Gospel Prism

Introduction

Because of two significant events upcoming, the Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center Walk-a-Thon and the upcoming trip to SA and Mozambique, I have decided to speak on this core value this week which we state as the following:

We value a CONCERN for the POOR and DEFENSELESS because of God’s great love revealed to us as spiritual orphans through the Gospel is the outflow of our compassion and active care for the poor and defenseless.

Let me begin by stating what I shared at the Hands at Work conference a few weeks ago. By nature and by disposition, I am not a compassionate person. When my children stumble and fall to the ground, my first words are not, “Are you okay?” but rather, “It’s okay, get up.” So what stirs someone like me, or perhaps someone like you, to have a concern for the poor and defenseless? For me the answer to this question is the Gospel of Christ, the core foundation of our vision. Octavius Winslow says it best when he writes:

We can only effectually deal with sin as we deal with Him who was slain for sin. Jesus the crucified is as much our sanctification as He is our redemption. The Spirit’s sprinkling of the blood that has pardoned all, cleansed all, cancelled all our sins, intensifies the motive and energizes the soul to repel its attacks, and to rest not from the conflict until the nail has been driven home which fastens every lust to the cross of Jesus. Oh, what motive, what power, in the great, the essential work of personal holiness does the cross of Jesus supply!

This is my motive. There is no speaker, no video, no sad commercial, no home I can visit where orphans live, no ultrasound I can watch of a child being aborted, that can not only stir my soul and move me to tears with more profoundness AND with a more lasting quality than the Gospel of Christ. Speakers and images come and go, but what will remain forever is the Gospel of Christ. I need not wait for the George Snymans and World Visions and Ratenaks of the world to convince me of how I should go care for the poor and defenseless. As Jesus Himself said to His disciples in John 12:8: “For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” What we seek is Him and in doing so, we have a Gospel-driven concern for the poor and defenseless. When you have the Gospel that oozes from Genesis and Isaiah and the Gospel of John and Paul’s letter to the Galatians and the book of Revelation, your heart is so stirred by God’s grace for you through His Son that you will be concerned for the poor and defenseless. You will not remain silent and immobile because of God’s great Gospel for you.

So out of this value, I’d like to make three points that flow from the Gospel to this concern: First, the Gospel must ALWAYS be the foundation of our concern. Second, the Gospel leads to a biblical understanding of dignity because of the image of God and the restoration of that image through Jesus’ atoning work. Third, the Gospel calls us to serve, act, and care for the poor and defenseless in various ways.

The Gospel Must ALWAYS Be The Foundation Of Our Concern

We must never assume that the Gospel is our foundation because the sad reality is that sinners, like us, are prone to forget the Gospel of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 15:3 Paul makes this compelling statement: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” The Gospel is not something that is to be attached to our faith as an addendum. The Gospel of Christ, the fact that Christ took our place as sinners so that we might become the righteousness of God, is never to be a given, something merely assumed but forgotten. It must continually be at the forefront of all that we do because the sad reality is that unless we actively seek to make the Gospel foundational, we will forget the Gospel. Mark Mullery, pastor of the Sovereign Grace Church in Fairfax, VA, tells this story of his childhood:

One of my favorite childhood games was called Hang Us on the Wall, a silly little game our Dad had made up. He would pick up one of my sisters or me, so that our feet were just off the ground, and press us lightly against a wall. As I swung there in gleeful anticipation, he would ask, “Now Mark, if I hang you on the wall, will you promise to stay?” “Oh yes!”, I’d reply. “But Mark, you promised last time you’d stay on the wall, and as soon as I let go, you got right down. This time, will you really promise to stay on the wall?” “Yes, Daddy, I promise!”

So he’d let go, turn around, and pretend to be oblivious to the fact that, once again, I hadn’t stayed on the wall. Eventually “alerted” to this by our giggles and laughter, he would turn back around and, with great theatrics, express surprise at how I’d once again failed to stay on the wall. It happened every time. A moment after he let go of me, my feet became firmly planted on the carpet, for after all, there was nothing on that wall to keep me there.

