Why Ask for Daily Bread?

“Give us this day our daily bread.” (Matthew 6:11)

Do you ask God to give you the food you need every day?

Why should a rich person ask God for his daily bread?

Or – in case you don’t think you are rich (see this sermon for arguments that you are) – why should anyone with money in his wallet and savings in the bank ask God daily for the sustenance he needs?

Jesus gives us “The Lord’s Prayer” as a model, in response to His disciples’ request to be taught how to pray (Luke 11:1-4). The petition for daily bread is part of this model. Jesus wasn’t speaking here only to his poor followers – “Ask God to give you the food you don’t have, and trust Him to provide it!” – but He clearly implies that all his followers should pray like this. So the injunction to pray for daily bread applies both to the poor, indigent leper Jesus heals in Luke 17, as well as to the rich Zacchaeus who is saved in Luke 19. Clearly the leper, most likely dependent on begging, needs to pray for his food. But Zacchaeus remains wealthy even after he gives away half of his assets. Why should he ask God for his daily bread when he has enough saved up to buy his every meal for the next several decades?

Two biblical principles are key for answering this question.

First: You deserve nothing of what you own. Economists have researched the question: How much of the differences in wealth between people is due to their different skills, abilities, and work effort, and how much is due to accidents of birth, of race, of nationality? Even looking at the issue from this completely secular point of view, the vast majority of differences in wealth across the world are due to accidents. The country you are born in has much more impact on your wealth as an adult than your abilities or your work effort. Many bright, hard-working people are exceptionally poor. So from a secular standpoint, you deserve very little of what you have. You have most of it by accidents of birth.

But from a biblical viewpoint, you deserve none of it. Deuteronomy 8:17-18 warns us:

Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth,

Whatever skills you have come from Him. Whatever work effort you have comes from Him. You could not think, you could not work, you could not eat, you could not digest your food apart from God’s sustenance and provision. As James 1:17 says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” That is, nothing good that you have comes from anywhere else. God is the source of everything good – everything you have, everything you have ever experienced.

So recognizing that, give thanks for what you have and ask Him to provide for this day’s needs.

Second biblical principle: All that you have could disappear in an instant.

All material possessions will disappear when Jesus returns (2 Peter 3:10-12). They won’t last. They will do you no good on that day. They are a temporary grant from God, to be used for His purposes.

And even before that Last Day, disasters happen. Hurricanes. Tsunamis. Stock Market crashes. Robbery. Embezzlement. Illness. Disability. One day your assets may look sufficient to carry you through many years. And the next you might lose everything. As Proverbs 23:5 says, “Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle.” So do not set your security on the uncertainty of worldly assets, but the certainty of a faithful God (1 Timothy 6:17).

So as you sit down to eat today, surely give thanks to God for His provision. But also, when you wake tomorrow morning, ask your heavenly Father to provide the food you need for that day. Acknowledge that apart from His provision, you would have nothing. Look to Him as your security, as your hope, as your joy. Admit your dependence. Ask – and He will provide all you need to fulfill His purposes.

Why a Mediator?

1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
John 14:6 I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

What does it mean to say that Christ Jesus is our mediator?

We frequently think of Jesus’ mediation as being necessary for our salvation; He died on the cross to pay the penalty for all the sins of all who repent and believe in Him. So, in last Sunday’s sermon, we considered the biblical image of the courtroom, with each of us standing accused of crimes for which we are guilty. Satan, the Accuser, lists them one by one – but for those in Him, Jesus, the Mediator, the Substitute, responds to each accusation by declaring, “Forgiven, by my blood!” Christ, our Mediator, covers those sins and keeps’ God’s justice from requiring of us the fair punishment of an eternity in hell.

But Jesus’ mediation accomplishes much more than keeping us out of hell. Through His work, we who once were God’s enemies are now in His family. We are loved by Him; we are His little children, His joy, His delight. As Jesus welcomes the little children to come to Him, God the Father rejoices to have us approach Him, confident in His love.

