Preaching on Orphan Care - James 1:27

This past Sunday I had the privilege of preaching at The Vine on James 1:27 and the calling of orphan care upon the church.  You can take a listen here if you would like.  Here is how I closed the message:

...So we never get past the Gospel. A culture of orphan care will not come through me getting up here and guilting you all into feeling bad about your wealth and wanting to “spread it around” a little bit more.

It is going to stream from a constant meditation upon what God has done in our lives. This comes through preaching, reading, and our relationships that remind us of our salvation in Jesus.

This and only this will establish anything that is actually sustainable. Guilt never sustains. A desire to just be a little more nice will not sustain. Trying to wrap your mind around the need in our world will not sustain. You can’t do it and if you could it would be more weight than you could bear.

What will sustain is a constant remembering of what God has done for us in Christ and how he reached down and took rebellious orphan children and made them members of a new family. Children who are loved, justified, secure, and given a mission.

When are minds and hearts at fixed at the foot of the cross and empty tomb and we look up and see what God has done it will give us a vision to look to the left and the right and see the most broken, needy, powerless and voiceless among us and say to them... wow, I can relate to you. Spiritually speaking I was once in that place too.

Since I can relate. I am going to treat you in the same way I have been treated. I am going to lay down my life for you as Jesus laid down his life for me. This love that has been shown to me is like a fire shut up in my bones that has to find a place to land.

So we will continue to believe the Gospel and never move beyond the Gospel but this gospel HAS to propel us forward into radical (i mean normal) acts of obedience that make the world stop and go, “Who are these people?” and gives us a platform for speaking the truth of the Gospel that we would never have otherwise.

As we have seen this morning from the book of James, if it doesn’t produce this desire then something is off and we need to repent and go back to the Gospel and ask God to make us alive in him.

Don’t get a messianic complex. We can’t save the world.

But God can. So let’s join him in the process and in that process his glory and Gospel will shine like the sun through our spoken declaration and our supportive deeds and our lives will be so blessed and changed.