I’ve been thinking about this game lately because it illustrates so accurately how I relate to the gospel. Sometimes it seems that, no matter how often I try to hang the gospel on the walls of my mind, it always falls back to earth. Why is it that I can have a genuine, deep love for the gospel and yet go through long portions of a day completely unaware of it? Why is it that God’s grace can be so amazing to me one day and affect me so little the next? How come I can leave a Sunday meeting exhilarated by the holy love of God as demonstrated on the Cross, and wake up Monday morning with thoughts about everything except God?

It seems that I have an enormous capacity to forget the gospel.

And so do I, and so do we all. And as we have a concern for the poor and defenseless, let me tell you now that unless you continually remind yourself that the fundamental reason you serve the poor and the defenseless is this Gospel of Christ, that you as a sinner deserved not an ounce of God’s grace, and yet, He sent His Son to be a subsitutionary atonement for your sins so that now you might have His perfect righteousness, an act of mercy that you did not deserve at all so that God might be glorified in your worship of Him, you will forget this Gospel. You will be motivated by ‘compassion’ (there is so much suffering in this world), by statistics (AIDS, child sex-trafficking, abortion numbers), by feelings (listening to motivational speakers tell moving stories), by education (a college class on social responsibility), by culture (Madonna, Oprah, Bono, Angelina Jolie going to Africa), by everything and anything but the Gospel. And when this happens, you will slowly find that not only will you forget the Gospel, but you will forget God Himself. The work becomes more important, more foundational than the Lord Himself.

I was having a discussion with one young woman who was raised in the church, who was part of a youth group and active in her campus ministry. She taught youth kids in her church. Her major was social work and she had gone on to study further in her field. When I had approached her about the motivations behind her studies, she began to tell me about how the church at large was failing to care for the poor. She began to criticize the church for its lack of justice concerns. When I asked her where her faith in Christ fit in with her criticisms against the church, she shared with me how she was questioning whether her faith in Christ was real and how the church’s lack of concern for the poor made her feel as though God Himself was not a reality. In another conversation, one well-meaning Christian woman told me that she saw the church in serving the poor rather than in actually attending a local church. In the early 1900s, social theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch attempted do exactly what these two ladies were living out, which is a separation of the biblical Gospel (which he deemed as no Gospel at all) and a concern for the poor. My point is that unless the biblical Gospel is always at the forefront, always remembered, and always articulated, it will be forgotten. And slowly the act of serving the poor and defenseless will become the de facto Gospel itself. Do not take the Gospel of Christ and His atoning work for granted. We can never make the Gospel an assumption in our serving the poor and defenseless or we risk losing the very power of God in the Gospel as Paul describes in Romans 1:16. And the temptation in regard to a concern for the poor is to assume doctrine and right teaching is nothing more than ivory tower distraction. To give in to such a temptation is to ignore Jesus’ words in Mark 8:36: “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”

The Gospel Leads To A Biblical Understanding Of Dignity For All Human Beings Because Of The Image Of God And The Restoration Of That Image Through Jesus’ Atoning Work

With the first point in mind then, we need to recognize that the Gospel leads to a biblical understanding of dignity for all human beings because of the image of God and the restoration of that image through Jesus’ atoning work. When God tells us is that He created man in His image, which includes male and female in Genesis 1:26-27, we must never underestimate the significance of such a statement. In fact, in Genesis 9:6, the very prohibition of murder is rooted in this very idea, that all people are image-bearers of God. So at the core every human being lies this one reality, people reflect God’s glory in some way. We are distinct from the rest of creation on this sole basis. Somehow, our physical, emotional, psychological, relational, and spiritual state mirrors God, though now imperfectly because of sin. Yet, there is still some residue of that image and this mere fact means that each human being must be accorded with dignity.