Yet ponder this thought: This loving relationship is for those who are in Christ. In Christ, we can come into God’s presence – for God then looks at us and sees Jesus’ perfect life, not our sins. In Christ we can (and must!) speak to God, presenting any and all requests to Him – for we ask in Jesus’ Name, that is by His mediation and intercession. In Christ we offer all we are and do to God, presenting ourselves as living sacrifices – and, though even our best efforts are stained by sin, we are accepted by God as holy and acceptable because of Christ’s perfect life.

Ambrose, the fourth-century Bishop of Milan, put it this way:

Christ is our mouth by which we speak to the Father; our eye by which we see the Father; our right hand by which we offer ourselves to the Father. Save by his intercession neither we nor any saints have any intercourse with God.

Turn this over in your mind. Meditate on it. Apart from Christ, your relationship to God is solely that of condemned prisoner to Judge. You cannot speak to Him. You cannot see Him. You can do nothing for Him.

We speak to God, boldly approaching His throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), because we have “a great high priest who has passed through the heavens” (Hebrews 4:14). We see God for Who He is because of Christ, “the exact imprint of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3); when we have seen Him, we have seen the Father (John 14:9). We can be the light and salt of the world, doing good deeds that glorify the Father (Matthew 5:13-16) only because Jesus has sent to us the Holy Spirit (John 14:12-18) – and He Himself intercedes to cover the remaining sinful aspects of even our best deeds.

Thus, the author of the letter to the Hebrews rejoices that Jesus “is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). He must always live, if we are to have a relationship with the Father – for we always need His intercession. We always need His mediation.

So dwell on this precious truth. Before God the Father, Jesus is your mouth. He is your eye. He is your right hand. In Him – and only in Him – God the Father is for you. He loves you. You are His precious little child. You are His delight.

Because of Christ Jesus.

What a Savior!

Prayer and a Clear Conscience

Last Sunday’s sermon focused on the importance of having a clear conscience before God, and discussed how to guard your conscience. In this sermon excerpt from 1981, John Piper helpfully draws the link between maintaining a clear conscience and being diligent in our prayers for others. See the entire sermon (text, audio) – Coty

1 Timothy 1:18 – 2:4 18 This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, 19 holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith, 20 among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. 2:1 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

[Paul] warns Timothy that, if you reject a good conscience, you may make shipwreck of your faith, like Hymenaeus and Alexander did. A good conscience is a conscience that does not condemn you for the things you do or don’t do. . . .
I think we can all understand this connection between a clear conscience and a vibrant faith if we just think about our own experience. . . . If I fall into a habit that my conscience condemns, what eventually happens is that my conscience begins to say, “Piper, all your talk about trusting Christ is a lot of hot air, because if you really trusted him, you wouldn’t go on in that behavior or that attitude.” And so a bad conscience begins to drill its little holes into the belly of the ship of faith until one of two things happen: either we confirm the genuineness of our faith by changing our ways and plugging up the holes of a bad conscience, or we show that our faith never was seaworthy and sink into unbelief and blasphemy like Hymenaeus and Alexander. So, Paul’s charge to Timothy to hold on to faith by keeping a good conscience is tremendously important, and any help Paul gives on how to keep a good conscience should be received with open arms.

That is what I think Paul does in verse 1 of chapter 2. Since you must keep a good conscience in order not to make shipwreck of faith, therefore I urge you first of all to pray for all men. At the top of Paul’s list of things that we must do in order to keep a clear conscience is to pray for other people. In order to see why failing to pray for people will lead to a bad conscience and so jeopardize our faith, we have to ask, “What is it that will prick a Christian’s conscience in his relations to other people?” The answer to that question is clear from the whole Bible. All God’s instruction is summed up in this: Love God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself. Therefore, anything we do to people that is unloving will prick our conscience and threaten our faith. With that as a foundation we can start to see why prayer for other people is at the top of Paul’s list of things we must do in order to keep a clear conscience.

