The Works of God

Cure Magazine is a free magazine and website for those dealing with cancer.  They describe themselves as “combining science with humanity, CURE makes cancer understandable.”  We’ve received it for nearly five years, and it frequently has articles that are useful and helpful.

Recently, though, they explored the issue of faith and its role in the lives of cancer patients and survivors.

It reflected the culture’s understanding of religion:

• People with ‘faith’ were treated respectfully, but God was referenced generically or as a higher power.
• There was not one mention of the conflicting truth-claims of different religions.
• There was not one mention of Jesus.
• Religion is just one ‘frame,’ and the frame you choose “matters less than the opportunity to find a safe place to go inward and see what is in your heart – what truly matters to you.”

Contrast that with how Joni Eareckson Tada has been communicating about her new issue with cancer, including this encouraging news from yesterday:

Joni’s surgery was completed successfully yesterday evening, and she is resting comfortably, preparing to begin the rest of her course of treatment in the next few days,” Mazza said. “She is appreciative of all the prayers on her and her husband Ken’s behalf and is grateful to God for His sustaining grace and extra measure of strength during this time.

She has Stage II cancer and will require chemotherapy.  Please continue to pray for her.

Her journey with cancer is new.  But her message about God and his sovereignty remains the same:

Of course, I believe that God can and does heal and I covet your prayers to that end. Most of all, please pray that God will pour out grace-upon-grace on Ken and me. We’ll be posting regular updates on “Joni’s Corner” here on our website – also posted here you will find an article called “Don’t Waste Your Cancer” by John Piper and David Powlison, both of whom are cancer survivors. I can’t begin to describe how encouraged I’ve been just reading their insights – I’m sure you’ll say the same after you read it. We join you in resting in the assurance of Psalm 62:5-6, “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.”

Note the differences between how Cure Magazine deals with faith and Joni’s response to her cancer diagnosis, even in the above paragraph:

• God is personal and powerful.
• We look outside ourselves for comfort and meaning – to God and to his word.
• We can find encouragement from the experiences of others who are anchored in the word.
• Joni doesn’t mention Jesus here (but often elsewhere!); John Piper and David Powlison certainly do in Don’t Waste Your Cancer.

Faith in Jesus is wonderful.  Faith in faith is less than useless; it will destroy.  Joni knows that, so she helps us by being clear on who God is rather than offering a generic statement about faith.

I’ll let Pastor John and David Powlison have the last word, from Don’t Waste Your Cancer:

6. You will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.

John Piper: It is not wrong to know about cancer. Ignorance is not a virtue. But the lure to know more and more and the lack of zeal to know God more and more is symptomatic of unbelief. Cancer is meant to waken us to the reality of God. It is meant to put feeling and force behind the command, “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). It is meant to waken us to the truth of Daniel 11:32, “The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action.” It is meant to make unshakable, indestructible oak trees out of us: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:2). What a waste of cancer if we read day and night about cancer and not about God.

David Powlison: What is so for your reading is also true for your conversations with others. Other people will often express their care and concern by inquiring about your health. That’s good, but the conversation easily gets stuck there. So tell them openly about your sickness, seeking their prayers and counsel, but then change the direction of the conversation by telling them what your God is doing to faithfully sustain you with 10,000 mercies. Robert Murray McCheyne wisely said, “For every one look at your sins, take ten looks at Christ.” He was countering our tendency to reverse that 10:1 ratio by brooding over our failings and forgetting the Lord of mercy. What McCheyne says about our sins we can also apply to our sufferings. For every one sentence you say to others about your cancer, say ten sentences about your God, and your hope, and what he is teaching you, and the small blessings of each day. For every hour you spend researching or discussing your cancer, spend 10 hours researching and discussing and serving your Lord. Relate all that you are learning about cancer back to him and his purposes, and you won’t become obsessed.

Lord, please, let none of us waste what you have given us, for your glory and for our good!

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I’m glad to introduce you to another dad from Bethlehem today, Chris Nelson.  If you are fortunate to have a copy of Just the Way I Am, you can see Chris with his oldest boy on page 45.

