Free to Serve

Sermon Study Guide 1 Sam 8-12

I missed last week's sermon study guide for 1 Sam 4-7, but here it is for 8-12.  Download 1Sam8.1-12.25 MVBC SSG. 

As I head into another week, I'm very grateful for the reminder of the gospel in 1 Sam. 12:22, "For the LORD will not forsake his people, for his great name's sake, because it has pleased the LORD to make a people for himself."

The Need for Prayer

C. H. Spurgeon pastored roughly 5,500 souls. He was overwhelmed, "I find I have enough upon me to crush me unless heaven sustains me," he said. He loved to preach and to teach, but it was hard.

Very few of us are called to shepherd that many folks. But everyone from the pastor to the Sunday school teacher knows what it is like to stand before a group of people, feed them the Word of God, and feel responsibility for their souls. Whether it is a class of 5 or a church of 500, teachers need the prayers of the people they serve. For those of us who teach, much of our "success" is dependent upon our faithfulness and our preparation. But so much more is dependent upon prayer. Spurgeon felt this acutely:

You must uphold me by your prayers. If I have useful to you in any measure, pray for me; it is the greatest kindness you can do me. If the word as spoken by these lips has been a means of grace to your children, plead for me that others of the young may be brought to Jesus by my teaching. If you would find my ministry more profitable to your souls, pray for me still more; and let it not be said of your minister that you do not profit by his preaching, and that you have not, becasue you ask not. Beloved, let us wrestle in prayer; for untold blessings are to be had for the asking.

Foster Tales II

As I shared earlier, we said goodbye to our foster child, Teresa, on Good Friday of 2013. Having her was a painful yet wonderful experience. Here is a sample of the lessons we learned and how we are going about thinking through next steps.

*****

Our Lessons 

Having Teresa in our home for so long, and having to say goodbye, was the most difficult and wonderful thing we have experienced as a family. Here are some lessons learned, in no particular order, which may help explain what God taught us through it all. 

1. Love is a choice. I was raised in a world which taught me that love is a feeling, that it is something you can’t control. If the chemistry is right a man and a woman somehow fall in love and get married. And if something goes wrong and the love dies, the husband and wife part ways. But love isn’t like that at all. Love is a choice. This is a simple reflection on how God loves us. When we are pointed to the love of God the Son, we look not toward his feelings for us but his actions toward us: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). 

When Teresa entered our home for the first time, she was already an adorable bundle of energy. We didn’t know if we would have her for one month or one year. But we were called to love her. She needed to be loved. She needed to experience the affection of a mother and a father—even temporary ones like us! I certainly didn’t feel the love for her, at least at first. Thoughts swirled through my mind like, “How can I love her when I may have to give her up so soon?” I grappled with the reality that love is a choice. I wasn’t to love her because she was mine, or because she was easy to raise, or because she could give me love in return. I loved her because she needed to be loved.

2. God’s love is beautiful. We went into foster care expecting to provide mercy for Teresa. We wanted to rescue her—even if only for a season—from a tumultuous life and provide her with a safe and loving home, for as long as she needed it. We quickly learned that our patience would be tested. Teresa was always jumping—but not always in the direction we wanted. Travel between our home and visits with her parents left her confused and, at times, angry. She was not always easy to parent, and she was not always easy to love. 

As Deana and I reflected on the challenge of caring for her, we were reminded of just how loving and merciful God has been to us. God loved us when there was nothing lovable about us, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). And “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). By folding Teresa into our lives, we learned something of the tender mercy of God who adopted us as his children simply because he chose to. His love is beautiful. It is so beautiful, in fact, that it makes the cost of being a foster care family seem so very small. I love the way pastor John Piper put it when he expressed his delight in seeing families at Bethlehem Baptist embrace ministries of adoption: 

Few things bring me more satisfaction than seeing a culture of adoption flourish at our church, Bethlehem Baptist. It means our people are looking to their heavenly Father for their joy rather than rejecting the stress and cost of children in order to maximize their freedom and comforts. When people embrace the pain and joy of children rather than using abortion or birth control simply to keep children away, the worth of Christ shines more visibly. Adoption is as far as possible from the mindset that rejects children as an intrusion.

3. Foster parents are parents.  Parenthood is about more than biology. Our prayer and our goal was always that Teresa be reunited with her biological mother or father, assuming that they would provide her with a safe and loving home. However, that doesn’t change the fact that for sixteen months, Deana really was a mother to her. 

Consider 1 Kings 3. Two women who lived in the same house approached Solomon the king with a dilemma. Each had a baby and no husband, when one of the babies died. Now both women were claiming to be the mother of the child who remained alive. There was no DNA testing, so what was Solomon to do? He instructed the child to be cut in half and shared equally among them! The true mother cried out against this horrific decision and urged the king to let the other woman have the baby. Solomon, however, handed her the child. The king, of course, had no way of knowing who the biological mother really was. But this he knew—the true mother would do what was best for the child. Foster moms (and, for that matter, foster dads) may only be temporary. But that doesn’t change the fact that they really are parents. Their willingness to put that child’s interests above their own is the only qualification they need.

