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The Elisha Foundation is growing! Please pray.

February 4, 2011 by John Knight

While I was at the Desiring God Conference for Pastors, another ministry I love made a significant announcement:

Beginning in April, The Elisha Foundation will welcome Justin Reimer as its first full-time executive director as they seek to take advantage of the opportunities God is placing in front of them.

This is very good news.  Justin (and his wife, Tamara) loves Jesus and the Bible, understands the needs of families experiencing disability, and puts together programs that bring families deeper into God’s word.  As we all know, there is plenty of work to be done on this issue of disability in the church. I’m grateful God has called Justin to pursue it full time.

Please pray for them.  Their financial need is significant, as is the need for God to provide wisdom in how to best grow The Elisha Foundation.  And please pray that God would grant them unprecedented impact on a global movement “to equip these special families for a more intimate faith in Christ, passionately lived out with love.”

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Larry and Lisa’s story

February 3, 2011 by John Knight

Dianne is a fan of Lisa Jamieson (well, so am I, but Dianne has actually met Lisa) and recommended this 25 minute audio interview Lisa did with her husband, Larry.  I’m happy to recommend it to you.  You can also find it here.

It is a hard story. And one that points to trusting in a living, all-powerful God.

If you don’t have 25 minutes to listen to the entire interview, forward to the 20:09 mark.  Lisa and Larry deal with the question, were you angry with God?  Their answers are insightful, and they offer helpful scriptures!

Thank you, Lisa and Larry, for sharing your story with us, living ‘as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing (2 Corinthians 6:10)’ and pointing us to Jesus!

More resources can be found at their ministry, Walk Right In.

Posted in Scripture, Special Events | 1 Comment »

God’s gentle rebukes lead to worship

February 2, 2011 by John Knight

Mid-afternoon Tuesday at the Conference for Pastors I checked on some donation numbers and was discouraged at the lack of progress on a campaign we are running. I definitely had a grumbling heart.

As I looked at those numbers and considered next steps, I’m told someone wants to see me.

I’m introduced to a wonderful, God-centered man.  He’s going through deep waters in his children and grandchildren – disability, terminal illness, hardship upon hardship.  But he also had a sweet confidence that God is, in fact, sovereign and good.  He was praising God for all the good he was seeing in the midst of so much difficulty.  He was the very example of ‘as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.’

He had heard through some friends of mine that I had experienced some similar things and wanted to meet me.

Two things came to mind after we talked and prayed together:

  1. How foolish I was to grumble, which is nothing more than disbelief.  God knows what we need financially; he will help us and will provide what we need.
  2. In the very second I was grumbling, he was bringing me a brother who would point me back to the source of all comfort and grace.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude after talking with this brother and deeply, deeply blessed.  I don’t deserve such mercy or grace.  I deserved discipline, but God chose instead to point me back to him.  I am very grateful that God extended it so kindly!

Posted in commentary | 2 Comments »

Reminder: Trust God in Everything – Jerry Bridges

February 1, 2011 by John Knight

A pitfall to trusting God, which we are prone to fall into, is to turn to God in trust in the greater crisis experience of life while seeking to work through the minor difficulties ourselves.  A disposition to trust in ourselves is part of our sinful nature.  It sometimes takes a major crisis, or at least a moderate one, to turn us toward the Lord.  A mark of Christian maturity is to continually trust the Lord in the minutiae of daily life.  If we learn to trust God in the minor adversities, we will be better prepared to trust him in the major ones.

Jerry Bridges in Trusting God, excerpted in Be Still My Soul, edited by Nancy Guthrie, p. 112.

Here’s a great 27 second video Jerry Bridges did for Desiring God last fall.  It highlights why we can trust in God through Jesus Christ:

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Pray for your pastor today

January 31, 2011 by John Knight

Today begins the 2011 Desiring God Conference for Pastors.  I love this gathering of faithful leaders.

This is my sixth Pastors Conference, and my fourth as a member of the staff of Desiring God.  If things progress like in years past, these things will happen:

  1. I will meet men dealing with such extraordinarily hard things in their churches, they live with constant discouragement and temptation to quit.
  2. I will meet men who are experiencing spiritual change in their own lives they never would have predicted – and this change is frequently coming years after they first began pastoring.
  3. I will meet some young man who makes the decision to pursue seminary based on what God is doing in his life through this conference.
  4. God will bring some man dealing with disability, either in his own family or in his church, directly to me without either of us knowing it until we meet.  In other words, he didn’t know about Bethlehem’s disability ministry or me or The Works of God, and I didn’t know anything about him.

Conferences like these are really important to those of us dealing with disability, and it is one reason I come back to our supporting our pastors in prayer and encouragement so often.  Not only does their being grounded in the truth of God’s word help us in our own lives, but leaders with that kind of affection for God and his word also tend to be more supportive of initiatives like disability ministry.

In fact, I can point to one church with a thriving disability ministry that had, at best, lukewarm support from their pastor.  All of the rest had clear, vocal, personal support from the lead pastor and usually the elders as well.

So, please pray for your pastor – especially if he is lukewarm to disability ministry – that he may be gripped by a big view of God and his sovereignty over all things.  And please pray for the gathering of pastors these next three days as well.

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“That light is eternal, it will last from now until the end of time.” Pastor Siud

January 30, 2011 by John Knight

This video isn’t directly related to disability, but it is so wonderful I couldn’t keep it myself.

