Words You'll Need, and Courage Enough For Them

If you followed the recent Chick-fil-a controversy, or the more recent Louie Giglio withdrawal from praying at the presidential inauguration, or the most recent Tim Tebow withdrawal from a speaking engagement at a large Baptist church, or if you didn't follow any of them, Kevin DeYoung does a great job giving us words we will most certainly need if we want to honestly and courageously stand with Christ in our day of intolerant "tolerance."

Give Thanks to God for Dr. C. Everett Koop

I was saddened to hear the news of Dr. C. Everett Koop's death. I have had great respect for this man and it only grew as I read the following post, which includes some wonderful windows into the character of this gift of salt and light to America. May the Lord mercifully raise up many more Christian men and women with his same rare combination of professional medical excellence and deep, humble faith -- for the good of many and the glory of our Great Physician's holy name.

Justin Taylor:

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop went to be with the Lord earlier today, February 25, 2013. Born in Brooklyn, he earned the A.B. degree from Dartmouth (1937) and his medical degree from Cornell (1941). Just a year after receiving the Doctor of Science (Medicine) from the University of Pennsylvania (1947), he became Surgeon-in-Chief of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. It was there that he met Francis and Edith Schaeffer (1948). In his new book Schaeffer on the Christian Life: Countercultural Spirituality, William Edgar tells the story:

[The Schaeffers' daughter] Priscilla contracted a strange illness, causing her to vomit violently. At the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital the doctors were baffled. A thirty-two-year-old physician named C. Everett Koop walked into the room, examined Priscilla, and diagnosed her with “mesenteric adenitis,” a disease he had just been studying. He had learned that most often the condition could be cured by the removal of the appendix, for reasons not clear to medical science. Edith mentioned to Dr. Koop that they were moving to Switzerland to become missionaries. Koop had just become a believer through the ministry of Tenth Presbyterian Church on Seventeenth and Spruce Streets. He performed the operation himself. Just before he wheeled Priscilla into the operating room, a telegram came in from Fran, who was traveling in Nashville, saying, “Dear Priscilla, Remember underneath are the everlasting arms. Love, Daddy.” Dr. Koop was deeply moved by the marvel of this kind of faith. Later, Fran [i.e., Francis Schaeffer] and he would meet and forge a friendship that led, among other things, to casting the film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Years later Dr. Koop explained during a Wheaton interview the way in which he would bring his Christian worldview to bear upon his own view of surgery and care for the family. He would always tell the families:

Let me assure you that if I thought that I was walking into that operating room in my own steam, my own power, my own knowledge and was going to operate upon your child—and its survival depended upon me—I wouldn’t open the door. I believe that I am a servant of the Lord and that I am going to that operating room with gifts that he has given me. But your child is in his hands, and he will guide me, and I will let you know everything I can about the future of your child.

Koop himself lost a child, David, who was a junior at Dartmouth when he died during a mountain climbing accident.

Dr. Koop became Professor of Pediatric Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine in 1959 and Professor of Pediatrics in 1971.

In March of 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed him Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), and later that year as Surgeon General.

His tenure as Surgeon General is widely remembered for his work related to abortion, tobacco, HIV/AIDS, and the rights of babies born with birth defects and handicaps. He served as Surgeon General until 1989.

Update: Christianity Today is posting a number of pieces from their archives. The most extensive is Phillip Yancey’s profile from 1989. See also Carl Henry’s interview with Koop from 1973, Koop’s 1987 piece on death and dying, and a report on a 1990 talk he gave on abortion, contraception, healthcare, AIDS, and homosexuality.

Don't Feel Qualified For Your Calling?

Jon Bloom of Desiring God has a really good word from God's Word.

HT: Bill Hughes

The Drop Box

This made me weep with sorrow and with joy.


"The Drop Box" - Documentary PROMO from Brian Ivie on Vimeo.

HT: JT

Credit Cards and The Cause of Christ

A very good word for the American Church, and for each of us in it, from Kevin DeYoung:

Do you want to be radical in your devotion to Christ? Do you want your life to count and not be a waste? Do you want to see the nations come to Christ and the world changed for the better?

Well, here’s one practical thing you can do right now on your way to those lofty ambitions: pay down your debt.

There are 610,000,000 credit cards in the United States, and every household with at least one carries an average debt of $16,000. Total U.S. consumer debt is more than $2.5 trillion. Think of all the money Christians have tied up in late fees and financial commitments that can’t be spent on the work of the gospel in the world.

