John Newton

HT: Scotty Smith

I urge you to watch this video and consider supporting New Hope Uganda. Bringing the Fatherhood of God to the Fatherless Children of Africa.

The folks at New Hope Uganda are carrying out a mission that is very dear to me. Their points of emphasis are heartening.

The Gospel. Fatherhood. Motherhood. Work ethic/Industry. Loving families.

Beautiful.

Consider helping them out.

Are there others doing this kind of thing as well? Are there those doing good work that lines up with your passions? Tell us about them.

Martin Luther

Photo from New Hope Uganda.

This won’t be a guilt-inducer, I hope. At least not in the way we often process things like this. It goes like this: “I’m a Christian, but if I’d just do more, I’d really be acceptable with God.”

No.

That is Moralistic thinking, trying to add to the perfect work of Christ. But Christ’s work needs no addition. It isn’t, “Christ’s work, plus my bit and we’re in.” It’s Jesus’ Work, plus nothing. So please don’t see this in that way.

Why should we help orphans? Because we serve a Lord and he has commanded it? Yes. Oh, and for joy.

Here is what James says, by the Holy Spirit. The context contains this:

“Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.”
(James 1:9-11 ESV)

James goes on to talk about being quick to hear, slow to speak, and bridling tongues. He is advocating true religion and condemning disobedience.

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:27 ESV)

Visiting orphans and widows in their affliction is more than just sending a check. That’s a wake-up to many of us. But when you have a lot of money, then it’s a good place to start. It’s a good way to rejoice in what our brother James refers to as our “humiliation,” or “lowly position.”

Note: If you are an American, then it is likely you are very rich (by world, and historical, standards). Don’t listen to the envy-inspiring politicians who beg us to covet our neighbor’s possessions and vote to steal them. Nor the ones who say we have a right to greed and self-indulgence. My advice: pretty much avoid getting theology (truth) from politicians in general.

I have a a few friends who are involved heavily in orphan care. You probably do too. I plan to highlight them more in this space in the future.

But for now, a couple of places to consider supporting if you want to jump on it.

New Hope Uganda. This is a organization our family loves and supports. “Bringing the Fatherhood of God to the Fatherless Children of Africa.” Beauty. See them on Facebook here.

Photo from Keith McFarland of New Hope Uganda.

Perry’s Adoption Journey. The Perry’s are doing just that, working toward adopting a little girl from Ethiopia. You can visit them here, or catch them on FB here. Consider supporting their mission. They need a lot of money to love one girl a whole bunch.

There are others who are adopting in their communities. You know them. Ask them how you can help.

What is the Gospel? from Southern Seminary on Vimeo.

If your god is like that, may I suggest you kill him and turn to the Triune God of the Bible. He is the Sovereign King. In actual fact.

Gaelic Maxim

HT: Tullian Tchividjian

“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. . . .

It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic.

It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.

It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple.

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame.

But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy

HT: Justin Taylor

The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them.

In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade,” “in school” and “out of school.”

But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them “to live is Christ.” These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no “salvation” by works done to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.

C.S. Lewis

Tim Keller

HT: Scotty Smith