Hoboken NJ, NJ GOP State Committeeman Joshua Sotomayor Einstein invites the Jewish community to join fellow conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans to learn the fundamental tools needed to hold your elected leaders accountable at NJ’s premier Grassroots Activist Workshop. On Sunday, Mach 31, from 11am–5pm, at the beautiful Barsky Gallery (49 Harrison St) in Hoboken, smaller government and tax reform inclined citizens will learn how to get involved and make a difference in local elections and governance. The training will bring together Jews, Christians, Atheists, and people of many backgrounds from across New Jersey who want to build better communication, messaging, advocacy, and leadership skills. Parking is available free of charge; kosher lunch will be provided.
“Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor.”
“Do good… be rich in good works… be generous and ready to share.”
Christians consider the Bible to be our source of truth in matters of faith. And the Bible says more about money than it does about heaven and hell combined. Nearly half of Jesus’ teaching related to money, and there are over 2,300 verses pertaining to money in the Bible. Clearly, it occupies an important place in what we consider to be God’s inspired word. So, what does it say?
In short, three things:
• All of our wealth originates from and belongs to God.
• In light of this, our wealth should be used for God’s purposes.
• God’s purpose is to restore the world to wholeness. This occurs spiritually through salvation in Jesus Christ, and physically through our service and giving to serve the poor, needy, and weak.
Implicit in these three statements is the idea that our wealth is not our own. As followers of Jesus we believe that we have been bought with a price – when He died for us, we were purchased into His eternal family, accepted and redeemed. In light of what He’s done for us, nothing but radical and total submission to His purposes would be reasonable.
Thus, our wealth is not to be used for our own goals, but rather subsumed into the greater purposes of God. Since we believe it is God who enables us to get wealth in the first place, and that we are the recipients of His great grace in our lives, our natural and joyful response is to engage in radical generosity on behalf of the Christian church and the poor.
This gets expressed in a variety of ways, but a few real-life examples might paint a picture of what 21st-century Christian giving looks like in its highest and best form:
• Mark and Megan, in their late 20’s, are so thankful for Mark’s $50,000 bonus he earned at his law firm. Joyfully and with a great sense of purpose, they give the entire amount away toward international justice efforts for the poor, and a Christian camp they admire. They rank the opportunity to give to God’s work more highly than their own potential enjoyment of this money, including their imminent need for a home down-payment.
• Tom and Bree relocate to a poor neighborhood, despite Tom’s very high income. They read about God’s heart for the poor in the Bible, and they want to know God’s heart. They lead a Bible study for the community, and eventually welcome a family in need to stay in their home for a while, while they get back on their feet. They give a huge fraction of their income away, raising their family on the median family income out of a desire to serve the world around them.
• Greg and Alison are home shopping. They buy a house that is only about half of the value of what they can afford, because they want to be able to give generously to address international poverty and spread the Christian message of hope, and don’t want to be tied down by their mortgage. The house is less than what they’d like to have, but they’re thankful God has given them money to share with others.
Paul’s Goodbye
The Apostle Paul stands second only to Jesus in his influence on the Christian faith. In his final goodbye to the Christian community around him, he gave them this charge:
“And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. I coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
He commends them to the word of God’s grace – i.e. the Christian message of spiritual salvation. And then, he tells them that he never coveted money, and goes on to charge them to help the weak and remember that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
Why is Paul mixing up money behaviors with the spiritual message of God’s grace? Consistent with the rest of the Bible, Paul didn’t see money and spiritual matters as separable. His life, free of covetousness and fully generous, was evidence of God’s grace acting in his heart. As the well-known Christian Pastor Tim Keller says, reflecting on this passage,
“To the degree you understand the Gospel of grace, you will live a radically generous life! If you truly have a spiritual inheritance, you are going to be promiscuously generous with your earthly inheritance.”
Christian giving springs from our view of God. Because we believe he emptied himself and gave everything for us, we have no proper response but to turn around, face the world around us, and give ourselves away.