How will you ever give sacrificially to your church if you are swamped in credit card debt? How can you even consider doing missions overseas if you’re swallowed up in student loans? What sort of flexibility will you have to go anywhere and do anything if your house is worth half of what you owe on your mortgage? What will you have to give to support a new church plant in your city or the crisis pregnancy center down the street or the seminary overseas if you have two car payments, two mortgages, and twenty thousand dollars in consumer debt?

I love the emphasis in our day on doing hard things. I love the passion for a big God and big causes. I love the gospel-centered enthusiasm and idealism. But more often than not new dreams don’t come true without old-fashioned virtues like temperance, frugality, and hard work. Heartfelt passion won’t change the world. But passion plus prudence plus perseverance just might.

So if you are serious about carrying your cross and giving your all to Jesus, you should take more seriously paying down all that you owe. I don’t think all debt is wrong. We have a mortgage. We’ve had student loans and car payments too. But for the sake of the gospel we have to keep whacking away at all we owe. If you want to be a radical Christian, try making a budget and living within your means. Think of all the missions money tied up in credit card debt? Think of the workers not being trained, not being hired, and not being sent out because we’ve squandered our American inheritance on easy credit. Think of the risks we haven’t taken because we took all our risks out with interest years ago. He is no fool who works hard to repay what he’s already lost so that he might serve the One he cannot out-give.

Make sure you are giving at least ten percent to your church. Don’t scrimp on that. But after that, introduce austerity until your obligations are under control. The Father and the Son may not expect you to pay them back, but Master Card and Visa do.

Why Are We Losing Our Youth?

Bill Hughes and Janet Baumann drew my attention to this one. It's really good. If you are a teenager, or a parent of a teenager, or know a teenager in a church, or go to a church, you should read this post.

Here are the 10 reasons the author gives, in reverse order: 

10. The Church is “Relevant.”
9. They never attended church to begin with.
8. They get smart.
7. You sent them out unarmed.
6. You gave them hand-me-downs.
5. Community.
4. They found better feelings.
3. They got tired of pretending.
2. They know the truth.
1. They don’t need it.

We Don't Want to Do This (Updated)

Ray Ortlund, When God Comes to Church:

Do we want to guarantee that our children will run in the opposite direction of our most cherished biblical convictions? All we have to do is sterilize our churches. Make them rigid, unresponsive, grim. Require of our ministers that they play the role of scolding, scowling Reverend Eat-Your-Peas. Treat the gospel as a theological system only, rather than also as a personal remedy. Use the Bible as ammunition for “culture wars” rather than as food for life. Withdraw from the historical situation in which God has placed us. Build up the walls, reinforce the barriers, and make certain that no experience gets in here. Ignore the fact that “doctrine only” is not itself a biblical doctrine.

HT: JW

Update: A friend of mine, Pastor Kipp Soncek, was familiar with the quote above and sent me the paragraph that follows. It's well worth adding, with a new title: "We DO Want to Do This!"

But do we want our children to embrace our biblical convictions with joy? Let our churches become environments fertile with revival potentialities. Let’s shape our churches with the deliberate intention that their content and tone may encourage our children, and all others, in true experience of God. Let our convictions open up to their eyes a glorious vision of God and to their hearts the succulent pleasures of God. We cannot trigger a divine visitation on our churches, but it is our responsibility prayerfully to offer our Lord a church steeped in the gospel and tenderly responsive to his presence. His Spirit’s blessing should not have to work against the logic and ethos we create.

Amen! Thanks, Kipp!

Help

I needed to hear this today. You just might need to hear it, too.

I will help you. Isaiah 41:10

“Let us hear the Lord Jesus speak to each one of us: ‘I will help you. It is but a small thing for me, your God, to help you. Consider what I have done already. What! not help you? Why, I bought you with my blood. What! not help you? I have died for you; and if I have done the greater, will I not do the less? Help you! It is the least thing I will ever do for you. I have done more, and will do more. Before the world began I chose you. I made the covenant for you. I laid aside my glory and became a man for you, I gave up my life for you; and if I did all this, I will surely help you now. In helping you, I am giving you what I have bought for you already. If you had need of a thousand times as much help, I would give it to you; you require little compared with what I am ready to give. ‘Tis much for you to need, but it is nothing for me to bestow. Help you? Fear not! If there were an ant at the door of your granary asking for help, it would not ruin you to give him a handful of your wheat; and you are nothing but a tiny insect at the door of my all-sufficiency. I will help you.’

