America’s Ugliest Export

Here’s a video from Christianity Today about the prosperity gospel in Africa.

(If you are viewing this in a feed reader, you may have to click through to the blog to see the video.)

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Are missions and the doctrine of election at odds? I don’t think so.

Some missionaries have said that if the doctrine of election were true, they would never have become a missionary. Well, I say, “I am a missionary because the doctrine of election is true.”

Where do I find this in the Bible?  In Acts 18, Paul is in Corinth.  You would not have found a more pagan city on the planet than Corinth in the first century.  Yet Jesus appeared to Paul in a vision and said, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people” (vv. 9-10).

Paul’s preaching didn’t elect people to salvation.  God elected them and the true sheep responded to the gospel message.  Remember Jesus’ words: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold.  I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice” (John 10:16).

Jesus does the bringing.  You do the preaching.  People will respond.

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Related Posts:

• Unconditional Election
• Election is for Humility
• God’s Sovereign Choice in Salvation

Teaching the Bible at Beam

One of the great (new) joys I have here in South Africa is to teach the Bible along with my friend Rylan Reed to four guys who work at Beam Africa, a local development center for township children, here in Pretoria.  Last week we talked about new birth and what God has done to make us dead sinners alive in Christ.  This week, we discussed grace, faith, and good works from Ephesians 2, James 2, and Abraham’s life.

Here are some pictures from our time together today:

Question of the day: “How do we know if someone has true faith?”

From the left: Ludwig, Brian, and Ronney.

I promise you I’m talking, not sneezing.

Rylan talking about the relationship between faith and works in James 2 (the guy on the right is Blessing).

God Works on His Own Scale

We just had eleven American students come to Joburg for a month long mission trip.  Perhaps the most important thing they learned is that God works in his own time and for his own purposes in the salvation of people.

It would be a delight to tell you that we saw a hundred conversions to Christ in a month.  It would also be a lie.  Let me tell you how many we saw after literally hundreds of gospel conversations.

Zero.

In The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, Don Carson provides some comforting words for guys like me who lead mission projects like the one we just had.  During a panel discussion, he said:

There are people who went to Korea in 1900, planted churches, and saw the church grow to a quarter of the world’s evangelical population today.  There are people who went to Japan about the same time — and no place on God’s green earth did the church grow more slowly than in Japan.  What are you doing to do?  Say, “All the ones who went to Korea are spiritual — particularly loved of God?”  The ones in Japan aren’t blessed of God?  God works on another scale.

South Africa is a de-churched culture on the brink of European-like post-modernism.  The soil is hard, and cultivating takes work.  Seeds have been planted.  And if they grow, God is glorious.  If they don’t sprout anything, God is still just as glorious.

Back to Normal

Our five week summer project in Johannesburg finishes up today.  The students will be headed back to the states this evening and we’ll be on our way back to Pretoria to start the final 97 day plunge of this 11 month trip.  It has been an exciting past month and the Lord, as always, did wonderful things.  I’ll share more in the next few days.

peace,
james

South Africa, Sex, and HIV

Here in South Africa, the Universities of Joburg and Pretoria are in their last week of exams, so we are taking advantage of the free time by spending the whole week at Beam Africa Development Center training the teens on abstinence and HIV/AIDS prevention.

I’ve never taught a sex education class before, and this is about ten times harder because the kids aren’t native American English speakers and few have parents to discipline them well.  We have to be very deliberate in our choice of words.  We have to be lovingly stern as we call them to behave properly.  And, of course, since they are still teenagers, it’s inevitable that we get a few laughs whenever we use the phrase “sexual fluids.”  Despite the hardships of communication, it’s such a joy to minister truth and love to these kids.  They are least of these, the overlooked, the downtrodden.  By God’s grace, we are trying to help.

Our hope is to instill values that will help these kids make good choices — indeed, the best choice — in order to avoid this continental killer.  People get HIV/AIDS mostly from sexual activity.  Many children are born with it, yes, but most Africans who are contracting the disease now aren’t getting it from drug needles or helping their friend who was cut on the arm. They are getting it from recreational, illicit sex.

