A few weeks ago I published a blog called, The Best Orphan Care Sermon, highlighting a messaged delivered by David Prince. So, I felt a little stumped after I listened to the first few minutes of a message by John Piper from James 1:27, Visiting Orphans in a World of Aids and Abortion.
Visiting was one of the most encouraging sermons I have heard in a long time. It hit me at a low point and raised my spirits.
Here’s an excerpt on the connection between orphan care and abortion to whet your appetite:
What does abortion have to do with orphans? The connection I see is this: God wants us to be concerned about orphans because they are helpless without mother and father, and we should feel compassion for the helpless who depend utterly on others for life. Picture a three-year-old child riding in his safety seat on the back seat of a car with his mommy and daddy riding in the front. There is a terrible crash and both mommy and daddy are killed. The child has minor injuries, but is okay. The hospital officials check and discover there are no grandparents and no other family members known. This is a heartbreaking situation. And God says to the church, step in there and take care of that child.
So orphans are children whose parents have died and left them at the mercy of others to take care of, lest they die. How does abortion relate to that? Well, abortion puts the child in a worse situation. The parents are not dead, but they have turned on the child and choose to have the child dead. This is worse than being an orphan. To have Mommy and Daddy choose to have you dead is worse than Mommy and Daddy being dead.
So it seems to me that if God wants us to care about the orphan whose life is endangered because his parents are dead, he would want all the more that we care about the child whose life is endangered because his parents choose to make him dead.
And another on AIDS:
[C]onsider the greater tragedy of AIDS, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and its impact on children. Worldwide more than 30 million people are HIV positive or have AIDS. 16,000 are being infected with HIV virus every day. Estimates are that there will be 5.8 million new infections each year, which would bring the total number of HIV/AIDS cases to 40 million by 2000. 2.3 million people died of AIDS in 1997, a 50% increase over 1996, 460,000 of these under 15. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in thirteen sexually active adults is HIV positive, and in certain countries, such as Botswana, it is 30% of the adult population. One of the staggering effects of this is that 8.4 million children have been orphaned by AIDS (StarTribune, Nov. 27, 1997, pp. A1,15).
If your hungry, then consider listening to this one on your lunch break!
Piper – Visiting Orphans in a World of Aids and Abortion
If your wondering how all this fits into adoption, then I encourage you to read our blog, Getting to Christian Adoption.
Photo by Tiago Celestino.
