By Vijay Jayaraj

When Scripture commands us to defend the weak, it does not address only pastors, lawyers, politicians, or professional activists. It speaks to ordinary believers who have been redeemed by an extraordinary God. It calls us to place our hands, voices, resources, and convictions at the service of people crushed by sin, coercion, poverty, and persecution.

One person who practiced that was Pranitha Timothy, who went to be with the Lord on August 9, 2026, at the age of 51, after several years of fighting a brain tumor. You would not have picked her out of a crowd. Every Sunday, at a small church in India’s Chennai (formerly known as Madras), Pranitha Timothy would enquire about my well-being before she mentioned about her own week.

An ordinary fellow Christian — yet when you find out more about her, you’ll see that she was used as an instrument of God, rescuing and restoring lives of thousands of abused and enslaved souls across Asia. In her early career, Pranitha served with International Justice Mission (IJM) and became deeply involved in rescuing people trapped in bonded labor and trafficking.

These missions often involved life threatening situations, coming face to face with dangerous criminals and overlords. The situation was made even more dangerous because of the corrupt and complicated law and order situation, unlike the U.S. or Europe where one would expect assistance and protection from both police and the courts. Yet she persisted!

Beyond rescue, she helped develop IJM’s aftercare work for people who had been liberated from slavery. I still remember meeting Gary Haugen, the founder of International Justice Mission, at a Church in Vancouver, Canada, and how joyful he was at the very mentioning of Pranitha’s name. She most recently served as Lausanne Movement’s regional director for South Asia. Lausanne called her a courageous champion for justice.

Pranitha once said what resonates with most Christians: “The source for fighting injustice is God. Anything else is inadequate.” Psalm 82:3 commands God’s people to defend the weak and the fatherless and to uphold the cause of the poor and oppressed.

Proverbs 14:31 says whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker. Isaiah 1:17 implores us to learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed. These passages do not leave room for selective compassion.

You see, for Pranitha, the mission of rescuing people and restoring broken lives was deeply rooted in her faith, and it meant giving everything she had. So must it be for all of us, regardless of our calling and the different aspects of culture we interact with.

Injustice of Various Forms: Policy-Made and Persecution

We are moved by rescue stories because the villain is obvious. What about injustice with no visible oppressor? Human suffering does not arise only from individual cruelty. Governments and international agencies can also create conditions that keep people poor, dependent, and powerless.

A policy may carry the language of compassion while producing higher prices, fewer jobs, weaker industries, and deeper hunger. Compassion requires more than generous emotion. It requires understanding how work, property, prices, capital, and voluntary exchange affect the poor.

E. Calvin Beisner’s book Prosperity and Poverty argues from a biblical worldview that concern for the poor must be joined to a serious understanding of how wealth is created and how resources should be used.

A Christian concern for the poor should therefore make us deeply suspicious of policies that prevent poor people from accessing the same engines of prosperity that transformed wealthy societies. One such aspect is energy, a topic I focus on for my livelihood.

Roughly 900 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa still cook with polluting solid fuels. Wood, charcoal, dung. Researchers estimate that burning solid fuels kills about 4 million people every year. A mother in Democratic Republic of Congo who cannot afford a cooking gas cylinder is not oppressed by a slave master. She is oppressed by a policy. The oppression is quieter, but her lungs do not know the difference.

The same God who hates trafficking hates the smug regulation that keeps a village dark or the policies that deny people their God-given rights to access energy resources. The same logic runs through economics.

Financial aid has never ended poverty anywhere. Property rights, honest courts, open trade, and access to energy have. Rainer Zitelmann assembles the evidence in his book In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths, and the pattern is consistent across continents.

Then there is the injustice aimed directly at the church. Pastors imprisoned in Nigeria. Congregations bulldozed in China. Anti-conversion laws in Indian states that criminalize a change of heart. Believers in a hundred countries who lose employment, custody, and life itself for confessing Christ.

Free markets, abundant energy, and religious liberty are not Western luxuries. They are the ordinary conditions under which human beings made in God’s image flourish.

God engraved His own character into you. Your anger at a rigged system, your discomfort when the weak are trampled, your instinct that someone should do something about this, are not accidents of temperament. They are fingerprints. He is a God who hears, sees, and acts, and He made you to reflect that.

Pranitha Timothy’s life reminds us that God often works through one believer who refuses to look away. You may not lead an international movement, yet your voice at work, your giving, your hospitality, your research, and your refusal to repeat a convenient lie can protect another person’s dignity and life. Teachers, engineers, nurses, shopkeepers, students, and pastors all hold ground somewhere.

Your position does not disqualify you. The Lord still calls ordinary believers to act as his hands.

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, and a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds a M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University and has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.