Mi Refugio, Missions and Our Mission

What does it mean to be a follower of Christ – to be a disciple?  I thought I knew.  But two experiences over the last two weeks have altered my perception radically.  I’d like to share them with you.

As my wife Jane and I prepared to leave for our mission trip to Guatemala, I was looking for a good book to read on the airplane and during any down time I might have.  I decided now would be a good time to dust off The Hole in our Gospel, by World Vision president Richard Stearns.  I had had it for months, but it just had not ascended to the top of my reading list.

I scanned the first few pages, and knew right away that it was a good choice.  It became the third leg of a stool – the other two being the mission experience itself and the bible study of the book of Matthew we did that week – each one contributing to a powerful and impactful experience that I hope and pray can lead to a renewed and refreshed perspective on what it means to be a Christ follower.

Our mission was to a school near Guatemala City named Mi Refugio, started by a sold-out servant named Kari Engen.  For an introduction to that the school is today, please watch these two videos. http://youtu.be/epXvLHkKNHQ and http://youtu.be/bSfrat3H2r0 .  But for some real perspective on where it all began, watch the 60 minute “Children Living in the Dump” documentary. 

Funny how my problems all start to just disappear when I realize how so many other human beings – people made in the image of God – would gladly eat the crumbs that fall from my table.

Some people ask God why he doesn’t do something about all the suffering.  Through these experiences I now realize that God is asking us why we don’t do something.  His job was to send His Son, to show us how we should live.  Our job is to do what the Son says.  If we did, the Kingdom would come, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Stearns points out that the words of the great commission (go and make disciples) cannot be fully understood without taking into account others such as Isaiah 58 and Matthew 25.  Isaiah 58 says in part:

² For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
⁴ Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
⁵ Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Many Christians today seem to think that if they go to church worship services, treat other people with kindness and respect and pray, they are O.K.  After all, they reason, Jesus said that the two most important commandments are to love God and your neighbor, and that “all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:40)  Yet when asked who our neighbor is, he answered with the parable of the prodigal son.  In so doing, he affirmed, it seems to me, this passage from Isaiah.  Your neighbor is anyone who has been yoked or oppressed, anyone who is hungry or in need of clothing or shelter.  He is one who needs something you can help with, if only you make a decision not to pass by on the other side.

In spite of that, many believers continue to cling to the belief that they don’t have to DO anything in order to be saved.  Some even believe that God chose them for eternity before the world began, and that there is nothing they can do, should do, or could do that would ever change that.  It’s an age-old argument.  But I do want to ask this: If that’s what you believe, what do you do with Matthew 25:

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

⁴⁴ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

⁴⁵ “He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

⁴⁶ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

We are saved BY grace through faith, but we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10)  And if we know what we are supposed to do, and we don’t do it, we will be the ones standing outside weeping and gnashing our teeth.  Because He will say “I never knew you”.

Kari Engen is not one of those people.  She has the kind of faith that I most admire.  It is not easy to be a good Samaritan.  It is even harder to be a full time missionary in a third-world country.  Not everyone is called to the same mission.  But we all have a mission.  Most of us never find out what it is, because we never really submit ourselves to God’s will to see what it is.  I don’t want to be one of those people.

How about you?

 

Tidal Wave Headed for Abortion-ville

180 Movie is a Tsunami Headed for Abortion-ville

November 17, 2011

A New WAVE in the Pro-Life Movement is About to Land on the Abortion Industry

It’s called the 180movie.  And it is having an amazing and powerful impact on the abortion issue.

Click on one of the links above and check it out for yourself.  You can watch the entire movie free, and with no strings attached.

Prevaricator in Chief

President Obama is an exceptionally gifted prevaricator.  He’s not the only one, of course.  He has many, many fellow prevaricators on both sides of the isle and in both houses of congress.

They can’t help it.  We make them do it.

Remember the song “The Snake?”  A tender-hearted woman sees a near frozen snake.  She takes him in a cares for him, and it revives.  But as she holds it tenderly, it gives her a vicious bite.

I saved you,” cried that woman

“And you’ve bit me even, why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die”

“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!”

Point being, we know they are going to bite us.  It’s in their DNA!  And in so doing, we become their enablers!

Similarly, politicians seen to have prevarication in their DNA.  Some of them are not very good at it.  They’re the ones who just give it to us straight.  Unfortunately, they’re also the ones who tend not to get elected much.

