Loving Those In the Margins

Dannah Gresh: Showing true compassion to those on the margins means a lot more than just feeling sorry for them. Here’s Dr. Karen Ellis.

Dr. Karen Ellis: As we visit widows and the fatherless in their distress, as we move from pitying the bereft to empowering them for kingdom service, God breathes life into us!

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of
Surrender: The Heart God Controls, for July 25, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Dannah, recently I’ve been journaling through the New Testament—the Gospel of Matthew. I’ve been just struck by how many times it talks about the compassionate heart of Jesus—His compassion for individuals who were needy and desperate and struggling, and His compassion for large crowds as well.

I’ve been so struck by that and have said, “Lord, I want to have more of a compassionate heart.” I want to be better tuned to the needs of the people that God puts in my path, and to be asking Him, ‘Lord, is there some way that You want to minister through me to speak to that woman?”

Dannah: This is such an important part of womanhood because I believe God created us as women with an amazing capacity for empathy. When you look at how a woman’s brain is wired, how her heart and her emotions are wired, we were created to give compassion to others.

Compassion is our theme this July here at Revive Our Hearts, and we’re excited to bring you a message from Dr. Karen Ellis. She’s been a guest on Revive Our Hearts before, but Nancy, for those who are not familiar with Karen, could you re-introduce her for us?

Nancy: Dr. Karen is the Director of The Center for the Study of the Bible and Ethnicity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta. She’s a powerful advocate for the global persecuted church around the world! In fact, she’ll be leading the breakout session on how we can have compassion for the persecuted church.

The message we’re about to hear is a message that Karen Ellis gave at a recent Gospel Coalition women’s conference. Here’s Karen Ellis, speaking on how we can show true love to those who are in the margins.

Dr. Karen: I heard my brother, who spoke before me, start in the book of James 1, verse 27, and I said, “Son of a gun took my text!” And then I thought, Lord, he’s using up all the Scripture. He’s not leaving any for me on the stage!

And then I felt this tap on my shoulder, and it was Jesus, and He said, “You know, My Word is living and activ,e and you can’t plumb the depths of it! So go ahead and go on and give the message that you brought as well.” So let’s stay in the book of James, chapter 1, verse 27, because we can’t hear it enough! 

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27 NIV)

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!

Who is a widow? Widows and orphans, they are so often paired together in Scripture. The widow and the orphan are the twins of the margins. Add to them the stranger, and you have a small “t,” trinity of oppression.

When it comes to the Scripture, rarely does one of these three appear on their own. And from Genesis to Revelation, and particularly in Deuteronomy, we see that how we treat the widow and the orphan and the ones who fall on society’s margins is of extreme importance to the God of the Bible.

God Himself ensures, as Deuteronomy promises us, that orphans and widows receive justice from Him, both in this life and in the next. So because the Old and New Testament cohere together, we understand how James captures the importance of their care in this New Testament verse.

As we talk about widows in relation to how God sees them and what our responsibility is, I want to introduce you first to my friend Andy Mendonsa. He wrote a book called Spiritual Widowhood. And Brother Andy challenges many of our assumptions about widows and, yes, even orphans as well.

Spiritual Widowhood captures Brother Mendonsa’s heart. He’s a very simple minister of the Word. He’s never been ordained, but he’s been faithful to the Word and to ministering on the margins for thirty years! 

He has poured his life into a ministry called Widow’s Harvest, ministering to widows in the city where I live.This means he has spent thirty years meditating on James 1:27, the Scripture that opened our talk, and putting into practice what he’s read.

And Brother Mendonsa has observed over the last thirty years that God views and accepts our religion—that is our worship, in the most literal sense of the word—as either being pure and undefiled on the one hand, or impure and defiled. As a matter of fact, in that word there is no middle way. You’re either one or you’re the other.

And inevitably, depending on the church’s faithfulness to Scripture, a critical mass is going to be reached depending on which side of the equation you pour into: pure and undefiled leading to restoration or impure and defiled leading to desolation.

