Christianity

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Boundless Treasures– Philippians 1.1-5


As I prepared this study, I began by just meditating on each verse and asking myself questions about each of them. This weekend we began with a “big picture” view of the book; now we are going to begin breaking it down and getting to the meat of the text. I’m going to start by posting the observations I made and the questions those observations caused me to ask of myself. You can jot down these questions and answer them on here and in your notebook, or you can use them as a guide as you work through the text and ask yourself some tough questions. Please post your questions and your observations. Discuss as much or as little as you like for each section! I will post a chunk of chapter one each day this week, then we will pull back and review and do “big picture” reading on Saturday and Sunday. This will also give you a chance to catch up if you miss a day or if you want to go back and dig even deeper in a section.

Philippians 1.1-5

  1. Paul describes himself and Timothy as “servants of Christ Jesus.”
    1. What does it mean to be a servant of Christ?
    2. How does a human servant relate to her master?
    3. If someone were to watch you throughout the day, would she know you are a servant of Christ, or would she assume you are your own master?
    4. Some translations say they are “bond-servants” of Christ Jesus. This is a different term than just servant or slave. A bond servant is one who has been freed by his master, yet chooses to remain a servant of that person. This person voluntarily turns his will over to another. This idea of being a servant recurs throughout the book—Paul stresses humility over and over again in Philippians.
    5. He is writing to the “saints” at Philippi: saints or holy ones indicate a people who are set apart and pure. Am I set apart from the world? Do I look different from those around me? Where else does Paul talk about being “set apart”? Do some digging and look through some other books to learn more about what it means to be set apart for Christ.

  1. Paul’s greeting is standard for the time in which he was writing. But don’t overlook it as a “hi, how are ya?” statement. Grace and peace are two words that are rich in meaning and help us understand more of who we are as children of God. Use a concordance and a Bible dictionary (http://bible.crosswalk.com has a great concordance and Bible dictionary) and look up the terms grace and peace. What new insights about your relationship with God did you discover?

3-5. Paul says he is praying for them with joy and thanksgiving. This convicted and challenged me greatly. I don’t spend a lot of time just thanking God for the body of believers he has placed in my life.

a. Are you thankful for the body of Christ?

b. When you pray about people at church, is it with a spirit of thanksgiving, or is it complaining? Do you just pray to ask God to do things for people?

c. Think about your prayer time. What do you spend most of your time praying about? What would you like to pray about more? What would you like to pray about less?

5. Paul is thankful for their partnership or participation in the Gospel. This is the word koinonia, which we usually translate as fellowship. This word is more than partnership, because when we use a word like that, it’s usually in a formal, business sense. Today, we have even cheapened the idea of fellowship and have often reduced it to mean eating ice cream together after a Sunday service. But this word carries an intimate, committed dedication to those who are in this fellowship. It’s a vow of commitment. Koinonia is not for fair-weather Christians. This partnership is not a social gathering, but deep commitment to walk with one another through both joy and suffering. I spent quite some time thinking about my commitment to the body of Christ.

a. Check out some passages that talk about loving your brothers and sisters in Christ. John talks about loving one another extensively in 1 John. Paul refers to this love in Colossians 3.12-14.

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Why this Faithful Evangelical is not Voting for Barack Obama


I don’t normally blog about political issues. I am not a staunch party line voter, either. Those who know me well know I am a political nerd and watch more MSNBC, CNN, and FOXNews than should be allowed by law. I’ve voted for Repbulicans, Democrats, and even the occassional Independent in my voting experience. But I generally keep my potentially devicive opinions concerning politics to myself in hopes of keeping every avenue possible open for sharing the Gospel with an unbelieving world. Paul says we should be all things to all men in hopes of winning some, and I usually attemtpt to follow that loosely by staying quiet concerning political issues.

However, the time eventually comes when the political season brings moral issues into play, and this year’s election is revealing a sharp contrast between what many claim to believe and how they are actually living their lives. Those who claim to be both politically liberal and evangelically Christian claim that the “right to life” is a “right-wing” fundamentalist issue in which people are close minded and “one issue” voters. A close look at Scripture would show that, under that definition, our God is Himself a right-wing fundamentalist who upholds human life above all other issues.