Maybe that’s what Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” meant when he said

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

It seems to me he was right.  We can’t handle the truth.  How else would you get your brain wrapped around the fact that we let them get away with it on such a regular basis.  We brush it off, saying ‘Oh, that’s just politics.’

But where is it written that we should reward such high-stakes deception? When the President says

“The American people are sold,”
“The American people are sold, I just want to repeat that.  You have 80% of the American people who support a balanced approach. 80% of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts. So the notion that somehow the American people aren’t sold is not the problem. The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically.”

Mr President, where did you get that 80% number?  Point us to the source.  Give us the actual facts, and forget about the ‘splainin’.

As a matter of fact, sir, please tell us why is is that you think you can look us in the eye and just lie through your teeth?  Have you no shame, sir?

But we don’t do that.  We let him get away with it.  We let them all get away with it.  It’s really more of an indictment of us, than of them.  We know they’re snakes.  Yet we take them in, and we want them to  return the favor.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSs!

God is pro-choice

God told Adam and Eve to eat from any tree in the garden but one.  He told them to choose.  They chose badly, of course, but the choice was theirs.  The result, of course was catastrophic.  We today are inheritors of the corruption they gave birth to on that fateful day.  Have we improved on the situation?  Have we made things better by our innate goodness, or our intellect?  I’ll leave you to decide on that one.  You choose.

As for me, I choose to believe that without trust in God’s goodness, we have no chance of choosing wisely in important matters.  Take abortion, for example.  We choose to have sex before marriage – lots of it – and we forget that God’s design for sex is not solely about giving us something pleasurable to do.  We make babies when we have sex.  When we try to prevent the babies without denying ourselves the sex and fail, we want the right to make sure the birth does not happen.  The result is that we choose a remedy for our first bad choice that is far worse.

Why does God allow us so much latitude?  Why allow us to choose, when we make so many bad choices?

One possibility is that being made in the image of God requires us to have free will.  And like newborn babies, we have to learn that there are consequences for bad behavior.  Sadly, way too many people wrongly assume that once they grow up (or graduate, or get married, or have some other rite of passage) they have life all figured out, and they can discontinue the learning program.

I assume that some of my Christian brothers and sisters will rebuke me for  taking a pro-choice position.  But think about it.  What evidence do you see that God relies on the law of the land to set things right?  For that matter, what evidence is there that He relies on His own law to set things right?  He established “The Law”, but He knew from the beginning that man would choose badly.  So His plan of redemption from the beginning recognized and acknowledged that we would never get it right.  We need a savior – we’ve needed one from the very beginning – because we had to be saved from the consequences of our own bad choices.

The pro-choice lobby today has co-opted something that was God’s idea and twisted it to mean that we are against something, when what we are for is far more important.  We are for life, because God is for life.  It’s time we reclaim the territory ceded to the enemy, however.  We are pro-choice, because God is pro-choice.  He knows that we will often choose badly.  But that is His plan.  It’s been that way from the beginning.

Abortion is wrong.  It is the absolutely wrong choice nearly 100% of the time.  But it is the decision of those who make our laws that it is legal in the USA.  Shouldn’t we be focusing on helping those around us understand the difference between justice and legality?

Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that some laws are unjust.  He said that “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Though the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme court has proven that it is perfectly capable of ruling unjustly, the good news is that we can still choose.

Scientists are now nearly unanimous in the view that a human life begins at the moment of conception.  It follows, therefore, that abortion is the taking of a human life.  Most abortions boil down to choosing whether to kill the baby or radically alter one’s life.  It is an incredibly gut-wrenching choice.  It is made far less so if the reality of the first choice is hidden.  That’s why Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers do not want pregnant girls or women to see an ultrasound of their babies.

It is a baby.  The secret’s out.

So, as for me, I am pro-choice.  And I am pro-life.  I think that’s what God wants.  What do you think?

Circling the drain

The woes of the United States of America are generally thought to be economic.  Indeed, the economics are woeful to anyone not completely absorbed in Oprah, American Idol or facebook.

But that’s not what I want to focus on here.  I want to see if we can zero in on the real reason we are piling on so much debt; the real reason we are losing our status as the most economically competitive nation; the real reason we struggle so mightily with issues like abortion and marriage.

We have no objective way to determine what is right and what is wrong.