4. The church is a family. When Teresa joined the Menikoffs, she became a part of our church. The entire congregation loved her, prayed for her, and welcomed her with open arms each and every week. There are so many ways to serve a foster family. Her teachers greeted her with enthusiastic smiles. Several members went through a background check so that they would be cleared by the county to babysit. One family even went through the process of having a home study done so that Teresa could be left at their house. Many more people regularly asked how we were doing, and let us know of their support. We speak a lot about the church as a family, but having Teresa gave us a front row seat.

One of the greatest lessons we learned about the church as a family is how much we needed it. We simply could not have cared for Teresa on our own. Both Deana and I are independent. It is hard for us to ask for help. The demands of navigating the foster care system with its restrictions on babysitting and travel left us in great need. We were reminded of what we already know: the church is a family, and we need the family. The members of the body weren’t just serving Teresa; they were serving us.

5. All parents are called to give up their children. After raising Teresa for sixteen months, it really felt like she was ours. We knew with our head that this wasn’t the case, but apparently our head had stopped communicating with our heart. In the beginning loving her felt like a choice, and it was. But joy followed that choice. She was a member of our family. We knew she would leave us eventually, and that is what we were preparing for. We wanted to bless her biological parents by giving her the best home possible while she was with us. However, it seemed like “eventually” would never come. 

Then, one night, we received a call. She would be moving in with her father in one week. Those last few days we realized that, in a sense, all parents are called to give up their children. We raise them to let them go. We prepare them to make wise decisions in the waters of a world that are difficult to navigate. With foster care, you just have to be prepared to say goodbye sooner. It helps to remember that, ultimately, Teresa didn’t belong to us, and our biological children don’t really even belong to us. They were not made in our image, but they were made in the image of God. They belong to him. We try to take good care of them for as long as we have them, and that’s all we can do. 

6. Saying goodbye to a foster child is traumatic. We planned as best as we could for her departure, but there was no way to be ready for the silence that flooded our home the morning she left. A few weeks before, I was taking a walk with a friend who told me that losing a foster child was a little bit like experiencing a death. I looked at him incredulously. How could he really equate sending a foster child to go back to her biological family with death? But he was right. Obviously, if she had been removed after a shorter period of time, it would not have been so hard. But sixteen months was long enough for us feel the sting of her absence. 

7. The gospel really is enough. I have mentioned already that the gospel motivated us to become part of the foster care system. That’s not to say that I believe everyone should be a foster parent or pursue adoption. It is simply to say that God’s saving work in our lives is what gives us a desire to serve him, to serve our church, and where the opportunities arise, to serve those outside the church. But the gospel did more than motivate us toward foster care; it sustained us through foster care, even to the point of saying goodbye to Teresa. 

Because of the gospel we are convinced that all of our needs have been taken care of by God. We never have to worry because our biggest enemy (sin) has been put to death (Galatians 5:24). And we never have to fear because our future is secure (Hebrews 12:22-24). The trials in this life are minor in comparison to what we faced (the wrath of God for our sins) and trivial in comparison to what we can expect to face (the perfect presence of a holy God who loves us). So whether it was the difficulty of learning how to manage life with a child who wasn’t truly our own, the uncertainty of not knowing how long she’d be with us, the reality that she was leaving, or facing the fact that she had left, God did not leave us alone. He prepared us to face these trials by reminding us that the most important work had been taken care of. Jesus bore the punishment that we deserved so that we could be free to live a life that pleases him. Now we are simply called to be faithful with the days before us, entrusting all the results to God. 

That’s why I say that the gospel really is enough. I’m thankful for the grace God gives his people to endure difficult things. And though I know that saying goodbye to a foster child is a small trial when set against the tragedies so many face, it was, nonetheless, our trial, and one we needed the Lord’s help to bear. 

Our Future

As best we can tell, Teresa is adjusting well. She is with her dad, she is near some extended biological family, and she is adjusting to life in a new home. For that we are very thankful. Though the story is not over, not every foster tale has such a promising ending. 

Even as I write these words, our family is praying about whether or not to see Teresa again. We want to do what is best for her. At two and a half she doesn’t understand deeply, and were we never to see her again she would eventually forget us. But it would please us to be part of her life in some form or fashion and perhaps even to be an encouragement to her family as well. We want dad to understand why we became foster parents, our love for Teresa, and our genuine desire to see him flourish as a parent. 

What will we do next? Time will tell. Our motivations have not changed. Stewardship, love of neighbor, and the gospel demands that we pour out our lives for Christ. We are not sure if that means becoming foster parents again, pursuing an adoption, or simply investing more of our time in our own extended family or as disciple-makers here at Mount Vernon and in our neighborhood. There is much good that can be done, and there are many ways to serve. We know service will look different from person to person, and we are using this break to figure out what it should look like, going forward, in our family. 

