http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15005095/how-to-speak-to-the-spiritually-dead
You Might also like
-
The Global Ripples of Roe: How the Unborn Everywhere Win
In Colombia, they have a saying that goes, “If it’s raining in the US, prepare for rain.” Pastor Anderson Ocampo in Medellín explains, “Practically everybody assumes that whatever happens in the United States will happen here. Since the United States is the most powerful country in the world, the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe will encourage our pro-life work in Colombia.”
I agree. The end of Roe is strengthening the ongoing effort around the world to end abortion and secure equal rights for all people, born and unborn. Abortion advocates also agree. As South African writer and journalist Matthew Blackman posted, “The US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has set off a tsunami of concern around the world among public health experts and women’s rights groups.”
Ripple Effects of Roe
Prior to this, Roe had brought the hard rain of legal abortion to country after country.
“The end of Roe will strengthen the ongoing effort around the world to end abortion and secure equal rights for all.”
Abortion advocate Nina Sun explains, “Roe has . . . been influential in court decisions in other countries that have achieved significant gains in reproductive freedoms. For example, in Kenya, the High Court of Malindi, in affirming that abortion care is a fundamental right under the Kenyan constitution, specifically references and considers key points from Roe.”
In contrast, Nigerian writer Obianuju Ekeocha sees the influence of Roe in Africa as the “ideological neocolonialism of the twenty-first century.” She explains, “The recognition of human life from the womb to the tomb is a common thread that runs through many tribes and towns of Africa.” Yet the West’s unrelenting ideological deconstruction of traditional values — the hyper-sexualization of youth, the normalization of homosexuality, the mainstreaming of gender dysphoria, and of course, the legalization of abortion — rains down on African countries. Are these the new values that must be adopted to be considered part of the modern world?
Leading Countries for Life
Let’s look at this from the reverse angle. A map from Our World in Data shows birthrates by country. The highest rates closely align with countries where the human rights of unborn children are still respected in law to various degrees — mostly in Africa and Central America.
Organizations like the United Nations and the World Health Organization look at this map as their mission field — the unreached peoples still to be persuaded that legal abortion equates to personal freedom. I look at this map and see these countries as our best examples for recovering the inherent, equal, exceptional, and eternal value of human life rooted in the Bible.
As Ekeocha says, “The most precious gift that Africans can give to the world right now is our inherent culture of life. Most Africans understand, by faith and tradition, the inestimable value of human life, the beauty of womanhood, the grace of motherhood, the blessing of married life, and the gift of children.”
The end of Roe fundamentally helps leaders like Ekeocha in Nigeria. It emboldens the church throughout Africa to petition their governments to reject the billions of dollars in aid offered on condition that they liberalize their abortion laws. It shows people like Pastor Anderson in Colombia that mobilizing the church to defend the value of life in their culture and law can work. “In the most advanced and powerful nation in the world,” they can say, “abortion is now being rejected.” That sentiment may overstate the Dobbs decision, but that is the ripple effect felt in many countries.
Retaliation
In my view, the end of Roe impacts abortion worldwide in one particularly positive way; though in the short term, it invites retaliation. For example, Roe has unleashed waves of vandalism against pregnancy help organizations (PHO) and a resurgence of the slanderous “fake clinic” charges designed to shut them down. The PHO I helped start in Miami was heavily vandalized right after Roe. Then last fall, while I was speaking at their fundraising gala, angry activists stormed in and ran through the crowd, shouting, “Fake clinic! Fake clinic!”
The next day, I got a note from a PHO in Romania. “After the decision that overturned Roe, the media in Romania started an attack against Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Their ‘concern’ was that we are pushing Romania back into the communist era by speaking against abortion and by providing care for women with unwanted pregnancies.”
The Christians who have started PHOs in Bogotá, Santiago, Cuba, and elsewhere know that storms are coming, if they haven’t already. They will be targeted in due time. It is a cross-bearing work.
Message Heard Round the World
Yet long term, the end of Roe sends out a powerful and welcome message to the world. In turning the legality of abortion back to the states, the highest court in the most powerful country has declared that there is something about abortion that is legitimately debatable as a matter of morality and justice. That might appear as a small stone thrown into the pond. But I think it is the one stone that makes all the difference.
The opening sentence of the Dobbs decision reads, “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” These words have the effect of saying, “There is something about abortion that might be wrong.” In a government that derives its “just powers” from the “consent of the governed,” the people must consider abortion openly and then decide.
“The end of Roe has framed the legitimacy of abortion worldwide as a preeminently moral question.”
The morality or immorality of abortion is precisely what abortion advocates seek to avoid. The decision belongs, they argue, to the category of chocolate or vanilla — a matter of personal choice void of morality. By contrast, the pro-life position is always a moral argument. It is morally wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Since abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being, abortion is wrong.
Slavery too was defended throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by sidestepping the morality of it. But over time, the moral question, as crafted by Josiah Wedgwood in 1784, pierced the darkness: “Am I not a man and a brother?” So today, the Supreme Court has returned the question to the nation as a moral question: “Are the unborn human?” If the answer, biologically, is yes, then you can believe in abortion rights or you can believe in equal rights, but you cannot believe in both at the same time.
More Equal Than Others?
Mary Elizabeth Williams writes, “Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about. . . . A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss.” That is a position hard for fair-minded people to hold. To try is to sound Orwellian, like saying, “All humans are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
The end of Roe has framed the legitimacy of abortion worldwide as a preeminently moral question. That, in turn, exposes the injustice of abortion and cripples the unrelenting push for legalized abortion worldwide. If it is coupled with a rising church answering the call to rescue the innocent from slaughter (Proverbs 24:11), that would be righteousness at work, and “righteousness exalts a nation” (Proverbs 14:34). Let’s pray earnestly for more victories to come.