We look at an issue like abortion, and lacking a uniformly agreed-upon moral framework, can’t see whether the rights of the pregnant woman or her growing child should most be protected.  Compassionate people sometimes choose one way, sometimes the other.  There is no consensus, because so many of us have a moral framework that is ours alone.  It’s based on our history, our learned values, and we know of no transcendent authority we can turn to for final adjudication.

We struggle with same-sex marriage, because some of us compassionately ask why gay people don’t have the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we do.  Others believe that compassion requires us to help those living as gays to see the costs of their choice in physical and mental health and economic terms, not only to themselves, but to our entire culture.

Let’s take a brief look back to see how we became great as a nation, and what has caused us to start down the long, slippery slope from world leader to world follower.

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

The Mayflower compact, according to the public high school textbook Triumph of the American Nation (authored by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1986), said this:

“We whose names are underwritten, having undertaken a voyage to plant the first colony…“

The original document has been lost, Yet nearly every version includes additional language, which makes it clear WHY they undertook the voyage, and why, even though the Mayflower stayed around, and the captain urged them to return on it because many of them were dying, they stayed.  The omitted language makes the text read something like this:

“In the name of God, Amen.  We whose names are underwritten, having undertaken, for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian faith, a voyage to plant the first colony…“

Beyond historical accuracy, there was one important additional reason to leave the reference to their faith in.  They were dying!  Why would they decide to stay?  The risks were extreme!  The escape vessel was still there!  The captain wanted to save them!  Why would they lay down their lives by staying?  Could it be that they genuinely believed that death would only be a doorway into another, better life, and that by staying, they would be laying down a foundation on which future generations could build?

It’s only when we realize that the Pilgrims saw their lives as being part of God’s eternal plan that we can understand how important their faith was to the founding of our nation.  Later, our founding fathers wrote “truths”, which they held to be “self-evident” into our Declaration of Independence.  Words like “all men are created equal” came directly from their faith.  Yet we in our sovereign self-centeredness have determined that any and all references to God or Christ or Christianity must not be allowed in public company.  The further we take this belief, the more thoroughly we have removed God from our minds altogether.

Regis Nicoll has written a three-part piece entitled Lessons from Bonhoeffer, in which he poses this question: “It is often asked how a nation steeped in Christian heritage could have embraced a madman whose messianic fancies led the world into war and six million Jews to their deaths.”

How indeed.  More to the point, what will the ultimate consequences of our own rejection of the moral framework that has withstood the test of  at least 5000 years of history be?  Marriage has never before in history been defined as anything other than the union of one man and one woman.  And homosexuality has never before in history been accepted as normal, or healthy, or right – at least not by a country that long endured.  (Rome, many historians believe, fell in large measure due to its own decline into moral depravity.)  It has been tolerated, that’s all.  Straight families have been given favored legal status for a reason.  It is in the public interest to promote healthy families.  They produce, among other things, healthy, well balanced children.

Today, in addition to teaching kids that the Darwinian version of our origin as the only theory worthy of mention, and by implication that the Bible is just myth, we are also teaching them that being “gay” is a perfectly acceptable alternative lifestyle.  They are even being taught that same-sex attraction is somehow so hard-wired into some people that they only way they can ever be happy is to live gay.  The inconvenient truth is that increasing numbers of people are waking up to the idea that their same-sex attraction is not wanted, and that they can, with the right help and support, become ex-gay.  Take some time to listen to Greg Quinlan, the current president of PFOX (Parents and friends of ex-gays) and an ex-gay himself.

So, if gays are only a minority group because of their behavior, do they really deserve to be granted favored legal and tax status?  What other minority group deserving of special protection under the law is comprised of people who can simply choose to no longer belong to the group?  No surgery.  No legal procedure.  Just change your behavior.  Bingo, you’re no longer a member of our minority group.  It’s like millions of people have been forced to wear special glasses, that only allow some truths to filter through.  We are told that gay people can choose to be ex-gay.  If we were to think about it, we would see with crystal-clarity that that changes everything.

Everything!

I pray that one day in the future some writer has no reason to pose a question similar to Nicoll’s.

It is often asked how a nation steeped in Christian heritage could have embraced the notion that morals don’t matter, when history is littered with the remains of nations who did so, and failed?  Nobody ever thought Rome would fall.  But it did.  Now that the United States of America has fallen, what have we learned?