I recently had the pleasure of joining a group of people that included a Christian man from Ghana. He loves Jesus and holds tightly to the promises of God in ways that are beautiful and humbling. He has been evangelizing, mentoring, and teaching for years in Western Africa, including some very dangerous places.

Last year he lost his daughter to an illness. She was a beautiful 21-year-old young woman about to finish college. He and his wife have suffered greatly. The response from some of the Christian "leaders" he knows made me sick. Confess your sins, they told him. "If you confess your sins she will be made well." Others even said they had received a prophetic word that God had heard…

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Pastor, even if you don’t have anyone with a disability in your church yet, I encourage you to attend this conference on November 8: The Works of God: God’s Good Design in Disability. 

In case you are wondering about its value, here are six reasons:

1. The teaching will be remarkable. If you want to help your people see that suffering and God’s sovereign goodness go together, this will help prepare you. Four people who treasure Jesus and know their Bibles — and who have all suffered — will lead us into God’s word on this subject of disability, suffering, and the goodness of God. 
2. You can’t avoid disability. Someday your church will face it: the unborn child with Down syndrome, the tee…

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On November 8 Desiring God will host a new conference: The Works of God: God’s Good Design in Disability. Pastor John said it well in his introduction: the theme of this conference is both biblical and controversial.

The controversy is easy to see. How can we possibly say that our good God is intimately involved in something as hard as disability? More than one person has said that seems more like the works of Satan rather than the works of God.

But if you take the Bible seriously, God openly proclaims his sovereignty over hard things, even disability. 

Here are two instances (among others) when the phrase “the works of God” appears in the Bible:

• Psalm 78:7 . . . so that they sh…

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It was the contrast that caught my attention. One of my colleagues said he knew the blog series "How to Stay Christian in Seminary" was for a niche audience, yet I knew I'd been helped by it (though I'm not a seminarian). The focus may have been on seminary, but the wisdom each blog post contained could be applied to a much broader audience.

And I saw three different areas where the rest of us benefit from this topic:

1.  The leaders it produces.

Seminaries exist to produce leaders for our churches, mission agencies, non-profits and institutions of higher education — so seminary really matters.

But God matters even more.

As both Jonathan Parnell and David Mathis pointed out, stud…

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What date is burned into your memory?

Many people impacted by disability can tell you the day it started. It is the day the child was born, or the diagnosis was made, or the accident occurred, or the virus attacked the body. 

And God already knew it.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:16)

For years this verse has been a particular comfort for me. God doesn’t just know my days, he has written them down!

That’s helpful when the days are hard because of disability. He knows, and he has a purpose.

Joni and Friends

On July 30, 1967, Joni Eareckson dove in…

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The argument isn't my primary concern. Articles like "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live" are more treacherous for the outcome of their argument than the argument itself, as silly as it is. Ideas really do have consequences.

When I read academicians pontificate from their ivory towers I think about children with names. Children like Paul and Andrew and Michael and Kristina and Mia. Real children. 

And I remember the Apostle Paul’s admonition to the church:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. . . (1 Corinthians 12…

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It doesn't happen often, but it does happen — people see my son Paul and ask if they can pray for him.

At places like WalMart (where it has happened) I usually accept their offer after quietly and quickly assessing their motives and authenticity. And people are usually appropriate.

But a scenario occurred recently where I struggled to respond graciously. The Holy Spirit helped me in that moment as I could feel my pride being challenged. Here’s the story. 

A Prayer for Healing

We got to our church service a few minutes late. I plopped Paul down in the seats just outside the sanctuary while we got our bearings on who was going where. A gentleman noticed Paul and asked me what "disease"…

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When the Journal of Medical Ethics released the article, “What makes killing wrong?” in January, they set off a mini-storm of outrage and controversy.  The authors, from Duke University and the National Institutes of Health, asserted that ‘universally and irreversibly disabled people’ could be killed for the sake of retrieving their organs for people who are not totally disabled.

On the whole, the issue raised is when it becomes appropriate to retrieve organs from one person for the sake of another. The governing rule that a person must be dead before vital organs can be removed, known as the ‘dead donor rule,’ has many difficult aspects to it that make even its proponents uncomfortable.

…

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And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. (Galatians 6:9)

January 22 makes the 39th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court ruling that overturned every state law governing abortion in America. 

39 years is a long time.

Yet that horrible decision effected one positive move: Bible-believing churches got off the sidelines. Today, it would be hard to find any American who is uncertatin about the Evangelical stance on abortion: it's evil.

Today, But Not Always

I say "today" because that's not always been the case. In fact, the eugenics and abortion movements in the United States successfully enlisted religious leaders — mo…

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Every January we rightly turn our attention to Roe v. Wade — the poorly argued Supreme Court decision that was driven by ideology rather than by actual case law.

It was not the first unjustly decided case that impacted tens of thousands of vulnerable lives.

In the early decades of the 20th century in the United States, there were deeply held prejudices against the three types of people: the poor, those with disabilities of all kinds, and people of color. These prejudices, along with their social and scientific acceptability, made up the fabric of what became known as the eugenics movement.

The argument went something like this: if only we could prevent the births of ‘feeble-minded’ peo…

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