O my soul, is not this enough? Do you need more strength than the omnipotence of the United Trinity? Do you want more wisdom than exists in the Father, more love than displays itself in the Son, or more power than is manifest in the influences of the Spirit? Bring here your empty pitcher! Surely this well will fill it. Haste, gather up your needs, and bring them here – your emptiness, your woes, your needs. Behold, this river of God is full for your supply; what can you desire beside? Go forth, my soul, in this your might. The Eternal God is your helper.”

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

HT: RO

Application On Your Knees

On Sunday we considered 1 Corinthian 13. It's not just (or even mainly) for wedding day readings and homilies. It's for the church. And it's convicting. If you want your love to grow like the Apostle Paul describes it in that chapter, what do you do?

Two follow up thoughts:

1. Focus on God's great love for us in Christ. Spend a lot of time reading about and thinking about and meditating on and reminding yourself of the love of God for us, his people. "In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). Spend less time focusing on how others have failed to love you. Spend less time focusing on how you have failed or succeeded in loving others. Drink deeply at the well. You'll be well-watered and full to overflowing, ready to share his love whenever the opportunity arises.
2. Pray that love down into your soul. When you want to grow in heart-level affection-love that overflows into ground-level action-love, you can't just flip a switch. Only God can give us that kind of love. No wonder there are prayers like this in the Bible (may I suggest that you memorize these and make them a regular part of your prayers for yourself and your family and our church?): 

Psalm 90:14

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

Ephesians 3:14-21

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith--that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Philippians 1:9-11

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

If we're going to get busy living out the love described in 1 Corinthians 13, we need to start by looking up and kneeling down. 

Don't You Dare...

Joni Eareckson Tada talked recently about her own experience of receiving the well-meaning, but unhelpful words of friends shortly after her diving accident that left her paralyzed. Then she gave some advice on how to help those who are hurting (emphasis added). It's priceless.

Q: When you were in the hospital room, in despair about becoming a quadriplegic through your diving accident, were some comments people made—with good intentions—hugely irritating?

I had many well-meaning friends my age who said well-meaning things, but they were uninformed because the Bible says weep with those who weep. Many friends would say to me, from Romans 8:28, “Joni, all things fit together to a pattern for good.” Or, from James 1:3, “Welcome this trial as a friend.” Or, from Romans 5, “Rejoice in suffering.” These are good and right and true biblical mandates, but when your heart is being wrung out like a sponge, sometimes the 16 good biblical reasons as to why all this has happened to you sting like salt in the wound. When people are going through great trauma, great grief, they don’t want answers. Because answers don’t reach the problems where it hurts in the gut, in the heart.

Q: What does help?

When I was a little girl, I remember riding my bike down a steep hill. I made a right-hand turn. My wheels skidded out on gravel and I crashed to the ground. My knee was a bloody mess. My dad comes running out. I’m screaming and crying. Although I didn’t ask why, if I had, how cruel it would have been for my father to stand over me and say, “Well, sweetheart, let me answer that question. The next time you’re going down the hill, watch the steepness, be careful about the trajectory of your turn, be observant of gravel.” Those would all have been good answers to the question, “Why did this happen?” But when people are going through great trauma and great grief, they don’t want to know why. They want Daddy to pick them up, press them against his chest, pat them on the back, and say, “There, there, sweetheart, Daddy’s here. It’s OK.” When we are hurting, that’s what we want. We want God to be Daddy: warm, compassionate, real, in the middle of our suffering. We want fatherly assurance that our world is not spinning out of control.

Q: When you were in the hospital, what from your friends did sink in?

One night my high school friend Jackie, with whom I shared boyfriends, milkshakes, and hockey sticks, came into the hospital late one night, like 2 in the morning, past visiting hours. The nurses were on break. No one was in the hallway. She crept up the steps of the hospital, snuck in the back way, came into my six-bed ward. I was with five other spinal-cord-injured girls who were all asleep. My friend came sneaking into the room, crawling on her hands and knees. She came over to my bed, stood up slowly, and lowered the guard rail of the hospital bed. Just like high schoolers will do on pajama sleepovers, she climbed into bed next to me, snuggled real close, and softly began to sing: “Man of sorrows, what a name. For the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim. Hallelujah, what a Savior.”

Hallelujah … I get choked up thinking about it 45 years later. She gave me something that night that was priceless. She helped me encounter Jesus Christ in a warm and personal way. That’s how precious the body of Christ is to healing the hearts of those who are hurting, to come up close to them, to infuse into their spiritual veins life, hope, healing, health. That’s what Jackie gave me that night. She gave me Jesus in a real and personal way. That’s really what I needed. ... Don’t you dare be caught rejoicing with those who weep. Weep with those who weep.

HT: JT