I see three reasons why prayer for other people is of first importance in keeping a clear conscience, in view of Jesus’ teaching that love is our greatest duty. First, prayer taps the power of God on behalf of others. We could try to help others . . . without praying for them. And, judged from a very limited perspective, we might do a little good that way. But the little good that we could do by our little power is not worthy to be compared with the great good God can do for people that he sets out to work for. So if we want the best for people, if we really love them, of first importance will be prayers on their behalf. . . .

A second reason prayer is of first importance in keeping a clear conscience is that it is the easiest step of love. . . . And isn’t it true that if you are unwilling to do something easy for the good of another, then it is very unlikely that you will be willing to do something hard for them? . . ..

And the third reason prayer is of first importance in keeping our consciences clear is that it reaches farther in its effects than anything else we can do. . . . Without it we can influence things nearby, and if we wait long enough, our influence may spread around the world. But God’s influence is everywhere and immediate, so if we send our signals to him, we can reach around the world in an instant. If a broadcaster wants to get a message to the most people possible in the smallest amount of time, he will send it first away from the people to a satellite. If a Christian wants to do the most good possible to the most people in the short time he has, he will turn to God first, whose influence reaches, without interruption, to every molecule and every mind in the universe.

So, if we would not make shipwreck of faith, we must keep a good conscience. And therefore, I urge you first of all to fulfill the love command by praying for all men, because prayer taps the power of God on their behalf, prayer is the first and easiest step of love, and prayer reaches farther in its good effects than anything else we can do.

By John Piper. Used by permission. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org

When Helping Hurts

You’re in an African country on a short-term mission trip, interacting with a group of poor persons. One of them becomes sick, and needs $8 to buy penicillin. Should you buy the antibiotic?

You are concerned about a poor area of an American city. Should your first step be to assess the needs of the people?

Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett say the answer to both of those questions is no. In their new book, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, the authors argue that most attempts to deal with poverty end up exacerbating underlying problems in both the rich giver and the poor receiver. They lay out a biblical understanding of poverty, identify principles for helping the poor, and then apply those principles to domestic and international settings. Along the way, they illustrate both effective and ineffective interventions – including their own errors and mistakes.

In Part I, “Foundational Concepts for Helping Without Hurting,” the authors emphasize the holistic nature of Jesus’ work. As we will sing tomorrow,

He comes to break oppression, to set the captive free;
To take away transgression and rule in equity.
While on earth He preached the Gospel through His words and through His actions. We, His church, are to do the same, until He comes and ends all wrongs. Christ is Lord of all of life – so the Gospel has implications for how we live every moment of every day.

How does this change our understanding of poverty? Poverty, argue the authors, is about much more than a lack of resources. It is about feelings of “shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation, and voicelessness” (p. 53). God created us to be in healthy relationship with Himself first of all, giving glory to Him, and then with others, the rest of creation, and ourselves. And these relationships are embedded in an interweaving web of economic, social, political, and religious systems. The Fall has broken all of these relationships, and led to systems that exacerbate this brokenness.

What we normally think of as poverty – the lack of material resources – is only one aspect of the breakdown of our relationship to the rest of creation. Apart from God’s redemption, we all experience breakdowns in all four of those key relationships, and each of those is a type of poverty. Even the rich are poor in some of these senses. Furthermore, those who are materially poor often are suffering from all types of poverty, not just materially.

In particular, one type of poverty we American rich people normally experience is thinking that we are great, we are the helpers, we are the givers, we are the problem-solvers – that we are, in a sense, God. When we then try to help those who are materially poor and suffering from the opposite sense of themselves – shame – we often, even while providing material goods, make our own god-complexes worse while increasing the shame and poor-self-image of those we are helping. In such cases, helping hurts – it hurts both the giver and the receiver.

Fikkert and Corbett’s approach to the issue is masterful. They manage to discuss poverty in a way that is informed by economic research but not limited by it, in a way that acknowledges the impact of economic and political systems on poverty, while also acknowledging individual responsibility. Thus they avoid sounding like Republicans or Democrats, conservative or liberal – they instead sound biblical.