I could say a lot about this man who I deeply respect, but I’ll just share this one fact about his family.  He and Katie adopted Andrew and then learned about his significant disabilities.  That was a hard blow. A few years later, with the full knowledge about what could happen, they adopted AGAIN, trusting God to provide all they would need.  Today they also have a third son God gave them through their own pregnancy.

In other words, God has called him and sustains him through hard things.  Thank you, Chris, for writing today.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The depth of human depravity is readily apparent when we are “me” centered rather than God-centered.  When the pursuit of personal happiness trumps the pursuit of holiness.  When we are so busy pursuing our sin-saturated mud puddles that we neglect to even consider what it might mean to embrace God’s offer of an eternal holiday at the sea.

On June 8 it was reported in a story on startribune.com that a Colorado woman was accused of killing her 6 month old baby.  Her motive?  “She believed the boy was autistic and thought his condition would ruin her life.”

She killed her own baby, knitted together in her womb by her Sovereign and Loving Creator, because she thought he might cramp her style.  She reportedly considered taking her own life instead, but didn’t want to unduly burden her husband with the child.  That’s chilling.  That’s real.  That’s the overflow of the human heart un-broken and un-repentant over sin, and un-surrendered to the restraining and sustaining and transforming mercy and grace of God as revealed in Christ Jesus.

As I reflected on this story, and my own struggle to mortify my sin as it is daily revealed to me through the gift of a mentally disabled son, Pastor John’s word from his sermon Sustained by Sovereign Grace-Forever, came to mind:

Not grace to bar what is not bliss,
Nor flight from all distress, but this:
The grace that orders our trouble and pain,
And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.

True and abiding joy isn’t in being burden-less.  It is in being upheld and transformed through the burden by the grace of God.  It is, when facing often weighty temptations to wallow in despair and anger and self pity, to repent afresh of our sin and gaze up from the foot of the cross to marvel at the one who paid our debt, and to freshly turn our focus to the risen Lord and His purposes, rather than our pathetic pursuits of momentary and fleeting escape from hard things.

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My google reader pointed me to the national gathering of denomination with ‘Reformed’ in its name that is meeting this week.  Part of the national gathering included a report of  their disability ministry council and its strategies and desired outcomes by 2013.

It was boring.

I don’t mean that as an indictment on their work at all.  I’ve done it myself; I’ve fallen into that same trap of feeling like the group I’m involved in needs to produce outcomes of significance, with time lines and measurements of progress.

And most of the time, when I visit denominational websites or read their papers on disability ministry, I end up with very little I can actually sink my teeth into with regards to the real issues in our church.

Let me repeat – I’m glad people care about this issue and are willing to put the time in.  Without meeting any of those volunteers who served on that disability ministry council, I know they deeply desire something better for the churches in their denomination with regards to people with disabilities.

But the end result is pronouncements about numbers and activities that have almost nothing to do with the life of a particular church, and even less so to do with individual people in those churches.

There was one interesting thing embedded in the council’s report: a story about a church plant specifically for people with disabilities in an area that included a number of group homes serving adults with disabilities.

Not to read too much into it, but I think they did two things right in creating that church:  1) They had a real need in front of them; they listened to the passion of a mother with an adult son with disabilities who had never had a good church experience, and 2) they went ahead and did something about it, without waiting for the denomination’s disability ministry council to lead the way.

I’m probably biased because that is how things have gone at Bethlehem with our little ministry.  A family shows up, and we try to figure out how to serve them.  Sometimes it goes really well from the beginning.  Sometimes the road is very difficult, and nothing seems to work.  God is continually humbling and holding us up at the same time.

In the end, I don’t want to be too hard on that denomination because at least they have a disability ministry council, which shows their concern for the issue.  The denomination that Bethlehem belongs to has exactly zero documents on this subject at the moment, and certainly no councils, task forces or committees.  At this moment, I must admit almost no desire to encourage them to do otherwise or get involved even if they called for the formation of their own council.  Which again speaks to my own biases about how I think things get accomplished!

If Converge/BGC were to call for such a council, would you serve on it?

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