Moreover, in Christ through the Gospel, we also know that the image of God that we were created with which is disfigured because of sin, is now being restored. Paul writes in Colossians 1:15 and 19-20: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation…For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” Through Jesus’ atoning work, we are reconciled to the Father and His image is now reflected in us. And one day when we finally see the Lord, John boldly states, “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) Thus, the Gospel brings us to a state that even takes precedent over how we were created, that is, we now reflect God’s glorious image by bearing the likeness of His Son! So if we have been lavished with such grace, mustn’t we also strive to see all of humanity treated with such dignity, respect, value, and worth?

This is every reason why I am unabashedly against abortion. This is not a political issue, but a Gospel issue. If we are saved by grace, now conformed to the image of His Son according to Romans 8:29, we cannot stay silent when those who are utterly defenseless, in this case the unborn, are being annihilated from this earth on such spurious grounds as one’s choice or a society’s choice. David, in speaking about his state before he was even born, says, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” (Psalm 139:14-16) David’s words appeal to the very fact that God has created us for Himself, in His image for His glory, before we were ever born. And the Gospel compels us to speak out on behalf of the millions of lives being ended for the sake of convenience or shame. This is why we support the Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center and its mission to provide care for women and girls who do not want to abort their children. This is why I am asking you to come and join the Walk-a-Thon, not because you feel compassion toward these girls and women, not because you feel it is your social conscience to do something, but because you love what Christ has done for you and you long for all people to receive the same dignity and respect our God has graciously and undeservedly given to us.

Again, the Gospel illustrates God’s steadfast love to those who had no hope and therefore reminds us of God’s concern for the hopeless and defenseless. Isn’t this what the atoning work of Christ has accomplished for all of us? Regardless of your condition before turning to Christ, we were all hopeless. In Africa, we met a young man who was serving with Hands at Work who told us his story of drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and utter licentiousness. But he was no more or less hopeless than I once was though I never tried drugs or slept around. It is the fool who believes that one’s sins are less offensive to God than another’s, especially when we consider Jesus’ understanding of the root of sin in Matthew 5-6 where He essentially condemns all sin equally which flow from the heart. The murderer is merely the angry person who acts out what he is experiencing in his heart. The adulterer is merely the lustful person who acts out what he is experiencing in his heart. The thief is merely the greedy, self-centered person who acts what he is experiencing in his heart. Paul is terribly right when he tells us that there is no one righteous, no not one. He cries out with the plea of the sinner who knows his heart well when he says in Romans 7:24: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

But when you understand the depth of such hopelessness, you begin to see the incredible joy that comes. The Gospel reminds us that God never leads us to despair, but delight. In following our own path to self-worship, we find ourselves living for a standard we were never meant to live up to. Tim Keller puts it well when he says:

If Jesus is your center and Lord and you fail him, he will forgive you. Your career can’t die for your sins. You might say, ‘If I were a Christian I’d be going around pursued by guilt all the time!’ But we all are being pursued by guilt because we must have an identity and there must be some standard to live up to by which we get that identity. Whatever you base your life on - you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who died for you - who breathed his last breath for you. Does that sound oppressive?

Certainly, the good news that the Savior’s love reaches our cold heart and makes us delight in Him and give us not only hope, but joy eternally, is never oppressive. Such good news should make our feet bring good news to anyone who would hear it, like the Samaritan woman who ran to her village that the Savior had come. Therefore, since we ourselves were once hopeless spiritually, we should understand both spiritual hopelessness, but physical hopelessness as well. From the Gospel, there should be an outflow of concern for the poor on the basis of this knowledge of hope when all things seemed hopeless. And so when I go visit a home in Africa where children are living in utter filth, where the oldest child of 10 years old is caring for 2 year olds and infants, where men and women are dying of AIDS leaving behind children who have no food or water and whose only means of survival could be slavery or sexual exploitation, I do not look at such scenes with mere compassion that will run dry when I return home to watch the Yankees play the Red Sox. I see the hopelessness and I remember that I too was as destitute spiritually as these children are physically. And so out of the joy that is given to me through such a great salvation as Christ taking my place on the cross, I have compassion and I serve with joy and delight. This is why we must be in Africa to care for the utterly defenseless.