Along the way, the authors discuss the importance of the material and social assets of the poor, microenterprise development, and savings and credit schemes. The last three chapters draw out lessons in three key areas: Short term missions trips – a devastating critique of most, even while laying out principles for healthy trips – domestic poverty alleviation, and international development work.

The book is structured particularly well for small groups to read together. Each chapter begins with questions to ponder and discuss, and then concludes with follow-up, questions for reflection that help the reader apply the chapter’s lessons both to the specific issues brought up in the chapter’s opening questions and more broadly. The website www.whenhelpinghurts.com provides a large number of additional helpful resources.

Should you read this book? If you’ve ever been on a short term mission trip, or think you might – Yes. If you’ve ever wondered whether or not to give to a beggar – Yes. If you’ve ever wondered how to live out James 1:27 – Yes.

In other words: Read this book. There is no better book on the subject.

When Others Sin, I . . .

How do you react when others sin?

This week we once again have been barraged with revelations of the sexual sins of a major public figure, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina. We thus have the opportunity to examine ourselves, to see if we are reacting rightly or wrongly to such revelations.

Here are some common reactions, with some words of evaluation about each one:

  • When others sin, I find out all I can about it. All sorts of unnecessary information is available on Governor Sanford’s sin. Some mainstream newspapers read more like supermarket tabloids than serious journalism. A natural human reaction is to soak this up, to titillate our prurient desires by searching out the details of these illicit liaisons. Don’t do it. Such information does not make you love Jesus more, does not make you a better witness for Him, does not protect you from future sin, and does not make you a better citizen. The outline of the infidelity, and the possibility of misuse of state funds, is all we need to know.
  • When others sin, I delight in relating the details to others. Paul writes, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (Ephesians 4:29). When you gossip, your speech is tearing down at least three people: yourself, the person you’re talking to, and the person you’re talking about. Don’t gossip.
  • When others sin, I look for something to admire in those hurt by the sin. We all need examples. When public leaders sin, we often are let down by those we admired. Oftentimes, however, someone around the sinner acts in an exemplary manner. In such cases, our focus should move from the sinner to the example – so that we, and those we speak with, can indeed be built up. In this case, I commend to you Jenny Sanford’s public letter. In an incredibly difficult situation, she seems to be acting with grace and wisdom.
  • When others sin, I think, “What an idiot! I would never do something like that!” The Bible is clear: Anyone who engages in adultery or fornication is a fool, ultimately destroying pleasure, not gaining pleasure. Proverbs 6:32 says, “He who commits adultery lacks sense; he who does it destroys himself” (see my sermon on this passage). So the first part of the statement is correct.

But Paul writes, “If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!” (1 Corinthians 10:12). That is, be careful that you don’t fall into a similar sin – in this case, sins such as adultery, fornication, lust, or viewing pornography – and be careful that you don’t fall into the sin of pride, thinking more highly of yourself than you ought (Romans 12:3). Is your life free from sexual sin? If the answer is no, use the occasion of this man’s sin to confront your own: Seek forgiveness from God and from those you have wronged, seek counsel and accountability so that you might fight this sin in the future. If the answer is yes – if your sexual life and thoughts have been pure – use the occasion of this man’s sin to remind yourself of the dead end of this sin, and to strengthen your resolve and your methods of dealing with temptation in this area. And then cultivate the next response:

  • When others sin, I confess that sin as if it were mine. If you have not committed such a sin, what has prevented you from doing so? Friend, it is certainly not your inherent goodness, your superior moral sense, or your high degree of self-control. Every one of us is guilty before God of sins so terrible that they demand a judgment of “Condemned!” (Ephesians 2:1-3). If I am free of a particular sin, God must have prevented me from committing that sin. Hear what John Donne writes:

O Lord, pardon me, me, all those sins which thy Son Christ Jesus suffered for, who suffered for all the sins of all the world; for there is no sin amongst all those which had not been my sin, if thou hadst not been my God, and antedated me a pardon in thy preventing grace.