-
What Is Saving Faith? 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16, Part 3
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15454401/what-is-saving-faith
Post Views: 277 -
What Risks Can Moms Take? Following Jesus with Small Children
For years, my husband and I each prayed for God’s timing and the right opportunity to move overseas to work among the unreached.
For many reasons, God did not open doors while we were single. And for many reasons, he did not open them in the first years of marriage either. The door finally opened when we had the most to lose, humanly speaking — a home, young children, unique educational opportunities for them, stability and favor in an interesting career, and a church family we loved and gladly gave ourselves to. That was when God called us to go.
My husband had visited the country once before, but I knew almost nothing of the place we were moving to except that the need was great and that the culture was both suspicious of foreigners and hostile to Christ. Some loved ones questioned our judgment, our value system, even our sanity. Do you have to go to such a risky place? Should you be doing this when you have a young family?
Some even sought me in private, appealing to my mother’s heart. Why make the kids suffer? Why are you throwing away so much? Indeed, why? We asked the same questions of ourselves and of God in prayer. Father, is this really what you are calling us to do? As we searched Scripture and wrestled in prayer, we sensed God asking us in return, Do you trust me? Am I worth what it will cost?
Will You Trust Me?
When I was in high school, my uncle took my brother and me backpacking in a beautiful alpine mountain range. On our way back, unbeknownst to us, we took a trail that required us to cross a ravine. The only way forward was across a fallen tree high above a river rushing with snowmelt. The trunk was narrow and its strength untested. If we fell in, especially with our heavy backpacks buckled to us, we could have showed up in the local obituaries. But we had little fear. We accepted the challenge and ambled across.
“Only a false gospel preaches that we can follow Jesus and avoid pain and loss in this world.”
Motherhood has changed the way I think about that tree. I probably would not take the same risk today with young children who depend on me (much less ever lead them across it) — unless God himself promised to go with us.
Some gospel risks feel like this tree, suspended above real dangers and yet the only path between where we stand and where we think obedience lies. Every mother who has been reconciled to Christ and entrusted with “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18–19) feels at times the tension between fear and gospel obedience.
God, how can I move to that part of town, even if it’s for a church plant? How can I open the safety of my home to complete strangers? Don’t you know how difficult life will be if my husband takes on more ministry? What if my neighbor never speaks to me again after I share the gospel with her? Do you know how messy the foster-care system is? Why would we walk alongside that troubled family, and invite trouble into our home?
Even believing mothers can want to shield their families from all risk, but only a false gospel preaches that we can follow Jesus and avoid pain and loss in this world.
Mothering in the Trenches
Christ requires that his followers (yes, even mothers) deny themselves and take up their crosses (Matthew 16:24). Only those who fully trust his next words would dare to follow: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Even if obedience results in immediate loss, do we trust its end will be life and gain, as he said?
The greatest question in the face of risk is not what we might lose but whom we will believe. And our trust has no better — no other — resting place than “our Father, our Redeemer from of old” (Isaiah 63:16). He is good and does good (Psalm 119:68). With him is wisdom, might, counsel, and understanding (Job 12:13). He holds the outcome of the dice and the whims of the king in his hands (Proverbs 16:33; 21:1).
“Even if obedience results in immediate loss, do we trust its end will be life and gain?”
And she who hopes in God will not be found cowering in the basement, shielding her children. She will be in armor out on the battlefield, asking in the face of danger, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” (Romans 8:35). Whether she is in a tree-lined suburb, a concrete city, or some foreign country, she will teach her children not to run from the risks of serving Christ, but instead to pray, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you” (Psalm 56:3).
Am I Worth Your Risks?
Before our move, I acknowledged with conviction God’s worth and, by extension, the worth of his gospel message and church. I trembled, but I confessed he was worth all we were about to risk.
Over a year in, as the real stresses of living in a foreign culture took their toll (and as I hoped to shut the chapter on the sickest year of our lives), I found myself nursing my family through even more rounds of severe illness. I found myself in the emergency room again, holding my smallest child, with no answers as to what was ailing her. Listening to the doctor try to explain to me that she might also have a problem with her kidneys, I lost sight of his worth.
In 2 Corinthians 11:23–27, Paul describes some of what he suffered as a servant of Christ: labors, imprisonments, bodily injury, deprivation of basic needs, and the dangers he faced from both people and nature. In Philippians 3:3–6, he further details what he lost for the sake of Christ: birthright, pedigree, identity, education, accomplishments, and the commendation of men. And he concludes, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8).
Even when the Holy Spirit testified to him that “imprisonments and afflictions” awaited him in every city, he declared, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). In Christ, the apostle saw such a magnitude of worth that even his very life was worthless by comparison.
Your Next Risky Yes
We cannot dismiss Paul’s choices as less practical or easier just because he was an apostle (and a single man with no dependents). Paul’s valuation of Christ transcended his season of life and calling in life.
Holding my child in the hospital, I was looking only to things seen and had lost sight of Jesus, “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). I had to pray — and ask others to pray — that God would enlighten the eyes of my heart (Ephesians 1:18) so that I could endure “as seeing him who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:27).
How then do our risks weigh against the worth of Christ? They are but light, momentary afflictions preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Corinthians 4:17). They are pennies swallowed up by the unsearchable riches of Christ (Ephesians 3:8).
Fellow mom, though I may be oceans away, neither of us raises our family in the country of our citizenship. You also face many risks as you serve Christ. Do you trust him? Is he worthy? If so, what is a faithful, risky yes you can say to him today?