We Are All Here for a Purpose

When I was five years old, our house was next door to the family grocery store on the wide main street of Estevan, Saskatchewan. My father often delivered groceries from that store, in his small Model A Ford truck.

One day when he was putting grocery orders into the bed of the truck I asked if I could go with him. He said no. I remember going around to the passenger side of the truck and stealthily lying down on the running board. This was an impulsive decision made with the limited judgment of a five-year-old brain.

Model A trucks were equipped with stiff transverse springs – crosswise to the vehicle like those in a horse-drawn buggy. When my father pulled the truck into the alley, I discovered how rough and full of potholes the alleyway was. The truck rocked slightly in the bumpy lane and when it reached one particularly rough spot at the end of the alley I rolled off onto the ground; the big back wheel of the truck just missed me.

Since at that point my father was turning right to enter the street, I could have suffered a crushed foot. Or a crushed head. I picked myself up and walked back to our yard. I was frightened, but didn’t realize what mortal danger I had been in.

How should I think about that experience now? Had the laws of physics or even blind chance just randomly played in my favor, like dice thrown without thought? Or was I under the divine care of One who had full power over the laws of physics? And had my mother’s prayers factored into my escape?

That is, what is our world really like?

I see the situation as a moment of divine care. That’s a faith statement, I know, but it seems to fit better with reality as the Christian Scriptures present reality, and as I experience it here and now. That strikes me as more real than to think our world is mindless and the fates regulate it without mercy or compassion. That would make our world a madhouse.

What did Jesus mean in his discourse about little children when he said to his disciples, “See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my father in Heaven” (Matthew 18:10).

I hear human accountability in those words. “Never disparage the worth of the little ones,” Jesus was saying. “Take care of them.” But I also hear a note of divine providence. It is a word of assurance about guardian angels who represent children before God.

Whatever we make of my near disaster as a five-year-old, I believe there is a God in heaven who cares for us through the many perils of childhood. For any of us who have survived to adulthood it is certain we have been spared from life-threatening perils even if we weren’t aware of them then or can’t identify them now.

This view of the world prompts me to treat every day as a gift and to live life purposefully as a believer in the Jesus who uttered those loving words instructing the care of children.

Why Stand for Real Marriage?

Why do Bible-believing Christians oppose same-sex marriage? Is it because they are bigoted, or afraid of change? Or is there another substantial reason the wider culture does not yet grasp?

To understand their conviction one must recognize the authority Christians give the Bible. Thereafter, consider what they read in its very first chapter. It says God created everything that exists, and here’s the pinnacle of that story: “So God created man in his own image,/ in the image of God he created him;/ male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Up to this point, same-sex marriage advocates might see no problem. But The Bible’s second chapter follows with the story of Adam and Eve. This says that God instituted male/female marriage. Then it closes with this editorial note: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

From there, for all Bible readers the narrative darkens. The third chapter of Genesis reports Adam and Eve’s disobedience and its dire consequences. They and their descendants must live under the curse of their sin.

Chapter 4 reports their descendant, Lamech, “married two women” (Genesis 4:19). This veers from God’s plan and with the introduction of bigamy the distortion of marriage is shown to invade ancient culture. Even Abraham, the father of the faithful, had children by two women, his wife Sarah and her maidservant, Hagar (Genesis 16).

And Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, in accommodation to culture was tricked into marrying two sisters and eventually had children by them and their two maidservants (Genesis 29:31-30:23). The stories show the hurtful consequences – family strife, jealousy, and bargaining for sleeping rights.

All the while, Genesis repeatedly holds up the standard of “one man and one woman for life.” For example, although Pharaoh of Egypt did not belong to the chosen people, he was aware that it was wrong to invade the sanctity of another man’s marriage (Genesis 12:10-20). The same was so of Abimelech, a heathen ruler in the southern regions of Philistia where Abraham and his retinue had settled for a period of time (Genesis 20).

Through the story of Sodom, the Genesis account speaks to homosexual practice where marriage was not only disregarded but where the very idea of heterosexual love was perverted: men, with no interest in women, sought sexual satisfaction with men – and did so violently. The cost for this abandonment to sexual perversion was eventually a divine judgment by fire. (Genesis 19:1-28).

Genesis closes with the story of Joseph a Hebrew alien in Egypt. He had no family to support him and no faith community to guide him. His master’s wife tried repeatedly to draw him into a sexual liaison. He steadfastly refused, asking his temptress, “How then could I do such a thing and sin against God?” (Genesis 39: 6-20).

Thus, this opening book of the Bible portrays the distorting influence of sin on God’s revealed provision of monogamous marriage. Genesis reports polygamy, adultery, incest, promiscuity and homosexuality in a variety of ways. But it does not lose sight of God’s original intent — one man and one woman by God’s design in covenant with him and each other, for life.

So, how does our Lord Jesus Christ treat Genesis, this fifty-chapter account of God’s divine intent and man’s unfaithfulness?

