This week the blog is sponsored by Acts29 and is written by Matthew Spandler-Davison the vice president for global outreach for Acts 29 and manages Acts 29’s Church in Hard Places initiative. He is also a church planter and pastor of Redeemer Fellowship Church in Bardstown, Kentucky.

Charles Spurgeon, the known Baptist preacher in Victorian England once said, “One night alone in prayer might make us new men, changed from poverty of soul to spiritual wealth, from trembling to triumphing.” There is a powerful truth conveyed in this statement, that even in our hardest times and in the hardest places, we can trust that God is always at work. 
Few of us would claim to be comfortable in the hard moments of life, let alone the hard places. And yet, this is the day-to-day reality of many pastors and Christians. Much of our world lives in the midst of real suffering, conflict, or a mixture of the two. One billion people live on less than $1USD a day. Over three billion people live in isolated and remote places that are often cut off from resources. Today there are over 50 countries where the risk of persecution for Christians is either “extreme” or “very high.”
There are places where life is hard in every nation and in every city. In the United States; for example, over 32 million people live under the poverty line, and cities like Detroit, Memphis, and Philadelphia have high crime rates. The hardship in these contexts is real—and yet God’s work through his pastors and churches is undeniable. 
In all these areas, God is making a way. This has been his promise for generations: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isa. 43:19 ESV). He is a God who pursues those who wander and has compassion on those who suffer. He is the one who takes the old clay and fashions it into something new. Right now God is at work to rescue and redeem the lost and hurting in the most hard to reach places.
Let me share a story of a friend of mine named Gabe. Gabe grew up in Liberia, and in 1989 civil war broke out and ravaged his country. In the midst of violence, poverty, and famine caused by the war, Gabe fled to a refugee camp. There, he learned of Jesus and felt a burning passion to preach the gospel to all he met.
Gabe was in a hard place preaching God’s Word. That should seem like enough of a challenge.
But soon, as some in contexts of poverty do, Gabe fell prey to the prosperity gospel, and the teaching infiltrated the church where he was pastoring. In the midst of teaching heresy, Gabe reached out to me. He was looking to become a better pastor but needed help. Many ministries would not risk investing time and resources in someone preaching a false gospel as Gabe was. But, we took the risk and enrolled him into the two-year Acts 29 Church in Hard Places Apprenticeship program. There, Gabe learned about the true gospel and gained valuable training even as he continued to be in community with other pastors and Christians in Liberia. Gabe saw how he was deceived and turned course, leading his church away from the prosperity gospel. Today, he preaches and plants churches that are offering lasting hope for those wounded by the 14-year war in his nation. 
We want to be like Jesus, who runs toward those who wander and has compassion on those who suffer. We want to be where he is at in the hard places of our world because we believe that by doing so, we will see him work in remarkable ways. And we can’t be content to sit back and wait for those working in the hard places to come to us for support. We want to be like Jesus—we want to go where they are, see how God is working, and partner with pastors and planters in those communities so they can extend the hope of Christ in the midst of great darkness.
Through Acts 29’s Church in Hard Places initiative, we see God working in incredible ways in some of the most difficult contexts—in urban centers blighted by violence, racial strife, and poverty; in rural communities facing drug epidemics and generational poverty; in restricted-access nations where persecution is real; and in remote populations seemingly left behind by a world in fast-forward motion, we are seeing disciples being made as churches are being planted.
Christian pastors and church planters who are working to make disciples in the hard places need our partnership. They need to know they are not alone—and they need the support of others to help them continue when there seems no end to the suffering they see. I believe that God is the master potter who is creating something great for his glory in the darkest of places, and that he is asking us to walk with his people who see that, even in the forgotten and forlorn places of our world, he is there drawing people to himself and as he does He is making all things new.
Check out This brief video so you can discover how Acts 29 is working to make disciples in the hard places and find out how you join us in this work. 

The Lord be with you and bless you today.
Today’s Kindle deals include a number that are worth checking out. You’ll find several by John Stott, David Wells, and so on.

“Rather than just react to pain, the Bible calls us to act towards it. We’re not to just be subject to our pain, blown about in every direction by it. Rather we’re to respond to it, and subject it to the light of God’s word.” In other words, we need to carefully interpret it.

Stephen offers some level-headed thoughts here about Christmas, and about the fact that some Christians celebrate it while others do not.

“A common objection to unconditional election is that it’s unfair. Isn’t God unfair to choose to save only some humans not based on any human condition but solely on his sovereign good pleasure? Isn’t there injustice on God’s part that some people are not elect?” Andy Naselli answers the objection.

