Disruptive Grace
“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21, 24).
MAIN POINT: God’s grace disrupts our comfortable religious routines to create streams of justice and mercy.
Through the prophet Amos, God expressed His frustration with religious activities that had become disconnected from justice and mercy. Beautiful worship services, impressive religious gatherings, and carefully observed rituals meant nothing when God’s people ignored the suffering around them. This same tension existed in Jesus’ time and persists in ours.
God’s grace is inherently disruptive. It breaks into our well-ordered religious lives, challenges our comfortable assumptions, and calls us beyond safe spiritual routines. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath, He was demonstrating that grace cannot be contained by human schedules or religious protocols. Grace flows like water, finding every crack in our defenses, every gap in our comfort zones, every opening to human need.
This disruption is not destruction—it’s restoration. When grace interrupts our lives, it’s not to create chaos but to create streams of living water that bring life wherever they flow. These streams of justice and righteousness water dry places, nourish withered hope, and bring healing to broken communities. They turn our gatherings from self-serving activities into launching pads for service.
Application: God’s grace disrupts our comfortable religious routines to create streams of justice and mercy. Are your religious activities creating streams of justice that flow into your community?
Prayer: God of justice and mercy, let Your grace disrupt my comfortable faith. Make my worship launching points for justice and mercy that flow into the world. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Responses