a new report saying this is the context of of slavery in the world today. And their most recent report was in 2023. And that's this is the number of 50 million slaves in the world today. And we um we realized just a few months ago that well why don't we take a look at the the work that we've been doing in the countries that we're working in which over the course of our work has been nearly 30 countries but um why don't we look at that in the countries where we've where we've seen just more than 100 intercepts. Um but we started by why don't we look at the top five countries where we've had the greatest impact. Surely we would hope to see that prevalence would have decreased over that time. And if you go to the next slide here, yeah, here we are now. You can see that we realized that in each of the five countries that we had the greatest we had had the most intercepts and the greatest impact in we saw slavery decrease over that time, which was so encouraging to us. In these graphs, the start column is different for every country because we didn't start in each country at the same time. But we look to see when did we start and then what is the the the report that we can use that was the closest to that start time that would make sense to then look and compare to 2023 where we're at now. What has happened in that country in that in that time period. And we were just so amazed by this and u of course we're not the only thing what's going on in those countries but we were so amazed and encouraged to see that okay at least we're seeing slavery decline in the countries that we've had the greatest impact in. And it was at this point that our CEO was about to send out an organizationwide email kind of celebrating this fact when um you know he thought well why don't we at least just take a look at the sixth most impactful country on the next slide here which is Bangladesh and and in that too we saw a decline and um and so why don't we look at the next most impactful South Africa and then Namibia and Mozambique and Rwanda and Zimbabwe let's get them all on one slide. side here. Zimbabwe. Each one of these countries that we had been working in all saw a decrease. And I want to and then Benin and then Tanzania. I want to pause here. Um while we're seeing this happen there, there there's something else going on which is the rest of the world the countries in the rest of the world on average you can go to the next slide. On average slavery prevalence is increasing on average in the rest of the world. So there's something going on here with with what we're seeing. You can go to the next slide in Sierra Leon and the next in Ghana and then Lutu and you can click it forward one more time there. Each of the 16 countries where love justice started working prior to 2022 saw slavery decline over the course of our work. Um, and so this has just been something that we've been celebrating recently and and just so encouraged to see that on the one hand we've had 90,000 more than 90,000 intercepts which impacts 90,000 lives. But what we're also seeing is that work is having a deterrent effect potentially much greater than even just that direct impact. If if you're driving home from work and you leave the office and leave at 5:15 and you get on the highway and um you see a traffic cop and he's it's it's one of those situations where he's outside his car, he's got the radar gun up and he's checking for speeding. You're going to if if you are speeding, you're going to immediately probably pump the brakes a bit. Um if you're not speeding, good for you. Um, but if you knew that that tra if you started to see a pattern and you knew that that traffic cop actually he's sitting in the same spot every single day I leave work and you're going to you're going to adjust your behavior. You're going to slow you're not going to be speeding as you're coming over that hill and that crest and you're going to know he's there. You're going to adjust your behavior in light of that. There's been studies to show the impact of of an officer out on the highway and the impact that that has on speeding. Transit monitoring is that traffic cop. We have monitors working in strategic locations around the world and traffickers can continue to traffic in the ways that they have. They cannot continue to just go on as if that's not happening. We are making an impact and we're seeing the results of that around the world. We believe that um there are 50 million slaves in the world today approximately. We believe that there will be tipping points that that tipping points that are achievable to hit when tra when trafficking becomes so difficult, so expensive, so risky that the systems and the the structures that support trafficking around the world, they will begin to collapse.

I want to talk um just a little bit about compassion. Joel invited me to share today and mentioned that the theme was compassion. And I was just um yeah, grateful for that theme for you this morning. And um I'm I'm not a Bible scholar by any means and this isn't going to be a full word study or anything of the sort. Um but I just wanted to share a a couple simple observations and I realized as Joel was sharing kind of a summary of what sounds like you've already shared on compassion, these won't be new. Um and so if you go to the next slide here, compassion, I pulled out a couple scriptures from Ephesians 4:32. I'll just read a few of these. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you. Let's go to the next in 1 Peter 3:8. Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. And let's go to the last here in Colossians 3:12. Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. This is just a few times that compassion comes up in the gospel. And I love this this last one in Colossians about uh clothing yourself with compassion. In in in other translations it says put on and compassion is listed first here to put it on. There's something you can go to the next slide. Compassion is a command. There's a command. There's a directive. It's it's not something you know we're not say if if you decide to put on comp. It's put on compassion. Clothe yourself with compassion. There's a choice in there. um as if in the same way that you dress yourself in the morning, that's that's something you're doing. You're putting on compassion. At Love Justice, we we've seen just uh and again this there's an echo in what Joel shared in his introduction is that how h how much our our response to injustice is to look away. It's so hard to to keep your gaze on injustice. when we watch a video hearing about what happened to Mina, everything in me wants to just look away and disengage. I don't want to watch that video again. Um,

