Phillip Blanks is a retired Marine and was a star receiver in high school and college. He was at a friend’s apartment in Phoenix recently when he heard screaming and a commotion. He ran outside and saw the top floor of the apartment complex ablaze and enveloped in smoke.

He looked up and saw a petrified woman on the third-floor balcony with a child. Flames were creeping up behind her. “People started yelling for the lady to throw her kids down,” Blanks said.

The mother dropped her son over the third-floor railing. As Blanks saw the small child falling, he dove for him, arms out, and caught him just milliseconds before he would have hit the ground.

Blanks said his time in the Marines, along with his athletic training as a football player, prepared him for this moment. The Marines taught him to “always be on high alert, not be complacent, and to have discipline,” he said.

He was not the only hero that day, however.

The child’s mother ran back into the building where her eight-year-old daughter was. She never came out. Word spread below that a child was in the apartment. D’Artagnan Alexander heard screams and saw the flames. “I have a three-year-old and a nine-year-old, so when I heard there were kids in there, that really hit my heart,” he said later.

He immediately parked his car, ran toward the smoke-filled building, and made his way to the third floor, where he found the girl and carried her out.

“Saving this child changed my entire perspective,” Blanks said. “It made me realize how short life is, and how we need to protect each other and treat people better.” Alexander echoed his sentiments: “I couldn’t be more thankful that we both happened to be there.”

“It was not you who sent me here, but God” 

Morgue trucks are being ordered by counties in Texas and Arizona as their morgues are reaching capacity amid the skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases in their states. Florida recorded 15,300 new coronavirus cases yesterday, the largest one-day increase in any state since the start of the pandemic.

In the midst of this crisis, it is easy to feel trapped and powerless. But God knew these days were coming before we did. He assured his people, “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come” (Isaiah 46:10 NIV).

And as with Phillip Blanks and D’Artagnan Alexander, he was preparing us for this pandemic before it struck.

In the midst of a global famine, Joseph told his brothers in Egypt, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:7–8).

“The reality of heaven touching the reality of earth” 

Now it’s our turn to believe that God was preparing us for this “famine” before it struck, that our past has prepared us for a present that can build a better future.

The Bible calls us “God’s fellow workers” (1 Corinthians 3:9). As we work, God works. As we experience God’s love, we are to share his love so that others can experience it as well. In fact, we cannot understand our faith fully until we share it.

If I serve those I love, I find that my love for them grows deeper. If I serve even those I dislike, I find myself liking them in a new way. It is the same way with God—when we serve him by serving those he loves, we find ourselves loving him in an indefinable but profoundly deeper way as well.

In The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship & Work, Regent College professor Steven Garber notes: “We think that worship and work are fundamentally different—one being more important to God than the other, one being ‘spiritual’ and one being ‘secular.’ Rather, if our truest vocation is the imitation of Christ, the very image of God, we see that everyone and everything matters, sacramental as it all is, holy as it must be.

“In a thousand ways, our human experience of this life in the world should be a window into the mystery and wonder of the reality of heaven touching the reality of earth, a ‘sacrament’ so to speak, if we have eyes that see.”

“Yearning for heaven and earth to touch” 

Your Father has entrusted you with gifts, abilities, education, experience, and relationships that are combined to make you the person you uniquely are. When you use them to help hurting people, your ministry advances his kingdom and draws suffering souls to our Savior.

Dr. Garber: “Whether our work is agricultural or academic, whether we are plumbers or carpenters, whether our labor is the law or the marketplace, whether our days take us into hospitals or schools, we want what we do with our lives to be born of something more, reflected, interpreted, and sanctified by the liturgical rhythms and realities of the truest truths of the universe. We are called to be like the Creator himself, yearning for heaven and earth to touch in and through the work of our hands.”

And when we love others as God loves us, they see his love in our compassion and are drawn to his saving grace.

Phillip Blanks and D’Artagnan Alexander are rightly being called heroes after what they did in Phoenix. But Blanks said it was the mother who saved her son but didn’t survive herself who is “the real hero.”