The Kimyal Tribe of Papua, Indonesia received the New Testament in their own language in 2010.  This video documents when that Bible was delivered to them.  To see such passion for the Word is humbling – and wonderfully exciting!

Let us pray for more and more such videos as more languages are translated and more people have access to the word of God in their own language.

Rosa Kidd (on this video) and her husband Orin will also be at the Desiring God Pastors Conference!  Please continue to pray for the pastors who are coming.

Posted in News, Prayer Requests | 2 Comments »

“How Jesus Helped His Disciples Increase Their Faith” – from Pastor John

January 29, 2011 by John Knight

Dianne and I were reviewing some of what is happening around us the other evening.  It seems like nearly everyone we know is dealing with something really big and really hard – personally, professionally, ministerially, involving health or spouse or children or finances or systems or the consequences of somebody else’s sin.

Some are doubting their faith.  How to respond?

The paragraph below from Pastor John was helpful for me.  Luke 17:6 can be misapplied, even when intended as a comfort or as advice.  But for those hearing that verse it can feel more like an indictment against them – ‘you need to have faith like a mustard seed!’  The answer isn’t more faith and it certainly isn’t telling them simply to have faith (adding guilt on top of doubt).

Luke 17:5-6:  The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

He strengthens our faith by telling us in verse 6 that the crucial issue in accomplishing great things to advance the Kingdom of God is not the quantity of our faith, but the power of God.  He says, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”  By referring to the tiny mustard seed after being asked about increased faith, He deflects attention away from the quantity of faith to the object of faith (emphasis mine).  God moves mulberry trees.  And it does not depend decisively on the quantity of our faith, but on His power and wisdom and love. In knowing this, we are helped not to worry about our faith and are inspired to trust God’s free initiative and power.

John Piper, Pierced by the Word: Thirty-One Meditations for Your Soul, p. 99.

May we all remain fixed on the object of faith and the enduring hope we can have in His power and wisdom and love.

Posted in Quotes, Scripture | 2 Comments »

Pastors are gathering next week. Please pray!

January 28, 2011 by John Knight

On Monday the Desiring God Conference for Pastors begins.  You can get more information about this conference and the speakers here.

The theme:  The Powerful Life of the Praying Pastor: In His Room, with the Family, Among the People of God.

When pastors have a really big view of God as sovereign over all things, when they love the Word of God and preach out of their knowledge AND affections, when they pray earnestly to God who has promised to supply every need, their people are better prepared for disability!

Not just the families experiencing disability – everybody has been prepared to engage this issue, sometimes through radical acts of service in love!

Please, pray for these 1,600+ pastors who are gathering.  May God raise up hundreds more churches impacting thousands more families like ours with the joy of God’s goodness and sovereignty over disability.

Posted in News, Prayer Requests | Leave a Comment »

Wrestling with an Angel as a discussion tool

January 27, 2011 by John Knight

Several mothers of children with disabilities from Bethlehem gathered at our home last week.  Caryn Turner organizes these regular gatherings, which rotate to different homes.

For this gathering she used Greg Lucas’ book, Wrestling with an Angel, to help guide and generate discussion.  Dianne (who has read the book) was struck again by this statement:

I hear religious-minded people say all the time with good intentions, “God will never place a burden on you so heavy that you cannot carry it.”

Really?

My experience is that God will place a burden on you so heavy that you cannot possibly carry it alone. He will break your back and your will. He will buckle your legs until you fall flat beneath the crushing weight of your load. All the while He will walk beside you waiting for you to come to the point where you must depend on Him.

(That quote is part of the first chapter, which can be read in its entirety here)

That may not sound like good news at first – but it is actually the best news there has ever been.

Read the chapter, then buy and read the book.  Especially if you are a man.  You may never think about God the same way again.

Posted in Book Commentary, Quotes | Leave a Comment »

More from Brian Skotko on genetic testing

January 26, 2011 by John Knight

From “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?” by Dorothy Roberts in Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2009, v. 34, no. 4, p. 792:

Brian Skotko’s survey of 985 mothers who received postnatal (after birth) diagnoses of Down syndrome for their children similarly discovered that many of the mothers were chastised by health care professionals for not undergoing prenatal testing (emphasis mine):

“Right after [my child] was born, the doctor flat out told my husband that this could have been prevented or discontinued at an earlier stage of the pregnancy,” wrote one mother who had a child with DS in 2000. A mother who had a child in 1993 recalled, “I had a resident in the recovery room when I learned that my daughter had DS. When I started to cry, I overheard him say, ‘What did she expect? She refused prenatal testing.’” . . . Another mother reported, from her experience in 1997, “The attending neonatologist, rather than extending some form of compassion, lambasted us for our ignorance in not doing prior testing and for bringing this burden to society—noting the economical, educational, and social hardships he would bring.” Regarding a postnatal visit, a mother who had a child in 1992 wrote, “[My doctor] stressed ‘next time’ the need for amniocentesis so that I could ‘choose to terminate.’” (2005, 70–71)

As a result of such pressure, many pregnant women now view genetic testing as a requirement of responsible mothering (Harmon 2007).

Again we must be clear: there is nothing wrong with receiving genetic testing for the purpose of serving the needs of the child.  What is assumed above, however, is that when an ‘anomaly’ is discovered, the child will be aborted.

Let us individually work to change those assumptions, for the sake of the child, the parents, and the medical community that includes too many members who have lost their way.

Posted in commentary, News | 6 Comments »

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