As the one member of creation which Scripture states was made in the image of God, as the only creature in creation given free will and a soul, as the only creature for whom Christ came to die, we should see right to life (both at the beginning and the end of a life here on earth) not as single issue voting, but as foundational to our belief system. Human life should be the starting point of consideration of any candidate. Where he or she stands on issues such as economics, health care, and the environment pale in comparison to the stance taken on life given by God.

I will not deny that issues like the war in Iraq, the current state of our economy, and our looming health care crisis are important issues. But the truth of the matter is that these issues have largely been created by poor choices of selfish American adults. Impulse, materialistic purchasing can be largely blamed for our economic crisis. We bought more than we needed with money we did not have and now we are paying the consequences. Our health issues could be slashed overnight if we would simply eat better, eat less, exercise more, and quit smoking, drinking, overworking, and overeating. We want the government to legislate solutions for our poor decisions. While the war in Iraq was created by the poor choices of a few Americans, every soldier currently serving there is in the military by choice (at least they originally enlisted by choice and therefore joined knowing that going to war was a possibility) and most would not return home early if given the chance. Those in the military generally have a high ethic of personal responsibility and dedication to seeing a job through to the end, whether or not that job was created for the right reasons.

While the issues at the top of the democratic platform have been caused largely by the choices of a self-seeking people, the issue of right to life is in the best interest of those who are not able to speak or choose for themselves. No one asks a fetus if it would like to be born. Many times, no one asks the stroke victim or the injured or the elderly if they would like to see the natural end of their days. Those at both the beginning and end of their lives usually have no voice for themselves and are at the mercy of others to seek protection and support.

We are mandated in Scripture to care for the orphaned and the widowed. These are specific terms for two large groups of people who represent one thing: a population that cannot care for itself. We would be wise to remember that, as evangelical believers, we base our belief system on the fact that we were helpless in our sin, without choice, incapable of saving ourselves, and a loving Father sent His Son to die in our place so that we would have the right to eternal life.

Separation of church and state does not mean you leave your religion in your car when enter the polling area. Scripture is clear that as Christians, all decisions we make should be made looking through the lens of Scripture with the glory of God being both the means and the ends of the decision we ultimately make.

Please read the following article carefully and with an open mind. It was not written by a right-wing, fundamentalist religious fanatic or a theologian or seminary professor, but by a secular professor of jurisprudence and senior fellow at Princeton University.

“Why Faithful Evangelicals Cannot Vote for Barack Obama”

By: Daniel L. Akin

“It is incumbent upon every believer, when they are active in the American political process, to vote their conscience and to further let their conscience be guided by the Word of God. Nowhere is this more important than in the area of abortion, an issue on which God’s Word is abundantly clear. In light of recent secular media reports and pollster predictions that many evangelicals may be supporting Democratic nominee Barack Obama for president, I found the following article by Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University to be compelling. Please read it as you become more informed about the candidates and how you can vote on election day in such a way that glorifies Jesus.”

Obama’s Abortion Extremism

Robert P. George

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States.  He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate.  Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals—even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals—who aggressively promote Obama’s candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama’s self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak.  It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly believe what they are saying.  But before proving my claims about Obama’s abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as “pro-abortion” rather than “pro-choice.”

According to the standard argument for the distinction between these labels, nobody is pro-abortion.  Everybody would prefer a world without abortions.  After all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an abortion?  But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby would present significant problems for them.  So even if abortion is not medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers’ money.

The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery.  Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition.  Such people—Thomas Jefferson was one—reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire.  Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken.  Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited.  They certainly didn’t think anyone should be forced to own slaves.  Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.

Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as “pro-choice”?  Of course we would not.  It wouldn’t matter to us that they were “personally opposed” to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were “unnecessary,” or that they wouldn’t dream of forcing anyone to own slaves.  We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said “Against slavery?  Don’t own one.”  We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being “pro-abortion” and being “pro-choice.”  Who would qualify for the latter description?  Barack Obama certainly would not.  For, unlike his running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely private choice that public authority should refrain from getting involved in.  Now, Senator Biden is hardly pro-life.  He believes that the killing of the unborn should be legally permitted and relatively unencumbered.  But unlike Obama, at least Biden would not use taxpayer dollars to fund abortion, thereby leaving Americans free to choose not to implicate themselves in it.  If we stretch things to create a meaningful category called “pro-choice,” then Biden might be a plausible candidate for the label; at least he respects your choice or mine not to facilitate deliberate feticide.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama.  For starters, he has promised to seek repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which has for many years protected pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest.  The abortion industry laments that this longstanding federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, “forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead.”  In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen.  That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

But this barely scratches the surface of Obama’s extremism.  He has promised that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed “fundamental right” to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed Act, “a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined ‘health’ reasons.”  In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry—protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs.  The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would “sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.”

