Thomas Long, professor of homiletics...
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Thomas Long, professor of homiletics at Princeton, tells of a church that opened its building to the homeless during a particularly cold spell. Long was recruited to help supervise one night. He invited a friend, who was not a churchgoer, to share the responsibility. After providing for the necessities, they opened the door to a long line of nameless poor. After the people had arranged newspapers into substitutes for mattresses and settled in for the night, Long's friend opted to take the first watch. He wanted to visit with some of these street people, to hear their stories, before they fell asleep. Several hours later the man entered the side room and shook Long awake. "Tom, Tom," he said excitedly, nodding his head toward the dark room filled with homeless people, "I think Jesus is out there!" Paul writes that "we regard no one from a human point of view" (v. 16). A sign on one church read, "We reserve the right to accept anyone." As the missionary E. Stanley Jones observed, "There are no snobberies in the gospel, not even spiritual snobberies." Something happens to our human way of regarding others when we take on the name of a crucified Jewish peasant who embodied the grace of God. -- Bristow
