Gospel.com Blog

This Sunday is Mother’s Day in the U.S.—the perfect opportunity for you to tell mom that you appreciate all that she’s done for you. Sure, she always nagged at you to eat your veggies and wash your hands before dinner, but thousands of changed diapers, dozens of trips to the children’s doctor when you got sick, and all the time and money spent raising you gives her the right. Here are a few items to help you think about your mother, and motherhood in general, this Mother’s Day:

• Revive Our Hearts has a five-part radio series about motherhood, much of it discussing the value of motherhood. If you’ve ever been tempted to think of motherhood as a lesser calling for women, be sure to check out No, Not Just a Mother, The Value of Motherhood, and Mother and Wife: Dueling Roles.
• Winning at Home has a lot of good articles and radio shows about parenthood and related family topics, but this Mother’s Day, take a look at Mom’s Big Four, a tribute to moms and the underappreciated advice they were always giving you when you were a kid. On a different note, the essay Dad’s Out of the Picture calls attention to the challenges of single motherhood, and encourages us to notice and lend a hand to the single mothers in our communities.
• Joe Stowell has a great devotional message up today called Thank God for Mothers, in which he encourages us to—you guessed it—give thanks for mom. Be sure to read the discussion points at the end, where Joe challenges us to be thankful even if a broken relationship or grief makes Mother’s Day more painful than joyful.

Even if you aren’t able to be with your mother this Sunday for some reason, it’s worth considering these words about motherhood, and the important role that mom played in our lives. So pick up the phone, set aside any lingering grievances you might have for at least one day, give mom a call, and tell her how much she means to you!

Amidst the destruction and continuing fallout from Cyclone Nargis there is a tremendous need not only for support (if you’re looking for a place to give, try International Aid) but news.

One of our gospel.com community members is Mission Network News, which is a news outlet that offers a missions-focused take on the news. From their about page:

Mission Network News is a mission news service dedicated to keeping Christians informed on evangelical mission activity around the world; in doing so we hope to educate and motivate Christians to prayer, participation, and support of missionary work to help further the Great Commission.

They’re currently covering the Cyclone Nargis catastrophe and have been updating as much as possible. You can read all of their Hurricane related articles here.

From their report today called Ministry encourages churches in Myanmar response:

Global Advance’s David Shibley notes one prospect: “The government is being resistant to aid. However, this does give opportunity for some mission groups that are already on the ground there to be very significantly used.” There are some agencies with projects in the hard-hit areas that will be able to make use of an already-established distribution network.

The Navigators celebrate their 75th year of ministry this year! They serve in over 100 countries with the goal of creating new disciples of Jesus Christ. 4000 people of 64 nationalities comprise the Navigators.

Impressive numbers don’t equal spiritual success though. The Navigators are still around because of their heartfelt mission and devotion to strategically influence people for Christ across a broad range of people. For more on this read their direction page and their mission page.

I really like the story of how their ministry got started:

The ministry of The Navigators began in the 1930’s through the call of God to a young Californian blue-collared worker, Dawson Trotman. Dawson caught a vision to teach discipleship principles he found fruitful in his own life. He began to teach high school students and local Sunday school classes. Then in 1933, he and his friends began to extend their work among sailors in the U.S. Navy.

Dawon taught sailor Les Spencer the principles of Christian growth. They spent many hours together praying, studying the Bible, and memorizing Scripture. When one of Spencer’s shipmates asked him the secret of his changed life, Spencer brought the man to Trotman. “Teach him what you taught me,” Spencer said. “You teach him!” Trotman responded. And that was the beginning of The Navigators.

Spencer did teach the sailor, and soon the two men were meeting with others. Eventually, 125 men on their ship, the U.S.S. West Virginia, were growing in Christ and actively sharing their faith.

Read more about it here.

If you’re looking for more information on The Navigators, you can check them out on the web in a few different places:

US site

UK site

Canadian site

Since 1952, The National Day of Prayer has been a day set aside for the citizens of the United States to come together to pray regardless of their faith. Today is a great reminder for Christians of what they’re to do every day, which is to be in communion with God through prayer.

The following video from the National Day of Prayer Task Force’s website is of Tony Dungy talking about prayer:

The gospel.com community has a number of ministries that have posted prayer calendars. If you’re looking for somebody to pray for today (and in the future), try these ministry prayer calendars:

Mission Possible

Nurses Christian Fellowship International

Arab World Ministries

Life Action Revival Ministries

Currently, I’m sitting in a lawn chair on my porch with my sleeves rolled up taking in the sounds of the neighborhood. Every once in a while a bird will wander close enough to see what’s going on with the human near its tree. The grass is green and there are flecks of yellow on some of the bushes across the street. A white butterfly is testing its wings against the light breeze.

Life is good because God’s creation is awesome.

For Christians this should be the impetus for celebrating Earth Day. There are plenty of reasons why people make this day special, and a lot of them are political; however, today I don’t really care because the sun is sneaking out behind the clouds and making my day bright.

‘Hallelujah’ just doesn’t seem like a good enough word when I think of the scope and bredth of what God gave us.

You’ll hear a lot about stewardship this week, and that’s a good thing because for the most part we could all stand to live a little more intentionally when it comes to loving and serving one another through the proper care of our resources. But today after all the hype and festivities, I urge you to go outside (even if it’s raining) and worship God for what you see in front of you.

