Do you believe that God cares about our feelings? Charles Spurgeon wrote “Our God’s tender love for his servants makes him concerned for the state of their inward feelings.” What we feel really matters to God. What some might call our “earthly state” matters indeed. I believe that the redemption God has promised us is not for some future destination or alternate spiritual reality but it is for Here. Life’s problems are often written off as inevitable. We can’t really do much or anything about it because this world is just evil. The church writes it off too doesn’t it? So many of the salvation messages we hear start out with warning of the “end of the world.” “Look at the problems around you surely the world is about to end.” Instead of providing a solution and responding as a help to the world the Church lets it be.

If God cares about those problems should not the Church? I believe that it takes a level of optimism to be a Christian. I believe the Church must respond to the world’s problems with a great optimistic faith that the problem can be solved. This is what I believe the Kingdom Of God which is written about in scripture is all about. We are to take part in the redeeming and healing of the world. We must believe that this Earth, this world can and will be renewed (Revelation 21). We must care about the problems in the world and answer them with hope.

This hope is not easy to defend. The answer of our hope is based completely on faith which is, when not view in the proper terms, irrational. It is to be defended not with empty exchange of fact but with action. Last month I posted an entry called “the Journey” in which I explained, with a bit of Wittgensteinien language, that the essential aspects of Christianity are not things that can be confined into language but things that must be shown. It is the same with this hope. We must be prepared to give an answer for this hope we have. Maybe the best answer is action. If we have faith but do nothing is it worth anything. “Faith without works is dead” James 2:26 Care about what God cares about. The so-called “earthly state” may be the most important state of eternity. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going" Ecclesiastes 9:10. Know also, that God is redeeming the world and it’s problems are real, as real as Heaven itself.