That’s the love of a mother for her children. And that’s the love of a Savior for those he died to save.

If you have experienced his love, with whom will you share it today?

Denison Forum

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was founded in 1845. Slavery played a significant role in its formation, a fact for which the denomination has expressed great remorse.

In a resolution adopted on its 150th anniversary, the SBC stated, “We lament and repudiate historical acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest” and added, “We apologize to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”

The denomination further stated, “We ask forgiveness from our African American brothers and sisters,” and then committed to “pursuing racial reconciliation in all our relationships.”

Now the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has taken a significant step in this pursuit. The SBC’s Executive Committee, the group that runs the business of the denomination outside its annual meetings, has elected its first African American chairman.

Rev. Rolland Slade, senior pastor of Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, was elected unanimously in what the outgoing chairman called a “wonderful and historic moment.” He was previously vice chairman of the committee and chair of its Cooperative Program Committee.

How Tony Evans and Robert Morris are making a difference 

I became a Christian through the outreach of a Southern Baptist church and graduated from a Southern Baptist seminary. While Denison Forum is nondenominational, I will forever be grateful for the contributions made by Southern Baptists to my faith and life.

But I have never been as proud of Southern Baptists as I am today. Nor have I been more committed to their goal of “pursuing racial reconciliation in all our relationships.”

To that end, this week we have been answering Benjamin Watson’s call to respond to racial injustice with awareness, advocacy, and action. Yesterday we discussed awareness, examining the history of racism in American culture and asking God to reveal any vestige of this sin in our lives.

Today, let’s focus on advocacy, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the act or process of supporting a cause or proposal.” We practice advocacy when we use our influence in the service of a value or purpose.

The Executive Committee of the SBC practiced advocacy when it elected an African American chairman. Dr. Tony Evans practiced advocacy when he wrote a brilliant article for the Dallas Morning News stating that “the church must address racial, economic, health care, and opportunity inequity, as well as recognize the systems that work against the fair treatment of people.”

Pastor Robert Morris of Gateway Church practiced advocacy by talking with ministers of different races “to hear the stories from these precious men and women of God of the racism and prejudice that they faced and that their families have faced, their parents, their grandparents.” He adds that their tragic stories “will break your heart.”

His church’s website states, “We acknowledge the evils of racism and discrimination fighting so hard to tear us and our nation apart at the seams.” It adds: “While these issues can be difficult to talk about, we want to keep talking about them and empower you with resources to help you in your own conversations.”

Three steps to justice and truth 

The Bible calls Eve “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). We are all created by the same Father and descended from the same parents. How can you and I be effective advocates for the value of every human being of every race as created in the image of God?

One: Identify your platform 

God has given you resources, abilities, and spiritual gifts that are uniquely yours. Ask the Lord to help you define your mission and influence in our culture today. (For more, see my latest Faithwire article, “Are There At Least 36 Intelligent Civilizations in Our Galaxy? Why Our Uniqueness Is Relevant to COVID-19 and Racism Today.”)

Two: Pray for God’s words and God’s heart 

Human words cannot transform human hearts, but God’s word spoken in the power of God’s Spirit will advance God’s kingdom in our culture and impact others for eternity. Ask the Lord to lead you to the biblical truth he intends for you to share with grace (cf. Ephesians 4:15; 1 Peter 3:15). (For more, see my latest Stream article, “How to Talk about LGBTQ Issues and Racism: Speaking the Truth in Love.”)

Three: Use your influence to stand for God’s inclusive love 

God called his prophet to “run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her” (Jeremiah 5:1). There is no justice that is not built on truth, and no truth that does not lead to justice.

Once you know your platform and you have prayed for God’s leading, look for ways to advance truth and justice in the lives of those you influence. And know that, however they respond, your obedience will bear eternal significance (Matthew 25:23).

The urgent question of the hour 

The hymn, God is Love, closes with these words:

Sin and death and hell shall never
O’er us final triumph gain;
God is love, so Love for ever
O’er the universe must reign.

What part of the “universe” will you influence with God’s love today?