Now here in the West, we tend to frame widows in a cultural sense more than a biblical one. But the Bible has a much deeper, more rich, description for a widow than simply a woman who’s husband has died.

The Greek word for “widow” in the New Testament is chera, which means “bereft.”It literally and culturally in the biblical context is a woman bereft of the full provision and flourishing that could be provided by a husband or a family. 

It’s her condition that scripturally qualifies her as a widow, not the circumstance that led her to that condition. The circumstances that had left her being bereft in a male-dominated world may have been: 

• Divorce
• Abandonment
• Death
• Imprisonment
• Being placed in a nursing home and forgotten
• Becoming physically or mentally disabled
• Being rejected by her family because of her faith
• Having been single and never married 

The circumstances can be many and varied. So our cultural definition doesn’t quite give us the full picture, and it leaves a whole lot of people out of the equation. 

To limit widowhood to an identity that’s solely based on the death of a husband cuts short the fullness above the need and the opportunity at hand. In short, ladies, we’ve been shortchanging ourselves and a significant portion of our population.

It seems that the quality and condition of our church communities hinge on how well or how poorly this particular group is cared for and empowered and spurred on to good works for the kingdom.So in Brother Mendonsa’s book, as he explores spiritual widowhood, he takes things a step further and expands things for us.

He argues that we would understand the plight of widows better if we understood our own spiritual widowhood. All of humanity is, he argues, a spiritual widow. Why? Because we’ve been separated from our bridegroom by the effects of the fall. Let me unpack that.

He points out that we’re all spiritual widows, just like we’re all spiritual orphans separated from the Bridegroom by the first sin of our first parents in the Garden [of Eden]. Now, we focus easily on being the Bride of Christ, but not so easily on our own spiritual widowhood that led us to the need for being redeemed.

And this is so here in the West, and even outside of the West, because our culture has built an idol in the industry of marriage and child bearing. Everybody wants to be a bride! Nobody wants to be a widow!

And of course, healthy marriages and child bearing and child rearing are good for society. But they are not and were never intended to be ultimate. For in the moment they become ultimate, the measure by which we assume our entire identity and our significance and our purpose, we’ve created an idol ourselves, and we fall into self-worship.

Until we’re born again in Christ, we’re spiritual widows! We’re approaching flourishing, but we’re still floundering in our lostness and our disconnection from the One who longs to make us whole. In telling the story of the significance of our own spiritual widowhood, Brother Andy takes an interesting turn, and he takes us to John 19, one of Christ’s final act on the cross. It’s the point where He gives over His own mother—now bereft herself—a widow, to the care of a brother in the soon-to-be-fledgling house of faith.

What does this mean for us? Scripture tells the story as it starts in John 19, verse 25. It says, 

Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene.

Mary must have been like the “Brittany” or the “Ashley” of the early church, because everybody was named Mary, right?

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then He said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. After this, Jesus—knowing that all was now finished—he said, to fulfill the Scripture, “I thirst.” (vv. 26–28)

In the Protestant tradition we’ve come to understand that at this point in Mary’s life, Joseph must have passed on, because we don’t see him anymore in the narrative. 

Now, watch this. Christ’s last act was to provide for His now-widowed mother. This is how seriously the Lord of Creation takes the care of those who are left bereft in our society.

And this is a particularly interesting excursion into the text, because we’re always taught to see Mary as only the virgin bride, or perhaps only as the mother of the Savior of the world. She was indeed all of these things, but surely these roles have overshadowed this particular moment in redemptive history, and it seems like it’s too important to overlook!

Because once we realize that Mary in her role as a physical widow, is also a symbol of our own spiritual widowhood, from which Jesus came to deliver and redeem us—as well as in her role as a virgin bride, which symbolizes who God desires His Church to be a bride without spot, stain, or wrinkle.

