A friend’s wife, a talented seamstress, made a loving plan before she passed away from a long illness. She donated all her sewing equipment to our town’s sewing guild, providing sewing machines, cutting tables and more for classes teaching newly arrived immigrants. “I counted twenty-eight boxes of fabric alone,” her husband told us. “Six women came by to pick up everything. Their students are hard workers, eager to learn a skill.”
Others describe such newcomers in less flattering ways. The plight of immigrants has become a divisive issue.
Moses, however, issued God’s view: “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners” (Exodus 23:9). He further shared God’s decree regarding strangers. “When you reap the harvest of your land . . . do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:9-10).
God also declared, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (vv. 33-34).
God set the standard. May He bless our hearts to show love to the strangers among us.
By Patricia Raybon
REFLECT & PRAY
How can you help those in your church or neighbourhood from other countries or who speak another language? How does God’s heart for ‘outsiders’ encourage you?
Dear Father, please give me a heart that welcomes others.
The posture of God’s redeemed people toward the “foreigner” (outsiders) is the focus of today’s text. The grounds for the instructions were that the Israelites belonged to the God who’d redeemed them: “I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:10, 34). This relational reality was to guide their conduct both negatively and positively. Relative to the gathering of their produce, they were not to “reap to the very edges of [their] field” or “go over [their] vineyard a second time” (vv. 9-10). Foreigners were not to be mistreated ( v. 33); rather, they were to be “treated as your native-born” and loved “as yourself” (v. 34).
Guidelines like these also help believers in Jesus to think proactively about what can be done for “the outsider.” Peter says that “once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10).
Arthur Jackson
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