Do You Know Joseph Kony?
He is the Adolf Hitler of our day and yet you don’t even know who he is.
There are two reasons Uganda has an orphan crisis. One is AIDS and other health related issues. The other is Joseph Kony. In the Northern part of Uganda, southern Sudan, and north-eastern Congo Joseph Kony has been kidnapping children and forcing them to kill their parents and then join his army. If you are a girl your role may be to provide sex. If you are a boy you will be called upon to intimidate, mutilate, and kill in the name of Joseph Kony. 30,000 children have been kidnapped in Uganda alone. His behavior has led to him being listed as the #1 most dangerous man on the planet according to the Interantional Criminal Court at The Hague in The Netherlands. Muammar Gaddafi, recently deposed dictator of Libya was #22.
Governements supported the overthrow of Gaddafi’s government simply because of oil. Joseph Kony doesn’t have any oil, but he has hands stained by the blood of thousands of innocent people. In 2012 the agency Invisible Children has made the capture of Joseph Kony an absolute must.
I encourage you to watch the following video, share it with anyone and everyone, talk about it with your children and friends, and churches and then join me to make Joseph Kony famous.
Unconditional = Power
We often fear that enduring someone’s abusive words or actions and being willing to forgive those who participate in them against us somehow makes us weak. See if Joy’s little motivational speech changes your mind. For all of you Harmony folks the ministry she works with may sound pretty familiar.
For Your sake or for the sake of Christ?
For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake,30 engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have. (Philippians 1)
Believe and suffer.
Doesn’t sound very like a very good tagline for a consumer does it? And in this day and age of consumerism the Church has often changed our tagline for the sake of communicating to the culture in a way that is relevant.
Believe and you will be saved from Hell.
Believe and you get eternal life.
Believe and you will become God’s son or daughter.
Believe and God will fix your spouse, or your kids, or your parents, or your boss.
Believe and God will make you wealthy.
Believe and God will make you well.
When our belief is focused upon us…when your belief is focused upon you, and is for the sake of you, then we will always view Jesus through the eyes of the consumer. There is plenty of evidence that any one of these belief statements may be true for you, but in the end if our belief is built on any one of them we may be setting ourselves up for disaster. In the end if our belief is built upon our willingness to do believe and suffer for the sake of Jesus, then suffering can bring joy and a new depth of our worth becomes evident.
But to be willing to believe and suffer for the sake of Jesus requires that we become familiar with the depth of our own fallen state, our own hopelessness without Jesus, our own desperate need of Jesus, and that can be a humiliating experience…but one worthy of enduring.
What suffering might you be avoiding for the sake of your comfort?