John Markum

Who is your “least of these”? (Adam Herald)

This post is from my friend, Adam Herald’s blog “Procrastinating Tomorrow”. Adam and I worked together with a church planter in Florida the summer that I met Tiffany (He had a small part in that…).  Check out his blog here for more great posts by Adam!

This picture rips my heart out like Will and Jaden Smith in The Pursuit of Happiness.
I hate that movie.  Great movie.
I hate it. It rips my heart out.

Jesus said…
“… when you refused to help the least of these… you refused to help me.” – Matthew 25:45

In Matthew 14:14 the Bible says that when Jesus saw the huge crowd… he was moved with compassion.
Compassion leads to action… so Jesus healed their sick.

I met a lady yesterday that inspired me. I didn’t get her name.
But I got her kid’s names… Daniel… Sam… Kevin… and Rehab.
This lady has compassion to her “least of these”.
She adopts kids with special needs.  Kevin had downs syndrome.  Sam was severely autistic.
She adopted them because they had a need… love.

Who is your “least of these”?
How are you moving with compassion towards them?

We can’t procrastinate taking care of “the least of these”.

Stop putting off compassion… live for today.

Of Heaven and Hell

It seems as if there are times in everyone’s life that are marked with concentrated periods of stress, trouble, and tough times. It always seems to come in waves:

  • First you fight with your spouse over finances and the lack of time you’ve spent together.
  • You get to work and find out that your hours are getting cut in half.
  • Because you’ve been moved from full-time to part-time you realize you now lose your company-paid benefits as well.
  • On the way home the car starts overheating.
  • You check the mail on your way in to see the familiar stack of bills, that seem to be constantly rising.
  • You share all of this info with your spouse who starts to cry.
  • She then tells you all of the problems in her day: house, kids, depleted savings account, etc…
  • A family member called her because her mother (5 states away) is in critical care at the hospital.
  • To top it off, she suspects that she’s also pregnant.

Sound familiar? This story is not entirely hypothetical. More than likely, you have your own lyrics to the same song. There’s an entire message I could preach here about God’s grace through life’s difficulties, and His faithfulness to see us through. Or I could talk about the fact that God is not putting us through the fires of life to burn us, but to forge our faith and promote us to another level of His blessings. All of that would be true.

Instead I want to share a story and a simple thought that I got once from an amazing man, pastor, father, and mentor in my life from years back when I was in high school. His name is Norwood Tadlock. I went to school with all three of his kids. I knew him as my Bible teacher at my Christian high school. His wife passed away while I was still a teenager. Making similar observations as I have above, he once pointed out to me:

For those of us who know Christ, this is as close as we will ever get to Hell.

That’s a relief. The Bible even tells us that compared to Heaven, our present sufferings are but “a light affliction that is working for us a far greater weight in glory!” God is not minimizing our pain. He is simply encouraging us that one day, all of this will seem very small in comparison to Heaven. But “brother Tadlock” didn’t stop there. He quickly made the opposite observation:

For those who do not know Christ, this is as close as they will ever get to Heaven.

Frightening. And not what God wants for them, either. These thoughts coming on the back of a week full of natural disasters, false prophets, hurting people within my church, hurting people outside of church, and trying to pastor others through this messy thing called life, make me think 2 things:

1)   Heaven must be unimaginably amazing. I want everyone to go there.

2)   Hell must be unimaginably terrible. I don’t want anyone to go there – not even my worst enemy.

Let’s stop trying to guess at the day that Jesus is coming for us since He said that “no one knows the day, nor the hour of the coming of the Son of man,” and let’s get passionate about seeing people far from God awakened with life in Christ. We have a world to change. Let’s “endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” and make a difference.

Blessings,

John

Thoughts on the World Ending this week

I can’t speak for everyone, but the announcement that the world will end tomorrow, Saturday May 21, 2011, at 2 am is stressing me out for the following reasons:

  1. I’ve been working hard planning sermons for the entire summer and fall, none of which I’ll get to preach… supposedly.
  2. We’ve already bought groceries for next week.
  3. I don’t know what to wear.
  4. Everyone is freaking out over something that we could not possibly know the day of it’s happening.
  5. For those of us who have a relationship with Christ, we’ve got nothing to worry about anyway.
  6. I just found out that next week’s winning lotto numbers are…

Blessings,

John

P.S.

Don’t freak out, it’s not gonna happen… yet.

The phrase no pain, no gain has been a mantra for athletes and fitness junkies for years. And what they understand about physical pain needs to be broadened to a much more general use in all of our lives. Pain hurts. That's the whole problem. No one enjoys it, and if someone does, we rightfully

The Premium of Pain