one of our values, one of our, we call it one of our global values is to let injustice break your heart. We serve a God that loves justice. His heart is broken by injustice. And so if your heart breaks by injustice, that is mirroring God's heart. And and I I see it we we see it in our own internal team. I see it in myself that I don't like that feeling. I don't like how confronting that feeling is in my heart. I don't like sitting with that. And so we've we've learned to tell oursel as a team to to face up to injustice, to face it squarely, to let it break your heart. And and you don't live in this space necessarily, but you you allow it to break your heart. We believe that the brokenhearted anointing is what equipss the believer to do justice work. And go to the next slide. Um in Luke 15:20 the is the story of the parable of the prodigal son where many are I'm sure are familiar where the son takes his inheritance early squanders it is eating with the pigs and now he's coming back home. And this in 1520 this is the response of the father here. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Go to the next in Mark 1:40. This is where Jesus heals a man with leprosy. He's moved with compassion. Jesus reaches out his hand and touches the man. And the last one here in Matthew 14:14, this is the context where Jes Jesus is feeding the 5000. But he first he sees the large crowd and had compassion on them. I don't I don't know what he saw exactly in the crowd, but maybe he started to see their sick because his response then is that he healed their sick. You can go to the next slide. Um the the simple observation here is that compassion leads to action. There compassion is not something that Jesus just had and went about his day and that was just a holy moment for him. It led to action in each of these. He he was filled with compassion. He ran. He threw his arms around and kissed him. He was moved. Even even in the introduction of compassion, it's it's talking about movement. He's being moved. What he was going to do that moment or that day is now changed because compassion has come upon him. And he reaches out his hand and touched the man. He sees a crowd and his response is is now to heal them, to heal the sick among them. I read a book um called Compassion when I was a teenager. It's by Henry Nan and and it's one of those another similar book that just set my heart on fire when I read it. Um and I I just want to read one quote from it here which is compassion always challenges us to do something about the pain we see. There's a challenge within compassion. And that's I think what I want to turn away from. I I don't like being challenged. Um but there's a there's a challenge that comes with compassion. And it's and it's to take action. Um

in Matthew 25, Jesus is talking about when the son of man returns. How he's going to separate the sheep from the goats as a shepherd does. And on what basis does he do that? He does it on the basis of what you did for the least of these brothers of mine. It's the least of these. That's that's how the sheep and the goats will be separated. He's looking for action for the least of these. I want to challenge you um to get curious about the world's greatest injustices. To take note when you feel compassion, when you feel the Holy Spirit um urging you to pay attention to something or or there something's breaking your heart, take note of that. Um and rather than allowing yourself to look away like I so often do, face up to it squarely. Take it to the Lord. Ask him what action he would have you take. And this is going to look different for everyone in each context. I want to end just in conclusion here going back to um you go to the next slide. Going back to that question, where were you? There was this question where were you in this book um terrify no more? And I want to end with a little bit of a lengthy quote. It'll be a couple slides here, but I I think it's worth reading. You can go to the next slide. This is how he ends this chapter. This is how the author Gary Hogan ends this chapter. And he says, "What would this nation and world look like if we began to lead?" There it is. With the riches of compassion and to lead, to take action with the riches moved with compassion. What would the world look like? Can we imagine that if we began to lead with the riches of compassion, grandness of purpose, and an abundance of hope? You can go to the next slide. Indeed, I think the God of history takes attendance and he convenes a tribunal of our grandchildren

who will someday ask us, "Where were you? Where were you, Grandpa, when the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and seeking safety on our shores?"

Where were you, Grandma, when they were marching our Japanese neighbors off to internment camps? Where were you, Grandpa? when our African-American neighbors were being beaten

for registering to vote.

Likewise, when your grandchildren ask us where we were when the weak and the voiceless and the vulnerable of our era needed a leader of compassion and purpose and hope. I hope we can say that we showed up and that we showed up on time and that the very God of history might say, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

Let's pray.

Father God, we just thank you for what you're doing around the world in the face of injustice. God, we thank you that um you are a God that loves justice. God, we thank you for every opportunity you give us to participate in your justice. God, help me. Help me to be aware of those opportunities and instead of turning from them to walk towards them even when it's challenging, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's scary, even when everything in me doesn't want to. God, I pray that your Holy Spirit would work in my heart, work in our hearts to be people of justice that care for the least of these around the world. God, gives give us hearts of compassion that mirror your heart.

Thank you, Father. We love you. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Kirk. I really appreciate your time and your investment for us. Um, we look at this idea of compassion and we are challenged when we hear things like we heard today. I hope you were challenged. I hope you're soft enough in your heart to be able to respond in a sense of like we talked about to to see to feel it and to do something. You're going to hear me uh in coming weeks talking more about Kirk and the work he's doing and about love justice and some ways that maybe we can get involved with them and just a step a step in the [Music]

[Music] In the face of injustice in our world today, I want to just say one more thing in light of this and then we're going to take communion together. Our world is full of injustice, but it is also full of uh distracting uh false representation of injustice. And we have to be careful as followers of Jesus to allow our hearts to be led by the Holy Spirit to respond where we are on the road in life like the good Samaritan and do something with the injustice that presents itself rather than allowing others to take our emotions and inflame them and tell us where we need and what we need to do. We need to listen carefully in a in a culture of loud and screaming voices to the still small voice of God that allows us to

break a cycle of injustice to bring kindness in the midst of of cruelty that allows us to be Christ in the midst of a chaotic world. So this morning I invite you if you put your faith in Jesus, he has done that for you. He has shown compassion and kindness in the midst of our need. He was not distracted. He stayed focused to the cross so we could be set free. So I invite you if you have a relationship with Jesus, come and take communion. be reminded of the kindness and compassion of God, but allow it to equip and to challenge and quicken your heart to a sensitivity of the injustice around each one of us in our daily lives. Do not take the communion elements as a step of a religious act, but a relationship of God's justice met in his son so we could be set free. If you have yet to have a relationship with Jesus, why not today? It's time to be set free. A simple uh statement of to God in your heart that you believe that what Jesus did on the cross has set you free and forgiven your sins. Then praise God, come and take what is represented here and rejoice in the new life that you have. Your sins can be forgiven. God, forgive me. Come into my life. Lead me. break my heart for the world around me that I can be a person of compassion.