The measure of us as followers of Christ is not how much we have studied His word, but how much we are living it.
Metrics are important. There is some truth in the old maxim, “What gets measured gets done.” The United Nations has set forth some laudable goals for dealing with disease, poverty, and lack of education in their Millennial Goals. The trick will be people trying to take credit for improvements which will not have a clear cause and everyone trying to avoid blame when things take major turns for the worse. Issues such as famine, wars, political corruption and so on make it tough to achieve such goals. Don’t get me wrong, I think such goal-setting is a positive step. It is only the first step, however. Action must follow. As followers of Christ we should try to contribute to the reaching of those goals and to the reaching of goals set by Jesus in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. Studying those goals will not accomplish much either. We must act on them. Start with a single step.
James 1:22-25, 27
22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it-he will be blessed in what he does.
27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