It gets worse.  Obama, unlike even many “pro-choice” legislators, opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice.  He has referred to a baby conceived inadvertently by a young woman as a “punishment” that she should not endure.  He has stated that women’s equality requires access to abortion on demand.  Appallingly, he wishes to strip federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need.  There is certainly nothing “pro-choice” about that.

But it gets even worse.  When pro-life members of Obama’s own party in Congress proposed the so-called “95-10” legislation to strengthen the social safety net for poor women and, they hoped, reduce the number of abortions by 95% in ten years, Obama refused to support it.  This legislation would not have made a single abortion illegal.  It simply sought to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies.  Here was a concrete test of whether Obama was “pro-choice” rather than pro-abortion.  He flunked.  Then he flunked again by opposing the inclusion of unborn children in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-Chip)—which would have helped to save unborn babies without making abortion illegal. Many implacably “pro-choice” members of Congress like Edward Kennedy supported it.  But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it.

It gets worse yet.  In an act of breathtaking injustice which the Obama campaign lied about until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done, as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability.  This legislation would not have banned any abortions.  Indeed, it included a specific provision ensuring that it did not affect abortion laws.  (This is what Obama and his campaign lied about until they were caught.)  The federal version of the bill passed unanimously in the United States Senate, winning the support of such ardent advocates of legal abortion as John Kerry and Barbara Boxer.  But Barack Obama opposed it and worked to defeat it.  For him, a child marked for abortion gets no protection—even ordinary medical or comfort care—even if she is born alive and entirely separated from her mother.  So Obama has favored protecting what is literally a form of infanticide.

You may be thinking, It can’t get worse than that.  But it does.

For several years, Americans have been debating the use for biomedical research of embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (originally for reproductive purposes) but now left in a frozen condition in cryopreservation units.  President Bush has restricted the use of federal funds for stem-cell research of the type that makes use of these embryos and destroys them in the process.  I support the President’s restriction, but some legislators with excellent pro-life records, including John McCain, argue that the use of federal money should be permitted where the embryos are going to be discarded or die anyway as the result of the parents’ decision.  Senator Obama, too, wants to lift the restriction.

But Obama would not stop there.  He has co-sponsored a bill—strongly opposed by McCain—that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed.  In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored would require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning.  It would make it a federal crime for a woman to save an embryo by agreeing to have the tiny developing human being implanted in her womb so that he or she could be brought to term.  This “clone and kill” bill would, if enacted, bring something to America that has heretofore existed only in China—the equivalent of legally mandated abortion.  In an audacious act of deceit, Obama and his co-sponsors misleadingly call this an anti-cloning bill.  But it is nothing of the kind.  What it bans is not cloning, but allowing the embryonic children produced by cloning to survive.

Can it get still worse?  Yes.

Decent people of every persuasion hold out the increasingly realistic hope of resolving the moral issue surrounding embryonic stem-cell research by developing methods to produce the exact equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using (or producing) embryos.  But when a bill was introduced in the United States Senate to put a modest amount of federal money into research to develop these methods, Barack Obama was one of the few senators who opposed it.  From any rational vantage point, this is unconscionable.  Why would someone not wish to find a method of producing the pluripotent cells scientists want that all Americans could enthusiastically endorse?  Why create and kill human embryos when there are alternatives that do not require the taking of nascent human lives?  It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.

This ultimate manifestation of Obama’s extremism brings us back to the puzzle of his pro-life Catholic and Evangelical apologists.

They typically do not deny the facts I have reported.  They could not; each one is a matter of public record.  But despite Obama’s injustices against the most vulnerable human beings, and despite the extraordinary support he receives from the industry that profits from killing the unborn (which should be a good indicator of where he stands), some Obama supporters insist that he is the better candidate from the pro-life point of view.