Praise the LORD, my soul.
LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

The LORD wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent

and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind…

Read all of Psalm 104

The last place most people read the stuff that falls under the banner of ‘literary’ is in college, which is a shame because the contemporary small press publishing scene has never been more robust. If you’re in the small percentage of people that read literary poetry, fiction, or non-fiction nowadays, you might be interested to know about WordFarm:

WordFarm is an independent literary press begun in 2002 by a group of Chicago-area writers, editors and designers who have between them more than fifty years of publishing experience. WordFarm publishes collections of poetry, short fiction, essays, and single works of fiction or literary nonfiction. WordFarm’s mission is to discover and promote outstanding literary works by both new and established writers.

On a personal note, a few years ago I enjoyed John Leax’s Tabloid News: Duck Hunters Shoot Angel, which WordFarm publishes.

If you’re looking for high quality books full of the kind of deep thinking and rich thought that exemplifies how we should strive for excellence I’d urge you to check out WordFarm.

In Matthew 25 Jesus tasks his followers to take care of “the least of these” and later in Matthew 28 “to make disciples of all nations.” The mission of International Aid is responding to “Biblical mandates by providing and supporting solutions in health care.” They do a far better job of describing their ministry than I ever would, so read this excerpt from their welcome page:

Disasters such as the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes, and floods will continue to test International Aid’s ability to provide compassionate care in emergencies.

Yet, it is our experience and preparedness as a disaster aid provider that allows our health ministry to offer compassionate care beyond the time and place of disaster.

International Aid is committed to improving global health care by making quality health services available to the world’s poor.

For the past five years, we have leveraged the impact of our worldwide network of ministry partners in countries with unmet health needs.

International Aid bridges the three components of health delivery systems: community health, clinical care, and technology, and embraces them as mutually supportive approaches to health care in the developing world.

The work we do is a physical expression of the power of compassion. We introduce tangible projects of mercy and love that restore the physical, emotional and spiritual health of others.

If you’re at all interested in international missions and providing health care to the oppressed, consider praying and supporting International Aid’s ministry.

Albeit lighter on Christian theology than some devotionals, Daily Wisdom strives to offer insightful advice for all people, whether they follow Christ or not. They publish a devotional the majority of days that you can have sent to your inbox or RSS reader.

The following excerpt from their author’s page does a perfect job of explaining their mission and direction:

DW is not a conventional “devotional” but a daily message with an evangelistic or apologetic emphasis. Since DW is meant to appeal to a not-necessarily-Christian audience, we avoid phrases like “we, as Christians…” and words like “sanctification” that only believers understand. We steer away from “Christianese” - cliches only Christians use - and references to Bible verses, etc. understood exclusively by Christians. That’s not to say we don’t quote Scripture, only that when we do, we quote the verse itself, avoiding phrases like, “In Matthew where Jesus talks about the narrow gate…” We prefer “Revelation chapter 3, verse 6 says…” to “In Revelation 3:6, God says…” Submissions must not assume the reader is familiar with Bible stories or books of the Bible.

Read the latest from Daily wisdom here. Or, if you’re interested, you can read their archives.

The site also publishes a quotation every day called 1liner. While not always written by theologians, they often have theological implications.

Mention the word devotional to me and I instantly think of Our Daily Bread. The church I grew up in had a stack of them readily available on a table in the narthex. Said table was littered with various devotionals and aging bulletins that my friends and I would idly paw through while we waited for our parents to cease talking with each other (they insisted on talking for, like, a million hours after church each week). So for the better part of my life I associated Our Daily Bread with tiresome waiting.

And that was about all I thought about Our Daily Bread until more than a decade later when I actually read the thing. I remember being surprised by the level of insight inherent in every page. I shouldn’t have been surprised, there has been a stable of prolific writers and thinkers that make up its contributor list.

Our Daily Bread focuses on walking you through a passage of the bible, giving you context and a solid teaching about it. You can almost think of it as a mini-sermon. Unlike some devotionals, Our Daily Bread is written to appeal to the widest available audience. While the teaching is good, it does lack rigorous depth, although it might introduce you to some new ways to read scripture.

Also, It’s been published since 1956! You can find archives going back to 1995 on the Our Daily Bread web site. Not to mention it’s now translated into almost 30 languages like the following:

• Our Daily Bread in Spanish website
• Our Daily Bread in Indonesian, Thai, Russia, and Chinese website
• Our Daily Bread in Japanese website
• Our Daily Bread in Korean website

You can read it for free online here.

This is a great story via Marko of the gospel.com community member Youth Specialities:

I’ve shared before how god worked in and through the middle school ministry at my church to change a community in africa. our kids set out to raise $3000 to build one house for a family of orphans. their goofy little variety show brought in $25,000 the first year. the money went to put in two clean-water wells. the next year, the church responded again with almost $35,000, and a health clinic was funded.

i shared this story at the national youth workers convention a couple times. and recently, i received this way-encouraging email from a middle school pastor, who agreed to let me post it here:

MarkO -

I’ve been meaning to send you a note for a while to say thanks. I’m a Jr. High minister and we were at the St. Louis Believe Conference last year. I had already heard your story about the impact the Jr. Highers at your church made in Africa and shared it with some of my students on Friday night, only to have you tell them all on Saturday. From that story, God sparked our own students to act.

Our story turned out much like yours. We got together and set an ambitious goal of $6,000 to build two wells in Africa (people, including our H.S. guy, later came to me and told me they thought there was no way we’d ever get close). We made “Just Add Water” our summer project and challenged our kids and their families to use their summers for something greater than themselves. Long story short, by the end of the summer we hit over $9,000. In the mean time, our church began a relationship with a ministry in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya and we were able to provide water (plus showers and toilets, which there are almost none of in the entire community of 100,000) for three schools in the slums of Nairobi.

…

Read the rest of the amazing story at ysmarko’s blog.