If I have not committed any particular sin, God has, in effect, pardoned me ahead of time for that sin by extending His grace beforehand, protecting me from the sin. So the praise and honor go to Him. Sins of others thus should lead to greater humility on our part, not pride.

  • When others sin, I ask God to search my heart. My friends, sin always deceives. Sin always destroys. Sin is always discovered. So may we take the occasion of great sins by great men to ask God with David: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!  And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalm 139:23-24). When He shows you the sin in your heart, confess it — and know the joy of living a life blameless before Him. Confessed sin – Praise God! — is always forgiven, by the blood of Jesus.

(For more on this topic, see this sermon I preached 11 years ago at the height of the Clinton/Lewinsky imbroglio. The last lines of this devotion are taken from that sermon).


A Great Commission Resurgence?

For the last several months, Danny Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has been advocating a “Great Commission Resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention. In his chapel address on April 16th (audio), Dr Akin laid out twelve axioms required for such a resurgence. Since then, SBC President Johnny Hunt has embraced this message, and modified the axioms somewhat, reducing them to ten, as available here.

In many ways, I am impressed with the Great Commission Resurgence document, and believe the SBC should move in the direction it lays out. Here are some of the axioms that clearly resonate with our theology, vision, and values:

1: We call upon all Southern Baptists to submit to the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ in all things at the personal, local church, and denominational levels.

2: We call upon all Southern Baptists to make the gospel of Jesus Christ central in our lives, our churches, and our convention ministries.

(more…)

Vintage Ralph Winter

Here are some favorite Ralph Winter quotes, to supplement this post on his life well-lived:

Jesus, today, might have put it, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and your career will take care of itself.” . . . God may indeed reward you with a startling career – but you will probably not know the details in advance. . . . Lots of people would be glad to follow God if He would only tell them in advance exactly all the wonderful things He would do for them and what high sounding job titles they might one day hold. But, remember Genesis 12:1? It is characteristic of the Christian life that God asks us to go without telling us where! . . . When we walk in the little light we have, and keep going on and on taking steps in faith, the ways in which He leads us are almost always, as we look back, something we could have never been told in advance! Untold marvels lie beyond each step of faith. You don’t really have to know what is beyond the next step. And you can’t find out without taking the next step. (“Join the World Christian Movement,” p. 722-23 in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, Third Edition, edited by Ralph Winter and Steven Hawthorne, William Carey Library, 1999.)

Make no mistake. God honors those who seek His work above their worries. One of our staff members once said, “Now I think I understand what faith is; it is not the confidence that God will do what we want Him to do for us, but the conviction that we can do what He wants done for Him and let Him take care of the consequences.” (same article, p. 722)

You can’t be any kind of a solid Christian if you are unwilling to do anything He asks. (same article, p. 723)

A famous missionary wrote back to fellow students and pled with them: “Give up your small ambitions and come East to proclaim the glorious gospel of Christ.” For me to give “My utmost for His highest” is no guarantee of health, wealth, or happiness . . . but that kind of crucial choice is, in the experience of thousands who have tried it, the most exhilarating and demanding path of all callings. You don’t lose if you go with God. But you have to be willing to lose or you can’t stick close to God. (same article, p. 723)

The shattering truth is that four out of five non-Christians in the world today are beyond the reach of any Christian’s [normal] evangelism. Why is this fact not more widely known? I’m afraid that all our exultation about the fact that every country of the world has been penetrated has allowed many to suppose that every culture has by now been penetrated. This misunderstanding is a malady so widespread that it deserves a special name. Let us call it “people blindness” – that is, blindness to the existence of separate peoples within countries. . . . In the Great Commission . . . the phrase “make disciples of all ethne (peoples)” does not let us off the hook once we have a church in every country – God wants a strong church within every people! (“The New Macedonia,” Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization, 1974; reprinted in Perspectives cited above, p. 346.)