Denison Forum

President Trump signed an executive order on police reform yesterday. He stated that “chokeholds will be banned except if an officer’s life is at risk.” In addition, the federal government will provide funding for “co-responders” like social workers to help police officers deal with issues such as homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse.

The order also mandates that departments share information on officers accused of abusing power. The National Fraternal Order of Police praised the president’s action.

In other news, Dr. Anthony Fauci told a British newspaper, “I would hope to get to some degree of real normality within a year or so. But I don’t think it’s this winter or fall.”

Two days that revealed the world 

March 11 was a day that changed the world. That was the day Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announced they had been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 and the day the NBA suspended its season.

Actually, March 11 was the day when the world became aware of a reality that already existed. A disease that began in China the previous year has now infected more than eight million people and caused more than 443,000 deaths as of this morning.

May 25 was a second day that changed the world. That was the day George Floyd died in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. The response to his tragic death has become a global movement to combat racism in all its forms.

Actually, May 25 was the day when the world became aware of a reality that already existed. African slaves were first imported into what we know as America four hundred years earlier. Racial minorities have been dealing with discrimination for centuries.

Awareness of racism in the past 

If you’re like most of us, you wish we were making more progress than we are on both fronts. To that end, let’s consider a call issued last Sunday by former New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson at an event he hosted called Boston Pray. As I noted in the Monday Daily Article, the hour of prayer, worship, and Bible study was remarkably powerful and hopeful.

At one point, Watson stated that to make progress on racial justice, we need awareness, advocacy, and action. Today and for the rest of this week, we will focus on all three.

Let’s begin with awareness.

Mark Noll is one of America’s preeminent church historians. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, he has taught at Wheaton College, Notre Dame, and now at Regent College.

Over the weekend, I read his remarkable study, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. He notes that many Europeans came to the New World with the firm belief that they were racially superior to the indigenous people they found here and to the millions of Africans who were eventually enslaved in America.

Slavery was legally abolished in the US with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment extended the rights of citizenship to African Americans; the Fifteenth Amendment extended to them the right to vote. But the racial prejudice that had empowered slavery remained.

Awareness of racism in the present 

Noll writes that less than a decade after the end of the Civil War, “the unleashing of lynch-law terrorism, the general lack of concern for black civil rights in the North, and the imposition in the South of Jim Crow laws to quash black political participation” were inflicted on the nation’s African American population. (“Jim Crow laws,” named for a black minstrel show character, were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation.)

As Noll notes, the consequence was a functional repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It took almost one hundred years after the Civil War ended for civil rights legislation to ban racial discrimination and remove legal barriers to voting by African Americans.

Unfortunately, many white Americans think this legislation ended the problem of racism in our country. As African Americans across our country have been saying in the wake of George Floyd’s death, this is tragically far from true.

A yard sign offers transforming hope 

I am convinced that until our nation embraces our Father’s love for all people of all races, we cannot be the nation he wants us to be. Since “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34), we must reject all prejudice. Since he “made from one man every nation of mankind” (Acts 17:26), we must embrace all men and women as our brothers and sisters.

The good news is that our living Lord stands ready to empower us as we seek to make true our nation’s founding claim that “all men are created equal.”

As I was walking in my neighborhood this week, a yard sign caught my eye: “Hope is alive. Jesus is alive!” I noted on Instagram that because Jesus is alive, we have hope for our past, since Jesus died for our sins (Romans 5:8) and rose from our grave. We have hope for our present, since the living Lord is praying for us right now (Romans 8:34). And we have hope for our future, since Jesus will return for us (John 14:3) and will one day create “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1).

Here’s my invitation to you: Ask Jesus to show you if there are racial sins in your past, then repent of anything he brings to your mind and claim his forgiving grace (1 John 1:9). Ask Jesus to show you ways you can respond to racism in the present, then obey his call at all costs (cf. Romans 12:1–2). Ask Jesus to show you ways you can help build a more just future, then follow his Spirit’s leading (John 16:13).

I am joining you in all three prayers today in the assurance that hope is alive because Jesus is alive.

Who will experience hope because Jesus is alive in you?

Denison Forum