When people ask me why we go to Africa when there is poverty in the US, I come back to the word ‘defenseless.’ In the US, a poor person still has at least minimal access to health care, clean water, food. When was the last time you heard of a person who died of starvation in the United States? In Africa, it happens to many children every day. These are the defenseless.

Also, when I was in Africa, I spoke to a man who had a friend who works in Asia. He told me a story his friend relayed to him of a time he visited a small house in Southeast Asia. In it were about 10 little girls sitting in front of a television set watching Bugs Bunny. Each girl had a number taped on her back. When a ‘customer’ would come into the room, he would select a number where he would have his way with her in an adjoining room. When his friend entered the room each child looked down with such brokenness except for one child whose number was 146. He was so moved by the look number 146 gave him that he started a ministry called Love146 that seeks to provide safe homes for sex-trafficked children. These children are the defenseless.

The Gospel is a continual reminder to me that God brings hope to the hopeless. He has done this for someone like me. And out of such joy, I know that the Gospel now compels us to bring hope spiritually and physically to the aborted children, the orphan and the widow of Africa, and the sex-trafficked children in Southeast Asia. And so, this is one of our values, a Gospel-driven concern for the poor and defenseless.

The Gospel Calls Us To Serve, Act, And Care For The Poor And Defenseless In Various Ways

Finally, the Gospel calls us to serve, act, and care for the poor and defenseless in various ways. What can you and I do? It seems so overwhelming. Can I really make a difference? Many of you have heard Loren Eiseley’s “Star Thrower” story: There was a man who was walking along a sandy beach where thousands of starfish had been washed up on the shore. He noticed a boy picking the starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean. The man observed the boy for a few minutes and then asked what he was doing. The boy replied that he was returning the starfish to the sea, otherwise they would die. The man asked how saving a few, when so many were doomed, would make any difference whatsoever? The boy picked up a starfish and threw it back into the ocean and said “Made a difference to that one…” The man left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had said. He soon returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping the boy throw starfish in to the sea.

Thank God our Savior came not only to seek and save the lost of all humanity, but he came to seek and save me. Paul’s words in Galatians 2:20 are deeply personal, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me.” We can make a difference in the lives of one person because of the Gospel which is a reflection of the God who saves personally. So what can you do?

1. Consider how you use your money.

If you are interested, there is an excellent book by Craig Blomberg called, Neither Poverty Nor Riches, that provides a biblical theology on the poor. It is fair and well-balanced and thoroughly biblical, the best book I have come across on the subject. He has a great section on application that I commend you to read, but here is one snippet that I think is most helpful when thinking about money and the poor:

First, if wealth is an inherent good, Christians should try to gain it. If some of us succeed more than the majority, our understanding of it as God’s gift for all will lead us to want to share with the needy, particularly those who are largely victims of circumstances outside their control. Second, if wealth is seductive, giving away some of our surplus is a good strategy for resisting temptation to overvalue it. Third, if stewardship is a sign of a redeemed life, then Christians will, by their new natures, want to give. Over time, compassionate and generous use of their resources will become an integral part of their Christian lives. Fourth, if certain extremes of wealth and poverty are inherently intolerable, those of us with excess income (i.e. most readers of this book!) will work hard to help at least a few of the desperately needy in our world. Fifth, if holistic salvation represents the ultimate good God wants all to receive, then our charitable giving should be directed to individuals, churches, organizations who minister holistically, caring for people’s bodies as well as their souls, addressing their physical as well as their spiritual circumstances.