John Cortines, 27, is the co-author of God and Money: How We Discovered True Riches at Harvard Business School (https://www.amazon.com/God-Money-Discovered-Business-Foreword/dp/1628624078). All book royalties are given to charity. John lives in Orlando with his family and works for Generous Giving (www.generousgiving.org), an organization that can help you host a Journey of Generosity (www.generousgiving.org/smallgatherings) retreat with your friends to further explore this message. John has shared the biblical message of generosity on national radio, TV, and at conferences around the country.
The Most Reverend Justin Welby describes Islamic extremists “a Herod of today” in his Christmas Day sermon.
Christianity is facing “elimination” in the Middle East at the hands of an Islamic State “apocalypse”, the Archbishop of Cantebury has warned.
The Most Reverend Justin Welby used his Christmas Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral to say IS is “igniting a trail of fear, violence, hatred and determined oppression”.
He branded the Islamic extremists as “a Herod of today” – a reference to the Biblical despotic king of Judea at the time of Jesus’s birth.
“Confident that these are the last days, using force and indescribable cruelty, they (IS) seem to welcome all opposition, certain that the warfare unleashed confirms that these are indeed the end times,” he said.
No room in America for Christian refugees
January 07, 2015, 04:00 pm
By Abraham H. Miller
At the end of World War II, the Jewish survivors of Europe’s Holocaust found that nearly every door was closed to them. “Tell Me Where Can I Go?” was a popular Yiddish song at the time. Decades later, the Christians of the Middle East face the same problem, and the Obama administration is keeping the door shut.
America is about to accept 9000 Syrian Muslims, refugees of the brutal war between the Assad regime and its Sunni opposition, which includes ISIS, Al Qaeda, and various other militias. That number is predicted to increase each year. There are no Christian refugees that will be admitted.
Why? Because the Department of State is adhering with all the rigidity of a Soviet era bureaucracy to the rule that only people at risk from massacres launched by the regime qualify for refugee status. The rapes of Christian women and the butchery of Christian children do not count. No matter how moved Americans were this Christmas season by the plight of their fellow Christ followers in Syria and Iraq, no matter how horrific the visuals of beheadings, enslavement, and mass murder, the Christians fleeing death do not engender the compassion of this president.
The Christians are being raped, tortured, and murdered by militias, not by the Syrian government. This technicality condemns them to continue to be victims without hope. And this technicality is being adhered to with all the tenacity with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State Department manipulated quotas and created subterfuges to keep out the Jews fleeing the oppression of Nazi Germany. Obama no more wants the Middle East’s Christian refugees than Roosevelt wanted Europe’s Jewish refugees.
We have seen in the last several weeks that President Obama has no difficulty using his “phone and his pen,” as he dramatically boasts, to circumvent the law. When it comes to immigration, he had no difficulty enacting an amnesty that a federal judge subsequently ruled unconstitutional. He has had no problem circumventing Congress to change the relationship with Cuba. This president has shown that he will push back on the constraints of law when he wants to get something done.
Christians in Middle East face growing threat, top cleric says
SEPTEMBER 27, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2014, 12:35 AM BY HANNAN ADELY STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
The patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, a cleric who formerly lived in Teaneck, recalled his visit recently to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where thousands of Christians have fled for their lives. A young boy in a crowded church threw up his arms and said to the patriarch: “We have no place. We have no space.”
He meant a real, physical place for Christians like him and his family, who were expelled from ancient Christian towns in Syria and Iraq. But Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II said he also understood his words to mean a place in the culture, religion and life of the Middle East.
“Their existence is threatened,” Aphrem said during an interview last week at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Teaneck, where he served for 18 years until his election as Antiochan patriarch last spring. “This has been their home for 2,000 years, and thousands of years before that they were indigenous to the area. There’s a real threat that they’ll be driven out of the Middle East and there won’t be Christians anymore in the area where Christ was born.”
