Churches—not the buildings but the people—were made to care. We must be gentle but bold in advising weary caregivers to receive care. They may need help in accepting it.

You May Need Care
Who cares? As we saw in the first blog, we were born to care according to God’s creation plan (Genesis 1:26-28). It is who we are and what our Lord designed us to do. That’s how we live out the image of God in which he created us. When we care for others, we act like our Creator and do his will. But caregivers also need care at times.
God Designs Care to Meet Needs
To care for caregivers, it is important to understand a caregiver’s needs. What role do needs play in caring for caregivers?
Needs can be complex. Every need we experience is uniquely God-designed. Our Creator makes no mistakes, not even in planning to meet our needs. Neither does he make two needs or their solutions alike.
As we saw in part 1, God sent Joseph into Egypt. The brothers thought they sent him. After all, they kidnapped him and sold him to slave traders who took him to Egypt. But Joseph corrected their misunderstanding; he explained that God not only sent him, but also orchestrated every detail according to his sovereign plan.[1] God’s plan was to care for Joseph’s brothers as well as the entire nation of Israel hundreds of years later (Genesis 50:20). From this passage we learn that only God can plan care with fail-safe outcomes that override all wicked human intentions.
Those Who Need Care Must Want It
Although Joseph’s brothers did not ask for his care, Joseph saw his brothers’ needs as requests for care. That’s how we should understand caregivers’ needs. We should view the needs of caregivers who are suffering in their care for others as silent pleas for help. But how can we get them to receive our care if they are reluctant? Caregivers want to succeed at their God-given roles. But they may need care so that they can, in turn, care for others.
What can we say to caregivers who are stressed, exhausted, and ready to give up? Some already may be in deep and dangerous distress.

Encourage care. Many caregivers refuse care because they don’t think they need it. But when they reach the end of their ability to fix their own problem, they cry out in anger to God, worse yet, they consider giving up. Unwise decisions like this are unnecessary. Churches—not the buildings but the people—were made to care. We must be gentle but bold in advising weary caregivers to receive care. They may need help in accepting it.

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God is holy.  All His actions and pronouncements are holy.  They must not and do not deserve to be compromised.  The above represent subtleties in that they do not appear to be active or aggressive evil attitudes or acts.  At least, that is how they might appear to us.  But how do they appear to a holy God?  Slighting or taking lightly His holy character, actions, perspective, or pronouncements dishonors and disrespects Him in every way.

Unholy darkness is so subtle that it may compromise relating to words or actions out of either ignorance or insensibility on the part of some Christians.  Due to the subtleties, a greater need for holy sensibility or awareness needs to be encouraged.  A first experience to this need for me came through another language—French.
My first two years of language studies for missionary service were spent in Montpellier, France: French in my first year and Arabic in my second year.  Members of the French church I attended would invite me to dinners in order to assist my proficiency in the French language through conversation.  One evening, I had dinner with two sisters.  After dinner (Where I had to learn to eat potato chips with a fork and knife!) they pulled out a word game named Diablo (Devil).  It was akin to Scrabble—composing words with lettered tiles.  Unlike Scrabble where an unlettered tile could be used for any letter foregoing a score, this game had the image of a devil on the tile to be used similarly.  One of the words needing another letter was “CHR__ST.”  It was one sister’s turn to add a letter where she could.  She placed the deviled tile in the blank space, spelling “CHRIST” with the devil’s image in the middle of it.  Looking on, I was shocked and thought to myself, “I could never spell such a holy name using a devil to score.  I would forego a turn and lose points rather than combine the unholy with the holy.”  To me—without judging her, I thought such a move lacked holy sensibility.  It was a compromise.
I was also confronted with a frequently-used French exclamation by even some believers.  Coming from the States, I was familiar with commonly uttered profane usage of God’s or Jesus Christ’s name in vain, which is prohibited to all.  It was a while before I recognized the French use of the word God in vain appearing at first innocuous because it didn’t damn anyone or wasn’t used against someone.  It was simply, “Mon Dieu”! (“My God”!).  Eventually, it came to me as virtually calling on God without really wanting Him.  In effect, it is simply an exclamation calling on God in vain.  It too represented a compromise.
Do these relate to holy sensibility vs. compromise today and here?  There are an infinite number of ways, but following are a few.
Perhaps the greatest compromise of all is misnaming murder as a woman’s right, health care, or abortion.  The term abortion originally related medically to natural miscarriage, not coerced miscarriage.  It comes from Latin, “abortionem (nominative abortio) ‘miscarriage.’” In French, avortement (abortion) was still used for natural miscarriages when I was there.  Not realizing this until later caused misunderstanding on my part.  Please note holy sensibility so rampantly missing in regard to this unholy act against the most vulnerable and innocent numbering in the millions.  Unfortunately, many claiming to be Christian fail to see it for what it is, i.e., killing a genuine human being in an early stage of life.  This is compromise.
Another prolific compromise relates to identifying an immoral propensity, temptation, or acts to one’s position and union in Christ.  The usage and acceptance of the term “Gay Christian” by so many is a compromise involving an unholy association with a holy union between a believer and Jesus Christ.  No other sexual propensity, temptation, or sexual acts ever become an identity factor of one’s position or union in Christ.  This, too, compromises the holy with the unholy.
One other compromise is accepting the rainbow colors in a flag or diverse objects—God’s holy promise and sign following severe judgment for evil on earth—for activism representing ungodly attitudes and actions. “I establish My covenant with you; and all flesh shall never again be eliminated by the waters of a flood, nor shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth . . . I have set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall serve as a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. It shall come about, when I make a cloud appear over the earth, that the rainbow will be seen in the cloud . . .” (Genesis 9: 11, 13-14. God’s holy covenant sign must not be compromised with unholiness or sin.
God is holy.  All His actions and pronouncements are holy.  They must not and do not deserve to be compromised.  The above represent subtleties in that they do not appear to be active or aggressive evil attitudes or acts.  At least, that is how they might appear to us.  But how do they appear to a holy God?  Slighting or taking lightly His holy character, actions, perspective, or pronouncements dishonors and disrespects Him in every way.
Let’s pray for and exercise “Holy Sensibility” by not compromising even in the subtlest of offenses against God. “But like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1: 15-16).
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, July 29, 2023
There are two related principles in Challies’s illustration and Habermas’s story for us to grasp and learn to live by. Don’t try to bear all the griefs and sufferings ahead of you all at once—especially not the imagined ones. Trust that God will give you what you need to bear your grief and suffering on the day when you need it.

I don’t need to tell you that life is hard. The older you are, the better you know this. The heavy burdens of past grief, present suffering, and anxiety about the future can easily overwhelm us, but they don’t have to. There’s wisdom about handling suffering to be learned from those who have gone through it before us.
Tim Challies, who wrote about the unexpected loss of his only son in Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God, had this to say about how to bear crippling grief:
My father was a landscaper, and he used to take me to work with him from time to time. I remember one day when he brought me with him to be an unskilled but low-cost source of manual labor. He showed me a skid of bricks that had been delivered to the end of a client’s driveway and then a walkway he was building to the front door. My job was to get the bricks from the first spot to the second. I remember gazing at that giant pile with despair. How could I, at twelve or thirteen years of age, possibly move what looked like a literal ton of bricks? I realized I would have to do it in the only way I could. Piece by piece, brick by brick, step by step, I carried each one to my father. He laid them as quickly as I could bring them to him until a perfect path led to the entrance of that beautiful home.
And just so, while God has called me to bear my grief for a lifetime, and to do so faithfully, he has not called me to bear the entire weight of it all at once. As the pile is made up of many bricks, a lifetime is made up of many days.
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