People across the nation have been hit by staggering food prices, an increasing cost of basic necessities, and rocketing heating bills. If you have read the news this week you may have seen that the latest figures have hit an all-time high. Commercial heating is now facing a 350% rise in energy costs, with over 480,000 households up and down the country affected. How as Christians do we respond to this?
The many people who were just about managing before the Cost of Living Crisis are now choosing between eating and heating. All across the country our children are going hungry, our elderly are sitting isolated and freezing in their homes, and hard-working people are left empty-handed when pay checks come through but just can’t cover the bills.
The newest statistics on the rise in food and heating costs are extremely disconcerting for many. But we know that people are not statistics and when we look at our families and those around us, we do not see statistics, what we see is their struggle.
Reading this I hope you can see just how important politics is and how government policies really do impact our lives. Reading this I also hope you may understand too, just how powerless politicians are in the face of circumstance. Who could have predicted a war against Ukraine that would be a major factor in the UK’s soaring energy prices?
As the statistics and figures once again shock us, we must remember who God is and live according to His word knowing that His ways are higher than our ways. We remember that in all our efforts and desires to bring change, it is God who knows the personal struggles of people up and down the country.
As I focus my eyes on the Cost of Living Crisis, maybe like you, ideas fly about in my mind on how to stop it and how to help as many people as possible come out of it, to get up right away and use my time to get straight to action. But our first thought should only be to pray. If God’s instruction was to do absolutely nothing as a response to the crisis, to just be still, could we do it?
When you open the word that’s not quite what He asks of us. But my challenge would be that if there ever is a time where He requires that of us, would we be able to submit and not respond based on our own understanding?
When we do open up the word it is clear that our instruction is to go out to the ends of the earth and proclaim the good news to the poor and to care for His sheep. Our instruction is to go out and lay our lives down for others, to pray for our hearts to break just as God’s does for the things we can’t see. We have a duty as Christians to find out what is going on, how people are suffering and to pray for them.
When the new Church was created in the book of Acts, they knew their instruction and gave all they had to the poor, as I look to the Church today, that is our job now as it is always. We need to pray that we would use our Church resources, our time, our words for those in our community and beyond who are struggling to put food on their table and to pay for their homes to be heated.
Most importantly we are not to do that in our own strength but to let God do that in us. His ways are higher than our ways and only through His way and will can this Cost of Living Crisis come to an end. Let’s continue to pray for Him to move because only He can.