They say that his economic and social policies would so diminish the demand for abortion that the overall number would actually go down—despite the federal subsidizing of abortion and the elimination of hundreds of pro-life laws.  The way to save lots of unborn babies, they say, is to vote for the pro-abortion—oops! “pro-choice”—candidate.  They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion abroad), parental consent and notification laws, conscience protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive research.  They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and embryo-killing.  An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of the unborn.

This is delusional.

We know that the federal and state pro-life laws and policies that Obama has promised to sweep away (and that John McCain would protect) save thousands of lives every year.  The rigorous studies conducted by Professor Michael New and other social scientists have removed any doubt.  In some cases, as we have seen, even the abortion lobby confirms the truth of what these scholars have determined.  Nor can we ignore the effect of the message that Obama and his policies would send: that abortion is a legitimate solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies (so clearly legitimate that taxpayers should be forced to pay for it).

But for a moment let’s suppose, against all the evidence, that Obama’s proposals would reduce the number of abortions, even while subsidizing the killing with taxpayer dollars.  Even so, many more unborn human beings would likely be killed under Obama than under McCain.  A Congress controlled by strong Democratic majorities under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would enact the bill authorizing the mass industrial production of human embryos by cloning for research in which they are killed.  As president, Obama would sign it.  The number of tiny humans created and killed under this legislation (assuming that an efficient human cloning technique is soon perfected) could dwarf the number of lives saved as a result of the reduced demand for abortion—even if we take a delusionally optimistic view of what that number would be.

Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism, how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral principle, not just prudence.  These questions reveal the character and judgment of each man.  Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect.  Across the spectrum of pro-life concerns for the unborn, he would deny these tiny members of the human family the basic protection of the laws.  Over the next four to eight years, as many as three U.S. Supreme Court justices are likely to retire. Obama enthusiastically supports Roe v. Wade and would appoint judges who would protect that morally and constitutionally disastrous decision and even expand its scope.  Indeed, in an interview in Glamour magazine, he promised to apply a litmus test for Supreme Court nominations:  jurists who do not support Roe will not be considered for appointment by Obama.  John McCain, by contrast, opposes Roe and would appoint judges likely to overturn it.  This would not make abortion illegal, but it would return the issue to the forums of democratic deliberation, where pro-life Americans could engage in a fair debate to persuade fellow citizens that killing the unborn is no way to address the problems of pregnant women in need.

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be?  Barack Obama’s America is one in which being human just isn’t enough to warrant care and protection.  It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin.  It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights.  In Obama’s America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the laws.  In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: “that question is above my pay grade.”  It was a profoundly disingenuous answer:  For even at a state senator’s pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty.  His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling:  human beings have no rights until infancy—and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

In the end, the efforts of Obama’s apologists to depict their man as the true pro-life candidate that Catholics and Evangelicals may and even should vote for, doesn’t even amount to a nice try.  Voting for the most extreme pro-abortion political candidate in American history is not the way to save unborn babies.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.  He serves on the President’s Council on Bioethics and on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST).  George is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey.


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The Bible is not about you.


Dr. Akin gave this to us this morning in class in a discussion of typology in the Old Testament. His point was to show that while so much of what goes on in the church today is people-centered, self-help, feelings-healing, needs-meeting fluff, the Bible is not really about us, it’s all about Jesus. When we focus on ourselves, we so often miss the point that when we really meet Jesus, we find our help, our feelings are healed and our needs are met!

Too often when we study scripture, we start with the wrong question: “What does this say to/about me?” If we start our study asking, “What does this tell me about God?” then we really get down to the deep riches of the Word. After all, if we are called to conform to the image of Christ, shouldn’t we be learning more about him and less about us?

The following resource was cited by Tim Keller in his lecture “Preaching the Gospel” from the Resurgence Conference in 2006. The audio can be found here:

http://theresurgence.com/r_r_2006_session_seven_audio_keller

Jesus is the true and better Adam, who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us.

Jesus is the true and better Abel, who, though innocently slain, has blood that now cries out, not for our condemnation, but for our acquittal.

Jesus is the true and better Abraham, who answered the call of God to leave the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void, not know wither he went to create a new people of God.