2. Get Involved Because of Your Understanding of the Gospel

There are many ways for you to get involved with the poor and defenseless. Our church is looking into the following possibilities, and I hope more people will be motivated out of their great passion for what Christ has done for them to be concerned for the defenseless.

a. The Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center

There are CPCs all around the country willing to care for girls and women who have become pregnant with a child. They are putting into action a concern for the defenseless by providing alternatives to abortion. My hope is that more people will see the abortion debate not as a political debate, but rather as a spiritual concern that grieves God considerably. You can find a CPC to work with in most major cities around the country.

b. South Africa and Mozambique Hands at Work

Hands at Work Africa provides care for the orphan and widow struck by HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in Africa. As George Snyman notes, there are 6000 children who are made orphans each day. Hands is actively attempting to reach the most desperate of children in the least reached areas.

c. Southeast Asia Child Sex-Trafficking with Ratenak

Ratenak’s story is a wonderful story of a man who had a dream to see young children who were victims of the pernicious evil of sex-slavery and trafficking given a chance to live free and experience the grace of the Gospel. You need to check out their website for more info.

d. The Persecuted Church

We must not forget those who are suffering and dying simply because they love Jesus and long to worship Him. These are the defenseless who will be with the Lord one day. But we must never forget them as the Lord has never forgotten them.

3.  3. Go Outside the Camp (Heb 13:13-14)

a. You must listen to John Piper’s sermon on this subject. It will vastly impact you. Here is one quote from it:

The world is not going to glorify Christ because they see that Christians are wealthy and healthy and prosperous because this is what they already live for. We may use Jesus to get it…they use other means to get it. They are not impressed when Jesus is just a ticket because when the show starts you just throw the ticket away.

4. Consider Hard Adoptions

When I was flying to the Together for the Gospel Conference, a pastor from Edmonton, Canada, shared with me how he and his wife had recently adopted a child with Downs Syndrome. I asked him why and he said to me, “Because the Gospel calls us to hard things.” I knew what he meant. The Gospel calls us to hard things not because we are to be masochistic, but because the Gospel’s love is so great to us, we must respond as one who is loved. We must love even when it costs us something because to understand the God of the cross, is to know that God loved us so much more than we could ever realize (John 3:16).

I hope more people will consider the hard adoptions, adoption a child with a disability, a child who most of society deems unworthy to live and should be aborted, a child of a different ethnicity (especially African and African-American), adopting a child as an empty-nester, or perhaps even as a single woman. This is what John Piper calls going outside the camp, being crazy people whom the world cannot understand, but whom the world certainly cannot discount.

Conclusion

I’d like to close with this quote by Tim Keller. I close with it because to understand the power and significance of caring for the poor and defenseless is never a sacrifice. To obey God is not mere obligation and duty. It is to understand that there is a lasting joy that far exceeds anything we could ever imagine. And this is our promise from our gracious and blessed Father who loved us by not even sparing His own beloved Son (Romans 8:32):

God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it. We were to join in the dance. If we center our lives on him, serving him not out of self-interest, but for the sake of who he is, for the sake of his beauty and glory, we will enter the dance and share in the joy and love he lives in. We were designed, then, not just for belief in God in some general way, nor for a vague kind of inspiration or spirituality. We were made to center our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting, and resembling him. This growth in happiness will go on eternally, increasing unimaginably (1 Corinthians 2:7-10).

http://www.wccc.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=307.

Rauschenbusch was certainly not a proponent of an orthodox view of the Gospel as revealed by this statement: “Since the Kingdom is the supreme end, all problems of personal salvation must be reconsidered from the point of view of the Kingdom. It is not sufficient to set the two aims of Christianity side by side. There must be a synthesis, and theology must explain how the two react on each other. (See Chapter X of this book.) The entire redemptive work of Christ must also be reconsidered under this orientation. Early Greek theology saw salvation chiefly as the redemption from ignorance by the revelation of God and from earthliness by the impartation of immortality. It interpreted the work of Christ accordingly, and laid stress on his incarnation and resurrection. Western theology saw salvation mainly as forgiveness of guilt and freedom from punishment. It interpreted the work of Christ accordingly, and laid stress on the death and atonement. If the Kingdom of God was the guiding idea and chief end of Jesus — as we now know it was - we may be sure that every step in His life, including His death, was related to that aim and its realization, and when the idea of the Kingdom of God takes its due place in theology, the work of Christ will have to be interpreted afresh.” Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1917), 144.

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, NY: Dutton, 2008), 172.

Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches, 246.

- Timothy Keller, The Reason For God (New York, NY: Dutton, 2008), 219.