Author: First Baptist Church

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27, NIV).

“Do your kids know how to defend their faith?” “Ready to equip parents for cultural challenges?”

Those are the subject lines of two emails I recently received. The first is from Focus on the Family, and the second is from Alliance Defending Freedom Church Alliance. As you can probably guess, the topics of both emails are similar. They both offer resources that help equip families, pastors, and churches to better withstand the barrage of assaults on the Biblical Christian worldview from increasingly antagonistic nonbiblical humanist worldviews prevalent in our culture. I have noticed that God has been directing a variety of resources on this general topic to me for a few months. This has been a consistent manner throughout my personal and pastoral spiritual growth and maturity in which God directs me to specific areas of focus, so I am once again paying attention as best I can. The resulting question always becomes, “How can I best use these resources in both my personal life and in pastoral leadership?”

The first way is to recognize that this is a legitimate Biblical issue requiring our attention. The first and primary responsibility of anyone receiving the Gospel message is to personally believe that Jesus bore the cost of our sins on the cross, to confess our sins to God, and to accept His merciful forgiveness. This is salvation. Our next responsibility is to begin growing in spiritual maturity so that we become more and more the person Jesus wants us to be – to become Christ-like. Closely associated with this is our responsibility to serve Christ. Frequently, but not exclusively, this is lived out by serving others who are in need. As James put it, “look after orphans and widows in their distress.” There is an obvious literal application to this instruction, but there are figurative applications as well. Those in distress go beyond just orphans and widows: victims of natural disasters, crimes, accidents, illness, and wars; those suffering from mental disorders and birth defects; those in distress due to financial setbacks; homelessness; and a myriad of other situations. The list can appear endless sometimes, and there are multiple ministries that have been created to respond to these needs.

“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:1-3, NIV).

Anyone who stops to contemplate the complexity of a human being can only be awestruck by the creative power of God. Our physical structure, comprised of so many microscopic cellular parts working together in a way that results in a functioning body, is amazing enough. Add to that, though, the ability to think and reason, and the concept of humanity is staggering!

But God did not stop there. Not only did He create a functioning body with thinking skills, He bestowed upon His creation emotion. Combined with the other facets of creation, God made the human being the crowning glory of His creation: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them… God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the sixth day” (Genesis 1:27, 31, NIV, italic added).

One of our most powerful emotions, love, is celebrated in the month of February as Valentine’s Day, so it is appropriate to consider its meaning and application. Scripture is clear enough on the matter: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God… We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:7, 19, NIV). Love that does not start here becomes distorted, misused, and abused. Even though cel- ebrating love as romance on Valentine’s Day can be whimsical, it pales in comparison to true love.

The Apostle John loved to write about love. The high point of love, he tells us, is that “we should be called children of God!” Spiritually, everyone is an orphan until he or she accepts God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. The image of an orphan is a universally frightening specter: abandoned, lonely, impoverished, and unloved. Into this bleak landscape, when we are at our most helpless state, God sent His Son. Through Him, God sent every one of us His personal Val- entine’s Day message:

“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this city or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not know that will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins” (James 4:13-17, NIV).

You may very well hear me say more than once that I have long been amazed at how much difference there can be between one year and the next simply because we turn the page of a calendar. Yet, it always happens, for better or for worse, that one year is remarkably different than another. Who could have ever imagined how different 2020 would be from 2019? Or from any other year we have experienced?

We are moving once again into a new year: 2022 becomes 2023 with another flip of a calendar page. Like any new year, we carry many hopes into it. Not the least for Rochester First Baptist is the prospect of a new pastor and pastor’s family. As God reveals His will to both this fellowship and the person who will be called, continue to pray for the pulpit search committee: wisdom, discernment, patience, and encouragement.

Pray also for our nation and the ongoing seismic cultural shifts happening all around us. Long-held moral principles are being redefined or eliminated altogether. Theologians in some arenas challenge Biblical integrity. The Christian faith is under assault from a variety of cultural sectors for proclaiming <gasp!> values and ethics and moral standards. What is a Christian to do?

There are a lot of overwhelming issues going on. My thought is, “Do the obvious: trust God and obey Him.” The portion of Scripture from James 4 speaks volumes: “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” This isn’t meant to send us plummeting into the depths of guilt-trip despair. It is a simple sentence of instruction meant to encourage and motivate us to accomplish that which God has empowered us to do. I can think of a lot of disciplines from which to choose an illustration; I’ll pick something from my submariner days. Everyone on the boat had at least one designated job (we really had way more than one). In order for the boat to be operated smoothly and safely, everyone needed to do his designated job(s). But if we stopped at the boundaries our individual jobs alone, we were still likely to run into problems. Each of us also had to know how to do someone else’s job as well. Why? Because if a crisis struck, such as flooding or fire, anyone in the vicinity of the casualty needed to respond immediately. Waiting for just the “right” person to arrive on the scene could be deadly. The crisis could develop into a catastrophe if those at the scene did not respond quickly. Since we always thought that not being able to surface the submarine would be a bad thing, all of us tried not to ignore doing the right thing; i.e., “doing good.”

“When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what
the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told” (Luke 2:17- 20, NIV).

“I can’t believe that it’s time for Christmas already!” I’ve made that exclamation before, and I will no doubt make it again. So have you. For most of us, this is not an expression of wonder and excitement. Instead, it is probably a groan. Unless you are a child, heading into the Christmas season means picking up a frenzied pace. It means shopping, wrapping, decorating, cooking, and preparing for travel or for guests. None of these are bad, of course, for they all represent an expression of our love for others. Nevertheless, they all combine to make us look back after the event and ask, “What happened? Christmas zipped by so quickly that didn’t get to enjoy it!” That seems to be the perspective of Christmas from the adult viewpoint.

The perspective from childhood is a bit different. If I recall accurately from my own childhood, I couldn’t wait for Christmas to get here. It seems like it took forever to arrive. It was a marvelous time of the year as new sights, smells, and tastes abounded almost every day. And waking up to Christmas morning itself… well, who could improve on an experience like that?

So… what happened to that sense of wonderful excitement and anticipation? Adulthood and all the things that go along with it. Yet, whether adult or child, I am convinced that God delights every time that we stop and consider and ponder the wonder of His creation. I recall a Christmas devotional that reminded me of the importance of wonder.

“Elmer Kline, a bakery manager in 1921, was given the job of naming the company’s new loaf of bread. As he struggled to come up with something ‘catchy,’ he found his answer in an unlikely place. While visiting the grounds of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he stopped to watch the International Balloon Festival. Later he described the sight of the beautiful hot-air balloons launching into the Indiana sky as one of ‘awe and wonderment.’ The thought stuck, and he called the new product Wonder Bread. To this day, the packaging for Wonder Bread is brightened by colorful balloons” (Bill Crowder, “Wonder,” Our Daily Bread, December 24, 2006).