Here’s some stats on HIV/AIDS for South Africa:

• Almost 71% of deaths between ages 15 and 49 in South Africa are because of HIV/AIDS.
• In South Africa, over 18% of people ages 15 and 49 are infected with HIV/AIDS.
• In the province I live in, Gauteng, over 30% of people are infected with HIV/AIDS.
• In 2007, it was reported that nearly 5,700,000 South Africans had HIV/AIDS.  That is more more than any other country in the world.  Nearly one in six people in the world with HIV/AIDS are South African.
• Five of the top six countries with the highest percentage of adults infected with HIV/AIDS border South Africa (1. Swaziland, 2. Botswana, 3. Lesotho, 4. South Africa, 5. Namibia, 6. Zimbabwe).

The most effective way to avoid HIV/AIDS, or any other sexually transmitted disease, is abstinence until marriage.  Everyone knows this.  It’s the only fool-proof way.  No one can question that.  But it isn’t widely taught — not even here.

It’s been concerning to me to hear our kids answer, when we ask how to prevent HIV, “Condoms.”  Earlier today, during our class, I said, “Condoms can, and do, break.”  One of the older boys looked at me and said, “Use two condoms.”  The truth is, I said, even two can break.

This whole battle isn’t about finding better sexual protection.  That will only give people more excuses to live out their fleshly pleasures and have multiple partners.  It’s not just simply telling people to wait until marriage.  That will only create sexually repressed people who take out their anger and impatience in other areas of life.

The battle is a fight for true worship.  We must point people to worshiping something that will give them a greater pleasure, a deeper delight, a more fulfilling satisfaction than sex.   The highest pleasure, delight, and satisfaction is God himself.  Pray that these kids, South Africans, and potential and actual HIV/AIDS victims all over the world would worship the Creator, not creation.  When we worship Jesus as supreme, our lives, priorities, practices, and decisions tend to fall into place.

Even Judas Was a Missionary

It will forever be a mystery as to how Judas could hang out with and be taught by Jesus for three years and then turn around and betray him.  Judas should be an example to us that even the most “spiritual” people might not really be spiritual on the inside.  In The Cost of Discipleship, writing about Jesus sending out the disciples in Matthew 10, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said,

No power in the world could have united these men for a common task, save the call of Jesus.  But that call transcended all their previous divisions, and established a new and steadfast fellowship in Jesus.  Even Judas went forth to the Christ-work, and the fact that he did so will always be a dark riddle and an awful warning (p. 205).

We need to heed the warning of Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:5 when he said, “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.  Test yourselves.  Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you fail to meet the test!”

I Want To Hear a Better Excuse

Even in South Africa, reasons for not loving the church — or ever going to a church — are the same as in America.  I talked to four male students yesterday at the University of Johannesburg and I did a “man survey” with them.  One of the questions was, “As a man, what would you change about a church so you could say, ‘I would go there’?”  All four of them answered, “I want church to be less judgmental.  I don’t want to hear the pastor tell me to repent.”

They think the church is judgmental.  Perfect.  They should join us cause they’ll fit right in.  Their statement that church is judgmental is, in itself, a judgmental statement.  Furthermore, their desire for the church to stop calling people to repent is their own call for the church to repent!

The church is a place for losers, dropouts, failures, deadbeats, and outcasts.  Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy.  He came for the sinner, not the righteous.  Pray that South Africans, and Americans, would feel, by God’s grace, their need for Jesus’ saving work in their lives.  Then, they’ll be able to join the rest of us hypocrites as we seek to pursue Christ together.

‘Nuisance’ Suffering Still Builds Endurance

One of the main lessons I’ve been learning while in South Africa is that suffering that seems to be a nuisance is still building endurance in my heart.  Most of the time, when I have to wait in line for a very long time, when my car breaks down, when communication is slow and sporadic, or when working with other ministries seems to handcuff me, I’d rather experience “true” Christian suffering than these annoyances.  To me, that would seem “more spiritual” or able to build me up more in Christ.

But the Lord has been reminding me that any kind of trial is either an opportunity to worship him or an idol.  If I worship Jesus, these mini-trials will build endurance, then character, and then hope (Rom. 5:3-5).  If I worship Jesus, these trials will produce steadfastness in faith (James. 1:2-4).  On the other hand, if I worship an idol (i.e. my agenda, punctuality, structure, details, etc.), then my heart grows hard, cold, unloving, and angry with God.

The apostle James says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.  And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).

Every kind of trail, great and small, can be fruitful.  The only question I need to ask is who am I worshiping during these trials: Jesus or myself?

Good Works is the Christian’s Symphony

Good works are the melodies that non-Christians hear.  Nearly all of the time, they cannot read our sheet music.  They can’t understand what the notes and chords mean, but they know a good song when they experience it.