How's Your Heart?

This week my wife and I were overjoyed to welcome our third child into the family. The Lord has given us a beautiful baby girl who instantly melted our hearts. As the nurses ran tests on her they discovered a minor problem—her oxygen levels were below normal. The pediatrician ordered a deeper investigation with an electrocardiogram (EKG). The scan revealed that our little Lydia was born with a heart defect.

The cardiologist informed us that she was born with a small hole in her heart, which she termed an atrial septal defect (ASD). Apparently, these can be common problems in infants. The doctor said they were confident that it was small enough that with time the heart would heal, and the hole would close itself. “However,” said the doctor, “if that doesn’t happen, there is a corrective surgery we can do to close the hole and fix the heart.”

We breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing that news, packed up our things and left the hospital grateful for another blessing. While reflecting on that episode I began to think about the spiritual connections. The Bible says that everyone of us is born with a defective heart, (spiritually speaking that is). In the Bible the heart represents man’s innermost being—the seat of our consciousness, will and nature.  

“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me,” David wrote in Psalm 51:5. The prophet Jeremiah lamented, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (17:9)” And, Jesus, diagnosed our problem, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person (Matt. 15:19-20).”

The heart of the problem is a problem of the heart. We spend most of our lives trying to fill the hole in heart with different things—money, success, popularity, pleasure. As the famous French mathematician and scientist Blaise Pascal realized, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made know through Jesus Christ.”

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes mused that this “existential void” should point us to God, “He [God] has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end (3:11).” To put it another way, we all have an “itch” for eternal things, that no finite thing can “scratch.”

If you are seeking fulfillment, purpose, or meaning from this world, I have some bad news: you will never find it. There is nothing in the world that will fill the deepest void in your life. Only God is big enough for that. The Good News of the Gospel is that we have a Great Physician who can not only fix your broken heart, but He can fill it with His—love, joy, peace and the most valuable things that can’t be found in this world.

We stand in need of spiritual surgery. Have you submitted to the scalpel of Christ? “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ex. 36:26). -DM   

Honoring Christ on the Moon

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?     

Psalm 8:3-4

This year our nation commemorates the historic 50^th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission which delivered the first humans to the moon. When the Eagle lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to do something difficult: Wait. They were scheduled to open the door of their lunar lander and step onto the unknown surface of a completely different world. But for now, their mission ordered them to take a pause before the big event.

And so Aldrin spent his time doing something unexpected, something no man had ever attempted before. Giddy with anticipation, Aldrin took part in the first Christian sacrament ever performed on the moon—The Lord’s Supper. The astronaut was also an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, and before he headed into space in 1969, he got special permission to take bread and wine with him to space and give himself communion. Aldrin wanted to honor His Savior in this epic moment saying, “There are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had only been on the lunar surface for a few minutes when Aldrin made the following public statement: “This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”  Aldrin then ended radio communication, and there on the silent surface of the moon, 250,000 miles from home, he read John 15:5, which he had handwritten on a scrap of paper—“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit, for you can do nothing without me.”

Buzz Aldrin 

The communion bag and chalice that Aldrin took to the moon. 

Here is his Aldrin’s account of what happened:

“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.  Apart from me you can do nothing.’  I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute they had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas.  I agreed reluctantly. I ate the tiny wafer and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements. And of course, it’s interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who spoke the Earth and the moon into existence.”

After taking the elements, Aldrin says he “sensed especially strongly my unity with our church back home, and with the church everywhere.” ^[1]

   

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[1] Eric Metaxas, “Communion on the Moon: July 20^th 1969” 19 July 2009 <http://www.ericmetaxas.com/blog/communion-on-the-moon-july-20th-1969/> 

Bible Balloons: Air Mailing the Gospel into North Korea

For the past 16 years, North Korea has been ranked the “most oppressive place in the world for Christians” according to the U.S. State Department. Christians are accused of being imperialists seeking to overthrow the despotic government and those who are caught practicing their faith are arrested, horrendously tortured, imprisoned and sometimes immediately put to death.

Like his father and grandfather, Kim Jong-Un has continued a pattern of dictatorial paranoia. North Korean citizens are taught state propaganda from birth until death. The entire nation and its laws center on the elevation of the leadership of the country to godhood. There are thousands of statues of national founder Kim Il-Sung around the country that children must clean and polish; citizens are taught that all countries worship the ruling Kim. It’s also illegal for any North Korean to fold a newspaper showing the face of leaders either present or past.  

Despite this persecution, Open Doors reports that Christianity is growing in North Korea. Estimates place the number of Christians in North Korea around 300,000, most of whom operate in secret networks of tiny house churches.[1]

One of the creative ways that missionaries have been trying to get the Gospel into North Korea is by helium-filled balloons. On the nights when the winds are favorable hundreds of balloons are sent up and away from multiple points in South Korea, destined a few miles away and into North Korea. Only these are no ordinary balloons — they are considered “Bible Balloons,” stuffed with pocket-sized New Testaments or flash drives featuring sound clips of Gospel sermons, digital files of the Bible and other Christian texts. These balloons are tracked with the help of GPS technology, in the hopes that even just one will be picked up.[2] (Click here to watch a video of how this works.)