This article by Caleb Davis traces 9 ways that Christians can encourage one another.

Al shows that wise friendship is committed friendship. “Fast food is OK if you need a quick hit of sugar and fat, something to give you just enough energy to do what you need to do. But we all know it isn’t good for us, it doesn’t nourish us, it doesn’t build us up. Fast friendship is the same – it has no depth, provides no nourishment, and doesn’t give us life.”

If you are interested in some slightly more academic reading, you may want to take a look at the new issue of Themelios. It offers plenty of articles and book reviews.

What secures us in our trials is not the magnitude of our faith, but the power of the one in whom we have placed it. The smallest bit of faith in God is worth infinitely more than the greatest bit of faith in ourselves, or the strongest measure of faith in faith itself.

Loving your neighbor as yourself, when the category of neighbor includes everyone you meet, including your enemies, is a supernatural action, and it is an action that is the proof of our salvation.
—Alistair Begg

We’ve all heard that marriage was designed to make us holy more than to make us happy. And though it’s a bit of a trite phrase that threatens to force a false dichotomy between holiness and happiness, there is a measure of truth to it. At its best, marriage does, indeed, help us grow in holiness. It helps us in our lifelong quest to put sin to death and come alive to righteousness. Aileen and I knew this was true when we got married all those years ago, but as time has passed we’ve been surprised to learn how it’s true.

It had been our assumption that marriage would make us holy because we would essentially be enlisting another person to our cause—a person who would assist us in identifying sin and in helping us put it to death. “This is the will of God: your sanctification,” says Paul, and each of us would be involving ourselves in embracing God’s will for the other.
Certainly there have been times when each of us has helpfully and even formally pointed out where the other has developed patterns of sin and selfishness. There have been times when we have each helped the other fight a particular sin or a general sinfulness. Yet as we look back on the past twenty-three years, we see that this has been relatively rare. It’s not that we don’t see plenty of sin in one another and not that we are firmly opposed to pointing it out. No, it’s more that there is another way that marriage has helped us grow in sanctification—a way in which our efforts are directed at addressing ourselves more than fixing each other.
Each of us has our sins, our imperfections, and our shortcomings. Each of us is pretty well established in who we are and how we behave and each of us is, at 45, pretty unlikely to experience dramatic transformations in this. That’s not to say that we have given up or declared ourselves as holy as we can ever be. Far from it! But at this point we are assuming that the sins that dog us today will probably continue to dog us to the end—though hopefully with diminishing strength. And this means that the sin we have each had to tolerate in the other is sin we will likely need to tolerate for however many more years the Lord gives us. So while Aileen may grow in holiness by having me confront her in her sins, she seems to grow more in holiness by patiently tolerating my sinfulness—by loving me despite my sin and loving me as the Lord helps me progressively put that sin to death.
Then, while each of us has our sins, each of us also has our quirks, our preferences, our idiosyncrasies, our annoyances. And just like we assume that the sins that have dogged each of us through the first twenty-three will dog us for the next twenty-three, we assume that the things that just plain annoy us about one another today are likely to persist as well. And let’s be honest—it is often harder to tolerate a bad habit than a bad sin. It is often harder to tolerate the way your spouse chews his food or leaves her clothes on the ground than the way he sins against you or the way she remains unsanctified. And again, while Aileen might grow in her sanctification by having me formally point out a way in which she is sinful, she seems to grow more in sanctification by learning to accept and perhaps even embrace some of those non-moral but oh-so-annoying things I do—those eccentricities and matters of preference.
So perhaps the foremost way that marriage has helped make us holy is not so much in calling each of us to serve as the other’s second conscience, a junior assistant to the Holy Spirit in bringing conviction of sin. It is not in calling each of us to be a kind of moral sandpaper to actively scour off each other’s rough edges. Rather, marriage has helped make us holy by calling each of us to extend a kind of divine mercy toward the other—to simply live lovingly with someone who is prone to be sinful and irritating.
In marriage, God allows us to see one another as we really are, then to accept one another as we really are—as holistic human beings who are a mixture of holy and depraved, grownup and immature, wonderful and almost unbelievably annoying. Marriage makes us holy not just in compelling us to identify and confront sin in the other, but also in calling us to bear patiently with another person’s sin, preferences, and bad habits. In other words, marriage makes us holy in the way it calls us to be like God in overlooking offenses, in imparting mercy, in extending forgiveness, in displaying compassion, in refusing to be petty. Thus, the great sanctifying challenge of marriage is not so much to fix one another, as to imitate Christ.