Missions, Abortion, Starvation, … and Revival
If you walk into the front room of our house, you will see a poster that I made on a piece of cardboard. Most of the poster consists of a full page newspaper add for Sofa Mart that I saved from 1998. It says, “What Are You Passionate About? For Italian’s (sic) It’s Soccer And Fine Leather Sofas!” Pictured is an older man with a soccer ball and a boy with an Italian flag both sitting on a fine leather sofa with several people standing around the sofa waving Italian flags. That ad has made me sad whenever I’ve looked at it over the last ten years.
On the poster I have written an answer to Sofa Mart’s question: “For our family it is JESUS!” Then there are four pictures: 1) a picture our family, 2) a picture of a sea of Muslims circling the Kaaba, 3) a picture of two bony, famished, Africa kids with hands outstretched, and 4) a picture of the remains of a first trimester baby killed in the womb. The unstated implication is that loving Jesus is, to a large extent, manifest in practical acts of loving “the least of these” His brethren (Matthew 25:31-46) and, in general, obeying His commands (John 14:21).
Why these issues specifically? Why, if you browse this blog and this site do you see so often the repeated themes of abortion, Christ-centered true-gospel proclaiming missions, and sacrificial financial giving to those who most desperately need it? After a bit of self-examination, I believe that the common theme is that I see the issues of weightiest significance to be those with the most profound life and death implications.
It seems to me that if we have received the free, undeserved, and sacrificial love of Christ, and thus had our hearts opened to love others likewise, then the horrors of people dying from starvation, and the horrors of helpless babies being killed for their fathers’ (and mothers’) convenience will both move our hearts and move us to action. Arguably even more significant are the billions who are going to their eternal grave without the sole source of hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ ever reaching their societies.
But there is another issue of life and death overarching these others and uniting them even more deeply. It is the issue of whether the professing church of Christ possesses true vitality or just a dead body surrounded by an external shell of apparent vitality:
I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. (Revelation 3:1-3)
If we harden our hearts in order to feel better about spending more on luxury items for ourselves than on helping starving kids, then as they die the vitality of our spiritual fervor dies right along with them. If we quench the prompting of the Holy Spirit in us to speak and act out against the slaughter of over 3,300 babies per day in America alone, then in the very act of embracing death we take it into ourselves. If we allow ourselves to see the sacrifices necessary for the evangelization of the billions living amongst the unreached nations as too big an inconvenience to our current lifestyle, then by ignoring their death we ignore the means God has given for preserving our own lives (John 12:25).
If there is one manifestation of death that breaks my heart more than parents killing their babies in the womb, children dying from starvation, and pagans dying without the hope of Christ in the gospel, it is the professing church of Christ killing herself by accounting these other deaths to be too much an inconvenience and hence looking away.
Sacrificial missions, sacrificial anti-abortion activism, and sacrificial financial giving to those most desperate meld together in my mind as practically one inseparable issue because much more than I long to see the hungry fed, the babies rescued, and the nations reached, I long to see the Bride of Christ alive. It is only a living church that can prayerfully work to accomplish any of these other things. And more importantly, it is only a living church that can worship the Living Lord, much less worship Him passionately, which is the ultimate aim of all things.