The essential missionary task is to establish a viable indigenous church planting movement that carries the potential to renew whole extended families and transform whole societies. It is viable in that it can grow on its own, indigenous meaning that it is not seen as foreign, and a church planting movement that continues to reproduce intergenerational fellowships that are able to evangelize the rest of the people group. . . .  God will reveal the glory of His kingdom among all peoples. We are within range of finishing the task, with more momentum than ever before in history. Be a part of it–“Declare His glory among the nations!” (“Finishing the Task,” by Ralph Winter and Bruce Koch, Perspectives as cited above, p. 517 and 524.)

Obedience to the Great Commission has more consistently been poisoned by affluence than by anything else. The antidote for affluence is reconsecration. Consecration is by definition the “setting apart of things for holy use.” (“Consecration to a Wartime, Not a Peacetime, Lifestyle”, Perspectives as cited above, p. 705.)

We must learn that Jesus meant it when He said, “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required” (Luke 12:48). I believe that God cannot expect less from us as our Christian duty to save other nations than our own nation in wartime conventionally requires of us to save our own nation. (same article, p. 707. Emphasis in original.)

A Life Lived to God’s Glory Among the Nations: Ralph Winter, 1925-2009

(For a version of this devotion that is easier to print, see this link).

Ralph Winter died on Wednesday night, at the age of 84. I am confident that the Lord Jesus welcomed Dr Winter into His presence, saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master!” In the new heavens and the new earth, when we recount the history of the greatest accomplishment of all time – God bringing all the nations to Himself – Dr Winter will be among the most prominent figures who by God’s power worked to fill the earth with His glory as the waters cover the sea.

I only met Dr Winter once. When he was about 80, after being diagnosed with an incurable cancer, during a period of remission, he came to Columbia to teach. He flew into Charlotte, and met with several of us that evening. Our conversation showed him to be what I already knew – an academic in the best sense of the word. Dr Winter was a man of ideas – and he was always looking for people to challenge those ideas, to engage him in debate over those ideas, to sharpen his thinking and to stretch him further. So when I thanked him for his profound impact on me and on the worldwide church, he brushed it off, and immediately began asking me questions. In short order, he discovered an area of disagreement: He believed each local church should be focused on one small slice of the demographic pie, in order to most effectively reach unbelievers like them; I believe God is most glorified when the local church transcends the cultural boundaries that so often separate believers. He wanted to debate the issue, and I gave him that pleasure, uncomfortable as I was – despite being a former academic myself, I was there that evening to honor him!

But that interaction displays the character of Dr Ralph D Winter: He was an incredibly creative man of ideas. He was always searching, always thinking. In my view, he propagated a few wrong ideas. But in God’s providence, he was the man most responsible for pushing the worldwide church to embrace a whole series of right ideas – biblical truths that had been overlooked, or not widely known. Here is a list of some of Dr Winter’s key ideas. See more of my favorite Ralph Winter quotes at this link.

God’s missionary mandate to the church is a cross-cultural mandate. Dr Winter’s address to the 1974 Lausanne International Congress on World Evangelization was perhaps the most important paper presented at any conference in the last century. At that time, almost every mission agency thought of the biblical missionary mandate as a command to reach every nation – that is, country – with the Gospel. Dr Winter argued persuasively that the biblical mandate was to reach every culture with the Gospel, every people group, every ethno-linguistic entity; that’s the biblical definition of “nation.” God’s design is for His church to plant a thriving, evangelizing church in every people group of the world. Thirty-five years later, almost every missions agency agrees with this analysis. This insight led to the founding of the US Center for World Mission and the development of the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course.

God’s cross-cultural mandate to His people permeates Scripture. Dr Winter emphasized that our God is a missionary God, calling all the nations to Himself, and that this has been His purpose from the beginning. The calling of Abraham in Genesis 12 is itself part of the cross-cultural mandate. Missions is thus not a mandate resting on a few, isolated verses here and there; it is the central part of the biblical storyline.

