Caution: Details and information are rough and heart breaking. Please seek the Lord in your feelings to read this and after you read this. This is a lesson I learned through culture differences, but for the Glory of the Lord.
How often do we hear or read about God’s grace, yet we don’t understand it? How often have we read that special verse in Romans chapter 5 that says, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us”, or that verse in Ephesians chapter 2 that says, “For it is by grace you have been saved…”?
Or how many of us have sat through a showing of “Passion of the Christ” where our heartstrings are plucked to feel an ounce of pain that Christ must have felt as he was beaten and hung on the cross for our sins?
Well, for Month 6 of the world race, I have been living in Tanzania doing a ministry called door-to-door evangelism. Everyday I have read these two verses to Africans of all ages, sizes, religious backgrounds, employment statuses, and for many different reasons. These are the verses that are the foundation of our faith, but was I just reading them because it was in a series of verses that I wanted these people to hear to hear the Good News of Salvation?
Do I understand these verses? Do we understand these verses?
I don’t think I completely grasped the concept of grace or how much I was saved from when Christ died on the cross for me, until a couple of days ago. I know I have been a Christ follower for 18 years but something hit me in a real and raw way on my walk to a local African school.
My team and I were in the midst of a long walk to a local secondary school for an hour of preaching when we encountered….African culture…you might say. As we were rounding the corner to take a path up the side of this mountain, we started to see a crowd of African women coming from another path making lots of noise. In a split second our pastor stopped and shouted some Swahili at this crowd that was now only feet behind us. We could hear them speaking Swahili phrases back and forth, but with our small knowledge of the language we couldn’t depict what they were saying. Our pastor had translated to us that they wanted to ask us for money, but he shoed them away.
As they continued on this path with us, we could see that they were pushing a young girl through the crowd. Her manner and dress were striking, but more than that was how different women in the crowd treated her. Women from different angles would take turns hitting this young girl with their hands or cloth or random sticks they would manage to grab as they hurriedly shoved this young girl down different paths. The young girl was caught between shielding her body from the different blows and holding her clothes on in different places. The despair on her face was evident and the lack of words brought silence, but the need to be saved was loud.
With the sounds of loud Swahili yelling, whipping sticks, slapping hands, and a whimpering of need, we stopped dead in our tracks. We had met cultural differences between African and American culture but couldn’t understand it. With our desire to stop this beating, we started to speak up. We saw the surface of what was happening and we didn’t like it. We saw this through our American eyes, which jumped to inappropriate abuse, but soon to our dismay our pastor explained to us that this young girl had stolen money from another villager. He enlightened us on African culture in that moment. Many times, if and when someone steals it is very likely that they could be killed by the other villagers for their choices. He explained that it is encouraged that they should take them to the police station, but many times the corruptness of the government trumps the misdemeanor of the culprit. Because the villagers have experienced a poor government system they take it in their own hands-thus our experience on the trail with the young girl.
But this moment opened my eyes to something I only ever read or watched in the movie about what Christ really did on the cross.
This village girl had sinned. She had committed a crime of stealing and was going to pay for it. She was being beaten and easily killed for her crime. [Who knows exactly how much she stole, our pastor said it could be 50 shillings (which is less than 50 cents) that someone could die for.] How often had I sinned like this? Maybe I didn’t steal money, but I lied or coveted. I had sinned and I should pay for my sin just like this village girl was in that moment. But here is when I saw the grace of God, when those verses started to take on human form rather than just being printed verses in a bound book.
Even while I am still a sinner, Christ has gone before me; he has taken my place and died for me. He has saved me from being drug through my “village”, beaten for my crime/sin, and being put to death. He has taken my place, physically. He was drug through the streets, beaten and put to death. He took my place already. What I saw of that village girl was only a tiny glimpse of the pain and humiliation that Jesus went through….for me.
He didn’t need to do that. I could and should have taken the pain and punishment for my sins each and everyday, but God saved me. He had grace on me. He HAS grace on me. I still continue to sin. I still continue to make poor choices, just like that village girl, but God still continues to show me how much he loves me; how much grace he has on me.
while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:8
I found that I have more in common with that village girl than I first could recognize, but in the midst of living in a moment of culture differences, I also found how much she had to teach me about this God that I tell everyone about and the grace he has waiting for each one of us.