On one occasion, when the Pharisees sought to corner him on the controversial issue of divorce, his answer reached back across the Old Testament Scriptures to their first references to marriage.

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one” (Matthew 19:5).

For Jesus, and all who follow him, marriage from the beginning of creation was meant to involve one man and one woman for life. It is for this substantially stronger reason that Bible-believing Christians stand firm.

They believe that to corrupt or distort marriage into something it was not intended to be can only invite human distress and the judgment of God. To stand staunchly for marriage as God ordained it, they believe, is to stand for what God, himself, intended! Truth!

Caring for Neglected Children

We recently had John and Sheryl Emra in our home as overnight guests. For some time they have been missionaries to neglected children in the inner city of Los Angeles. Our visit was short but during the evening we talked animatedly about what their ministry involved.

Their supporting organization was given an abandoned church building. They made the building usable and opened it to the children in the area. Advertising was not necessary. Neglected or abandoned children in the inner city have time on their hands and wherever there are people who care and things to do they show up.

During our conversation, the Emras gave us their summary of the four behavioral commitments they have for these children and how their mission attempts to apply them.

The children need AFFECTION. Affection in this case is a warm sense of caring that communicates itself in wholesome ways. John explained, it may involve buying a child a needed pair of jeans or shooting baskets with an after-school group. It may mean just talking to the child on the child’s level and with their concern. Inner city children, like all children, will eventually sense that they are loved.

They need BOUNDARIES. For all of us, boundaries are where our territory ends and the territory of another begins. Invisible but real, these boundaries represent the emotional and physical buffers that make social interaction possible without jarring conflict. In well-parented homes, a child begins to learn early not to hit, how to keep hands off what belongs to others, how to respect their neighbor’s space, when to say please and thank you, etc.

But children left to run the streets are less likely to have these boundaries. John’s ministry operates on the principle that boundaries can be learned and when they are learned, children are more at peace with themselves and more able to relate in a group.

Children also need CONSISTENCY. Children in the inner city are likely to be deprived of this. Life can be grim there. Contact with significant adults may be limited. Children’s moral compasses are damaged by adult drug abuse, neglect, and brutal treatment. Many years ago two sociologists, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, discovered that inconsistency with children is a great contributor to delinquency. The child who is cruelly abused by a drunken parent one day and then lavishly rewarded by that parent the next — motivated by guilt — becomes very confused about what is really right in their world.

Finally, according to the Emras’ operational standards, children need DISCIPLINE. For the Emras, discipline is training. In their program, children are not just given a safe haven in which to run free. These missionaries are concerned by their discipline to produce specific patterns of character and behavior and to teach that all conduct, whether good or bad, has consequences.

It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ that undergirds this self-giving ministry. Jesus set a child before his quarrelling disciples and said, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes him who sent me” (Luke 9:47) Who can measure the value Jesus placed on the children his life touched?

There’s More to Church Than Just Attending

My father was not a converted man when my younger sister and I were growing up, but even so he attended church with the family Sunday morning and night without fail. I’m sure he believed in what the church stood for and felt the value of attending — at least for the children’s sake.

I will never know fully what his decision to attend contributed to my own life’s decisions. Neither of my Sunday School buddies, Fred and Howard, had fathers who ever turned up at church and both of them fell away from any church connections when they were 15 or so. Fred died of a heart attack when he was 31 and Howard had a checkered life and he, too, has been gone for many years.

As valuable as mere church attendance might be for either believers or unbelievers, it is far from the whole story when it comes to the Biblical understanding of church.

“Church” in the New Testament does not refer to a building or auditorium. The simplest translation for the word in English is “assembly.” Literally the word means “the called out” or the people of God whom he calls to assemble together. It means a gathering of believers — the “set-apart-ones.”

The Apostle Paul enhances our understanding of church when he further represents it as a body – a vital organism (1 Cor.12:12-27). This analogy indicates the living nature of the church. And just as a body has arms and legs, eyes and ears, internal organs, etc., all of which are subject to a common control center — the mind — so the church has living members who exercise special gifts in and through the assembly under the direction of the supreme head, Jesus Christ. These members thus contribute in an orderly way to the church’s communal life.

The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 has much to say about exercising these gifts to give the whole body order and usefulness.

And to the church in Rome he wrote, “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully” (Rom. 12: 6-8).

The gifts God gives to the members of his church are varied for a good reason – they are to enhance the health and witness of the whole body. But the one gift, fundamental to all else, is the gift of God’s Spirit. He awakens us with the life of God (Eph. 2:4-5). That is called the new birth. And then he “gifts” us to serve in and through the workings of Christ’s body (Acts 1:4).

From these passages it is clear especially for Christians that the central idea is to participate as a living member, and to contribute to worship and ministry!

You might wonder what became of my father’s church involvement after my sister and I left home. He responded to the gospel at age 61.

He had “attended” church for nearly all his adult life but now he had become a “living part” of the church — a member of Christ’s body. He went suddenly to be with the Lord when he was 83, leaving that comforting witness behind him.