God has been working throughout history to fulfill this cross-cultural mandate. In telling the story of missions, many have written as if nothing happened prior to 1792, when William Carey sailed for India. Dr Winter emphasized that God has been at work in fulfilling the missionary mandate throughout time, using different methods in different periods of time. For pedagogical purposes, he broke history down into 400-year eras, and argued that one way of advancing the Gospel was prevalent in each era. I am not alone in rejecting some of those generalizations as too broad and thus unhelpful. But his emphasis was right: God has indeed been at work over the centuries, well prior to 1792.

God’s church needs bands of people focused on missions to assist in the fulfilling of the cross-cultural mandate. Building on the functioning of Paul’s missionary band, Dr Winter argued that such groups of missionaries are a vital part of the church. Indeed, he argued that each missionary band was fully a church in its own right – just a different type of church than the normal within-one-culture church. Here again, in my view Dr Winter took a valuable insight and went too far with it. By all means, mission agencies have a vital role to play in fulfilling the task. But each missionary should be part of a local, home church, living as one extended arm of that local church, as the local church plays its role in obeying the cross-cultural mandate.

Use all that you have, throughout all of your life, for God’s glory among the nations. Dr Winter exhorted others time and again to live this out, and then set a sterling example of what this means. He worked for God’s glory among the nations until the day before he died. He left a safe and secure job to start the US Center. He called all of us to a war-time lifestyle, and then he lived such a lifestyle, never accumulating possessions, always giving away much of what he received. Furthermore, he called the church to prayer for cross-cultural missions, and then prayed diligently himself.

For those of you who have been part of Desiring God Church for some time, these points may seem almost passé. You have heard me say them – as well as variations on these themes – time and again. That’s the impact of a man mightily used by God – His profound insights and ideas become so widely taught that we begin to take them for granted.

So let us thank God for this man:

I praise you, Lord God, for the gift of Ralph Winter to your church, and to me in particular. May you raise up many more like him because of his faithfulness to Your calling. And may we fulfill your cross-cultural mandate to the church in this generation – in part because of the faithfulness of Ralph D Winter. All glory and praise is Yours, O Lord.

(For more on Ralph Winter, see key quotes; John Piper’s tribute; another online tribute; and his autobiography. Best of all, take the Perspectives course!)

Responding to Conflict – When You are at Fault

How do you react when your wrong decisions cause pain and trouble for yourself and others? What do you do when others then bitterly blame you and accuse you?

We all make mistakes in judgment. And we all sin. There are consequences to these mistakes and sins. Surely we must take responsibility for those consequences.

But every mistake, every sin, and every conflict is an opportunity for God to display His sovereign goodness. And thus every error and sin of ours provides us with the opportunity to trust in Him, and thus to glorify Him.

Consider present conflict in your family, among your friends, or in your workplace. Limit your thoughts to those conflicts for which you are in large measure responsible: Your sin, or your error of judgment, has led to this dispute. How should you respond biblically? How can these problems lead to God’s glory?

This is the situation David finds himself in at the beginning of 1 Samuel 30. (more…)

Economic Recession and the House Built on the Rock

(For a version of this devotion that is easier to print, see this link.)

In a speech on the economy this week, President Obama quoted from Matthew 7, Jesus’ closing words in the Sermon on the Mount. A house built on sand falls when the storms come, but the house built on the rock stands. He used this picture to contend that we must build our economic house on a solid foundation. While those from different political ideologies will disagree about whether or not the president’s economic policies provide a solid or shaky foundation for future economic growth, all will agree that our economy needs to be built on rock, not on shifting sands.

But Jesus is talking about something much more important than the US economy. He’s talking about whether or not you enter the kingdom of heaven – that is, whether you rejoice with Him or you suffer apart from Him for all eternity.

Consider the verses immediately prior to Jesus’ story about the two houses: (more…)