Voice of the Martyrs Korea reports launching approximately 40,000 Bibles per year into North Korea. “North Korea is the one country in the world in which Bibles fall from the sky,” says Pastor Eric Foley of VOM. They believe the balloon ministry has been an effective means of reaching people for Christ in the closed country. “When we started 10 years ago, less than two percent of North Korean defectors reported ever having seen a Bible while inside North Korea,” Voice of the Martyrs Korea writes on its website. “Today, that number is around 10 percent.”[3]

Reading these facts made me think of Jesus prophetic words in Matt. 24:14, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” While Christians are using creative ways to get God’s Word into every corner of the globe, when you think about oppressive regimes like North Korea it seems impossible that Jesus’ prediction will ever come true.

However, we know that during the future Tribulation period God is going to get His word out by several effective channels. First, He will commission 144,000 Jewish evangelists to crisscross the globe with the Gospel (Rev. 7:1-17). According to the Bible, God will supernaturally protect them from persecution during this time so that the Antichrist will not be able to take their lives.

Then in Revelation 11, we learn that God will send two witnesses to the earth who will preach and perform miracles. Even though these witnesses will be killed; they will be raised back to life and many will believe their testimony as a result.

Finally, in Rev. 14:6-13 we see that God is going to send a trio of angels across the earth who will give warning to humanity to repent and trust in Christ before its too late. All these efforts combined will produce the greatest evangelistic harvest the world has ever seen, and it will take place during the worst possible time in history.

It’s encouraging to know that the Gospel is not bound by borders or governments. God’s Word will not return void (Is. 55:11). Whether by balloon, radio waves, social media or conversations around the water cooler, let’s be on mission for the Gospel everyday everywhere. -DM      

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[1] Christopher Summers, “6 Big Things About North Korea You Should Know,” Open Doors, 1 October 2008 <https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/stories/6-big-things-about-north-korea-you-should-know/>  

[2] Hollie McKay, “Operation Bible Smuggling: How Christian texts infiltrate North Korea,” Fox News, 9 October 2017 <https://www.foxnews.com/world/operation-bible-smuggling-how-christian-texts-infiltrate-north-korea>

[3] “FLYING BIBLE BALLOONS GROUNDED AS A RESULT OF KOREAN PEACE TALKS”, Facts & Trends, 28 June 2018 <https://factsandtrends.net/2018/06/28/flying-bible-balloons-grounded-as-a-result-of-korean-peace-talks/>

Philip Bliss: Leaving a Legacy

“I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.” (Psalm 104:33)

Philip Paul Bliss was born to singing parents in a log cabin in the northern Pennsylvania woods. He was raised with his mother’s hymnbook in one hand and his father’s Bible in the other. He left home at age 11 to work in lumber camps and sawmills. At age 12 he made a public profession of faith and joined the Baptist Church of Cherry Flats, PA. Bliss later said that he never recalled a time when he did not love Christ.

Despite his limited schooling, Bliss found a way to hone his musical talent. As a young man, Bliss set out on horseback with an accordion as an itinerant music teacher. In 1858 he met his beloved wife, Lucy, a musician and poet who encouraged him to write songs of faith. Bliss discovered that he an uncanny knack for writing hymns and churned them out as if divinely anointed.

His divine appointment came one summer night in 1869, while attending a revival meeting where the famed evangelist D. L. Moody was preaching. The man intended to lead music that night became ill and was unable to play. When a plea was made that night for anyone in the crowd with musical skill to help lead the worship, Bliss answered. And the rest they say is history—Moody had found a music minister to accompany him in his evangelistic campaigns.   

Bliss toured the country with Moody and his music became prolific. However, his career would be short lived. During the Christmas holidays of 1876 the Bliss family visited his mother in PA. They boarded the Pacific Express in Buffalo to return home to Chicago. About eight o’clock that evening in a blinding snowstorm as the train crossed a ravine, the wooden trestle collapsed. The railcars, packed with holiday passengers, plunged 75 feet into the icy river and caught fire. Over a hundred people perished in the wreck, among them—Philip Bliss and his family. He was only 38.

By providence, Philip’s trunk had been placed on another train and it arrived safely in Chicago. Inside his friends found the words to his last hymn. “I will sing of my Redeemer / And His wonderous love to me. / One the cruel cross He suffered / From the curse to set me free.”[1]

Bliss is considered by many to be one of the greatest hymnists in history. Had he lived as long as his peers, Fanny Crosby, Charles Wesley and Ira Sankey, he may have surpassed them all. Along with his last song, “I Will Sing of My Redeemer” another favorite of his is “Wonderful Words of Life.” Even though it’s been over 140 years since his death, we are still singing his hymns today.

As I thought about the relatively short, but impactful life of Bliss, I was reminded of a quote that I heard sometime ago by holocaust survivor, Corrie Ten Boom, “The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.” The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it, which is the Word and God and souls of men and women. Bliss went out of this world singing and writing for the Lord. What about you? Has the Lord inspired you to write something—a song, a poem, a book or a devotional. Why not write it down ASAP; you never know how it might bless someone else down the road. -DM

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[1] Robert J. Morgan, On This Day, “Pure Bliss,” December 29, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997).