Gospel for Asia/Groceries for You

Dear Friends,

You can help send the Bread of Life to people in Asia while buying your groceries. It's quick, easy and won't cost you a thing. Here's how it works:

Kroger, Tom Thumb and Albertsons will donate a portion of your total bill to Gospel for Asia each time you purchase groceries. It only takes a few minutes to register with your favorite store's reward program. Choose one or more of the stores listed below and follow the directions to register.

It's an easy decision that will make an eternal difference in the lives of many!

Kroger
Simply print this letter and give it to the cashier at your local Kroger store. The cashier will scan the barcode on the letter and your Kroger Plus Card. That's all you need to do to enroll in Kroger's Neighbor to Neighbor Donation Program. For the next 10 months, Kroger will donate a percentage of $1 million based on your grocery purchases to GFA.

Tom Thumb
Link your Tom Thumb Reward card to GFA by completing the Good Neighbor Program Form, which you can pick up at the store's customer service booth, or print one here. Fill in Gospel for Asia's account number 8913, and return the form to the customer service booth. Once this form is processed, all your future grocery purchases from Tom Thumb will impact Asia for Christ!

Albertsons
Just email us at strategicgiving@gfa.org or call us at 1-800-WIN-ASIA (946-2742) to request one or more Albertsons Community Partners cards. Give this card to the cashier when you purchase groceries at Albertsons, and get it back after it's scanned so you can use it again the next time you shop there. Each time the card is scanned, you will be reaching more people in Asia with God's love!

Partnering with grocery stores to raise money for the mission field costs you--and Gospel for Asia--nothing. But it has proven to be a fruitful decision, helping us touch many lives with the love of Jesus. During 2010, Gospel for Asia received about $440 in donations from these grocery stores. Another local charity received over $51,000 from Kroger alone! With your help, we can reap that much and more for the mission field in 2011!

If you shop at any of these grocery stores, please take the simple steps needed to link your purchases with GFA. It's such an easy way to connect your life with the mission field. And why not encourage your family, friends, church members and neighbors to do so, too?

THANKS so much!

God bless you,

Your Friends at Gospel for Asia

P.S. You can find other no-cost ways to support Gospel for Asia here.

John Piper on the celebration of sin. Via Desiring God

Jesus died so that heterosexual and homosexual sinners might be saved. Jesus created sexuality, and has a clear will for how it is to be experienced in holiness and joy.

His will is that a man might leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and that the two become one flesh (Mark 10:6-9). In this union, sexuality finds its God-appointed meaning, whether in personal-physical unification, symbolic representation, sensual jubilation, or fruitful procreation.

For those who have forsaken God’s path of sexual fulfillment, and walked into homosexual intercourse or heterosexual extramarital fornication or adultery, Jesus offers astonishing mercy.

Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11).

But last weekend this salvation from sinful sexual acts was not embraced. Instead there was massive celebration of sin.

One estimate said that 400,000 people celebrated gay pride in Minneapolis. That’s more than the population of the city. The number is probably inflated, but for the first time in history, it did include the governor of the state, Mark Dayton.

The Bible is not silent about such parades. Alongside its clearest explanation of the sin of homosexual intercourse (Romans 1:24-27) stands the indictment of the celebration of it. Though people know intuitively that homosexual acts (along with gossip, slander, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness) are sin, “they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:29-32). “I tell you even with tears, that many glory in their shame” (Philippians 3:18–19).

This is what our governor was doing on Sunday along with millions of others across the country—knowing these deeds are wrong, “yet approving those who practice them.”

Not only that, we are moving from celebration to institutionalization. On June 24 the New York legislature approved a Marriage Equality Act. This makes New York the sixth state where so-called homosexual marriages will be institutionalized: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, (and the District of Columbia).

My sense is that we do not realize what a calamity is happening around us. The new thing—new for America, and new for history—is not homosexuality. That brokenness has been here since we were all broken in the fall of man. (And there is a great distinction between the orientation and the act—just like there is a great difference between my orientation to pride and the act of boasting.)

What’s new is not even the celebration of homosexual sin. Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia. What’s new is normalization and institutionalization. This is the new calamity.

My main reason for writing is not to mount a political counter-assault. I don’t think that is the calling of the church as such. My reason for writing is to help the church feel the sorrow of these days. And the magnitude of the assault on God and his image in man.

Christians, more clearly than others, can see the tidal wave of pain that is on the way. Sin carries in it its own misery: “Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27).

And on top of sin’s self-destructive power comes, eventually, the wrath of God: “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Colossians 3:5–6).

Christians know what is coming, not only because we see it in the Bible, but because we have tasted the sorrowful fruit of our own sins. We do not escape the truth that we reap what we sow. Our marriages, our children, our churches, our institutions—they are all troubled because of our sins.

The difference is: We weep over our sins. We don’t celebrate them. We turn to Jesus for forgiveness and help. We cry to Jesus, “who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

And in our best moments, we weep for the world. In the days of Ezekiel God put a mark of hope “on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in Jerusalem” (Ezekiel 9:4).

This is what I am writing for. Not political action, but love for the name of God and compassion for the city of destruction.

“My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law.” (Psalm 119:136)

Faint Not

"And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." Galatians 6:9

Remember this--your life is short, your duties many, your assistance great, and your reward certain. Therefore, faint not, and hold on in the way of well-doing, and heaven shall make amends for all. ~ Thomas Brooks

There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man’s faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything. ~ Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Perseverance is the badge of true saints. The Christian life is not a beginning only in the ways of God, but also a continuance in the same as long as life lasts. It is with a Christian as it was with the great Napoleon: he said, “Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

Via: Lee Dodd (Daily Edification)