Where Are The People of God?

In this daily devotional, I often write of the beauty of the world that God has created and especially the splendor of the place that He has allowed me to live.  I love Grand Lake.  I love Grove, Oklahoma. I love my home and the people that God has called me to minister to.  But this morning, as I have been studying for an upcoming sermon series, I have come across some very disturbing statistics that remind me that this physically beautiful world is a spiritually dark and forboding place.  The numbers tell us that almost a third of teenagers have been drunk twenty times or more and 35% have experimented with illegal drugs.  Every year 3 million young people--about 1 in 4 sexually experienced teens--acquire a sexually transmitted disease.  Children as young as six are cutting themsleves. The average self-harmer is aged eleven, and 1 in 10 adolescents are thought to have cut themselves deliberately at least once.  AIDS has now killed more people than the Black Death.  In Africa alone, 400,000 children have been orphaned to this terrible epidemic.  And even in America one in five children is living in poverty while more than half of adults in the richest nation on earth did nothing in the past year to help the poor.  Such self-absorption in the midst of such crisis begs the question, "Where are the people of God?" 
It seems to me that we have fallen into a comfortable Christianity that demands padded pews, temperature-controlled sanctuaries and finely managed production values for our orderly and high-impact worship services and we've forgotten that Jesus said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
It's time that we stepped outside our comfort zone and do something that we couldn't normally do.  It's time to make a sacrifice for someone else, to go to those who are in need, and to make a difference in our world.  The darkness around us is caused primarily by the fact that those who are called to be the light of the world are hiding their candles under a bushel.  So let's go!  Let it shine, people of God, before it's too late!