Jesus is the true and better Isaac, who was not just offered up by his father on the mount, but was truly sacrificed for us. And just as God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love from me,” now we can look at God taking his son up the mountain and sacrificing him and say, “Now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from us.”

Jesus is the true and better Jacob, who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us.

Jesus is the true and better Joseph, who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them.

Jesus is the true and better Moses, who stands in the gap between people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant.

Jesus is the true and better Rock of Moses, who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert.

Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends.

Jesus is the true and better David, whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves.

Jesus is the true and better Esther, who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace, but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave up his life to save his people.

Jesus is the true and better Jonah, who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in.

Jesus is the read Rock of Moses, the real Passover Lamb, innocent, perfect, helpless, slain so the angel of death will pass over us. He’s the True Temple, the True Prophet, the True Priest, the True King, the True Sacrifice, the True Lamb, the True Light, the True Bread.

The Bible’s not really about you—it’s about Him.

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Singleness Wears Steel-Toed Boots


When I arrived in Raleigh Sunday night, it was after 20 hours of travel over 4,000 miles, an ocean, and two continents. Those who know me well understand that when I am tired I tend to revert to my toddler self: weepy temper tantrums are not rare when I am fatigued. So I was not surprised when I arrived in baggage claim and was suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to plop down on the floor, throw my backpack, and cry.

What did surprise me, however, was my physical, emotional, and spiritual response to seeing that the baggage claim was full of the wives, children, mothers and fathers of some of my team members. There was an instantaneous feeling like I had literally kicked in the stomach– the physical side effect of loneliness. My first, self-pitying thought was, “Singleness not only kicks you when you’re down, it wears steel-toed boots.” Aloneness is never more glaringly obvious than when you realize that you have no one to go home to.

When I lived in Chattanooga, homecomings from mission trips were a big deal. We would arrive from Honduras to a baggage claim full of friends and family. I’ve now come “home” to Wake Forest from two mission trips, and my immediate response has been the same both times– I’ve experienced the physical emptiness of being kicked by the army boot-wearing enemy, Alone. Being that I tend to be a people person to a fault, this never sits well with me. The last two years I have truly made peace with my singleness; I enjoy being able to serve the Lord however He sees fit to use me. But contentment does not always mean steady, unfailing joy in the situation. Paul may have been content in the Lord while in jail, but I’m certain that he still would have preferred his freedom.

But while I was standing at the baggage carousel waiting for my bags, I couldn’t shake the image of my singleness treading on me in steel-toed boots. I instantly shut down and isolated myself in my thoughts, desperately crying out to the Lord to perform a miracle and ensure that I not cry in front of all of these people. And in that moment of solitude amidst the chaos, the Lord gently expanded my understanding of those work boots I felt were walking all over me.

I thought about Emily, who spent a couple of days in tears because it was the first time she had been away from her son for more than a night. I remembered how much Jason missed his son while we were in Amsterdam. I thought of Rob and Nick and Mitch and Bill and Dr. James, who had all made comments about wanting to get back to their wives and families. And then I thought about how I hadn’t really missed anyone the 15 days we were out of the country. Living in Wake Forest is a discipline in missing my family; I didn’t miss them in Amsterdam any more or less than I would any other day.  And then I thought of the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 when he addressed singleness and ministry: “But I say to the unmarried and the widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I…. Only, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk….But I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but one who is married is concerned about the things of this world, how he may please his wife, and his interests are divided. The woman who is unmarried, and the virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of this world, how she may please her husband. This I say not for your own benefit; not to put a restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord” (1 Cor. 7: 8,17,32-35).

We are encouraged to serve the Lord in whatever circumstance we are in when He calls us into His service. For me, I was and, at the moment remain, single. That is how I am to serve Him, and when I am focused on Him, His kingdom, His glory, and not myself, I find no greater joy than giving Him my undivided attention. Even in my weary state, I recognized the still small voice of the Holy Spirit convicting me to a closer relationship with Himself, calling me away from me and back to Him and His all-sufficient grace and mercy.

I still think my singleness wears steel-toed boots. But now I think of them as the footwear essential for wearing the full armor of God at this time in my life. And the only time I am going to get kicked by them is when I get in the way of the work the Lord is doing in and through me.