Meanwhile, we wouldn’t give up the past sixteen months for anything. A few nights after Teresa left, I asked my family a question: knowing what you know now, would you still have wanted Teresa to stay with us? Everyone said yes. We don’t know Teresa’s future, but we are grateful that she was with us for so long. Not only were we able to be family in her time of need, but we were able to share with her the gospel. Our heart was not only for her physical well-being, but her soul as well. As Dan Cruver so clearly stated: 

The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel, so that within that family, the world might witness a representation of God taking in and genuinely loving the helpless, the hopeless, and the despised.

May God give you a heart for the orphans—inside and outside the church.

 

Sermon Study Guide - 1 Samuel 1-3

Sunday morning, we began a 12 week series through 1 and 2 Samuel. I pray these study guides help you dig deeper into God's Word.

Download MVBC Sermon Study Guide (1Sam1.1-3.21)

Foster Tales I

For this month's Perspective, I decided to share my family's story about our experience with foster care. In this post, I want to summarize our story and share our motivations--why we decided to become foster parents. In an upcoming post I'll share some lessons we learned and lay out our future plans--as best we know them!

*****

On Good Friday my family and I said goodbye to a foster child who had been in our home for sixteen months. She came to us the first of December, 2011, when she was not quite a year and a half old. Teresa (not her real name) had already been in foster care more than once. Her parents were young, unmarried, and at the time neither was able to give her the home she needed. From the day she arrived, we prayed that her mom or dad would be able to care for her well so that she could be reunited with one of them. In the meantime, we wanted this to be her last foster home.

 

Sunday is for Everyday

In his great book, Engaging with God, David Peterson writes: The preaching of the gospel is designed to bring about a consecrated lifestye that will enable believers to glorify God, by word and deed, wherever and whenever they can. This view of worship highlights the importance of the family, the workplace and leisure activities as the sphere in which to work out the implications of a genuine relationship with God." 

In other words, Sunday is for everyday. As we gather as one people to hear God's Word, the Lord equips us to scatter and live that Word. It would be foolish to forsake that time. It's like saying, "I don't need food this week." But it woud be just as foolish come and let the good teaching you receive on Sunday go in one ear and out the other. What did Jesus say? "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 5:16).

Sunday is around the corner. Let's ready our hearts not only to receive teaching, but to live that teaching out, by God's grace, the rest of the week.

Are you squandering your life away?

Warning his audience about the coming Day of Judgment, Jesus said, "But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day will come upon you suddenly like a trap" (Luke 21:34, ESV).

A dissipated life is a life squandered by the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. But dissipation takes place when your primary committment, your first love, is to "make merry" as they used to say. So Jesus is telling us, "Beware, don't let your life be marked by squandering your time with pleasure and drink and anxiety over all that won't last because a day is coming when it will be obvious these things don't matter."

How can you tell if you are obeying Christ's command to "watch yourselves" or if you are squandering your life away? Take some time to answer the following questions:

1. Is personal pleasure (food, drink, entertainment, sports) more important to you than private devotion (disciplines of grace: Bible reading, prayer)?
2. Do you regularly confess your sins to the Lord, admitting your need for Christ to both forgive you for the ways you squander time and empower you to watch your life closely?
3. How often do you long for heaven, either because you feel weighed down by the sin in your own life or the sin in the world around you?
4. How often do you weep for the lost, burdened by the fact that without Christ they are pursuing worthless, dissipated lives?
5. Do you lean on the body of Christ to help you love the Lord (and not the world) with zeal?

My friend, Jesus died on the cross for sinners like us and he rose from the dead so that we could be confident that he is the Savior of all who repent and believe. Take his words to heart. Watch yourself. Pursue Christ prayerfully and passionately. Live for his glory and this day will most certainly not be squandered.

Sermon Study Guide - Jesus Wept

I preached this Sunday from John 11:1-37. It's an amazing passage about Jesus' great love for Martha and Mary and Lazarus. The topic is suffering. We learn in these verses that every believer, even in suffering, is in the hands of God.

If you'd like some help walking through this text with family and friends--or in your own quiet times, you can download a guide.

Download MVBC Sermon Study Guide (John11.1-37)

Sola Scriptura

The latest Perspective is out, and you can download it here. It includes a review of John MacAthur's book, The Gospel According to Jesus as well as the talk I gave on the sufficiency of Scripture at the Feed My Sheep conference. 

Sermon Study Guide - Mark 16

I was very grateful to be able to preach this past Sunday on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We explored the reality, the reason, and our response to the resurrection. My life forever changed when I believed that Jesus rose from the dead. I'm thankful for this life-giving faith. 

Here is a guide you can use in your quiet times, small groups, etc. 

Download MVBC Sermon Study Guide (Mark16)