We see in this moment of joining new mother to new Son, widow to orphan, it’s operating on so many levels that our minds work overtime to keep up! For, indeed, in the very words “and from that hour the disciple took her to his own home,” I hear the echoes of our Lord’s words for all of us as spiritual widows in John 14:2, where He tells us:

“In my Father’s house there are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. And I go to prepare a place for you.” (KJV)

So here Mendonsa notes that we have married as a widow—proving God’s deliverance—a bride, proving God’s promise, and Mary in marriage, proving God’s restoration.

And Jesus’ last act toward her on the cross can be understood then as the ultimate act of pure and undefiled worship that we read about in James. But catch this: the widow and the orphan are too significant in the kingdom of God just to be pitied. Indeed, I argue that they are not to be pitied. They are to be empowered.

And in my travels at home and abroad, I see this empowerment played out over and over again, and it is truly remarkable. I wish you could all come with me. First, we’re going to go to China. My friend, John Ensor, is the President of PassionLife. He’s a valiant advocate against global gendercide.

He tells of this single woman in Chinese culture who rescued a newborn baby girl who had been thrown into the cemetery to die. The baby was still alive. She had probably been thrown into the cemetery because she was a baby girl and undesirable in Chinese culture.

This single gal goes and takes the baby from a graveyard, rescues her to her own bosom, legally adopts the child . . . and everything is above board and by the standards of the Chinese government. That is an important concept, because at that day what were those standards?

This woman signed away her right to ever give birth herself, since China was under the “one child policy” at the time. She also sacrificed her reputation among possible suitors, because people who don’t know her situation would assume that she was pregnant out of wedlock and thus, in their culture, a woman of low character.

So this young woman sacrificed her own birth opportunity, her own marriage potential, and her reputation to take in the orphan. My friend John met the young woman’s daughter when she was about eight years old, and saw firsthand this incredible picture of the orphan and the widow—by our broader definition—together!

We see this same faithfulness among many of you here in this room. Many of you are like my dear sister, Latevia Priddy. Latevia, raise your hand. She’s somewhere in here. If you see her, pat her on the shoulder. Many of you are like Latevia, a beautiful single sister with whom I shared breakfast this morning.

Latevia Priddy, attorney at law, heads her own law firm in Louisville, Kentucky. She and her team are completely restructuring their office to focus exclusively on family law. They’re eagerly addressing fast-changing new legislation with counter policies and procedures that think outside the box to enhance the church’s ability to answer our changing foster care and adoption possibilities. Creativity and empowerment from our margins, from a single gal! 

The second location on our trip: Iran. The visitation of God that imparts life, what we’ve spoken of in James 1:27, is alive and well in Iran!

Our friend and brother named Hormoz Shariat runs Iran Alive television. He says that there is a very special grace on Iranian Christians living inside that country! Why?

Women in Iran are relegated to the margins of society. They have limited rights, and they are treated as a man’s property—first a father’s and then a husband’s. And since Iran is the only country in the world that’s led by Islamic clergy, the women of Iran are not just oppressed culturally by the men of Iran in their personal lives, but also by the government.

Now, we know that Jesus works in a special way among the oppressed segment of society, and so, of course, He’s doing a special work among these bereft women in Iran. Many of them are stuck in unhappy marriages where the husband is unfaithful and abusive. She can’t stay; she can’t leave.

And so despite the presence of a man in a house, she’s still bereft, still a widow, with no provision to flourish. Divorced women in Iran are looked at as free game; they’re considered open for prostitution. A divorced woman will still have a hard time supporting herself financially.

She’s often forced into some type of prostitution, even when applying for jobs. Most employers—implicitly or explicitly—imply that sexual favors are expected from them to be hired. And because the children are almost always given to the father in a divorce, a married woman who seeks a divorce not only enters the society as an outcast, but will also lose the children that she loves! 

Many people living under these conditions have become depressed and even suicidal. Iran has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

Here’s how this system plays into this for single women: a woman thirty years and older is considered undesirable for marriage. If you don’t believe in systematic oppression, if you don’t believe that’s a real thing, I truly hope this convicts you, because this is how it breaks down in Iran.

A bad economy, a high rate of unemployment among the men under forty means most men can’t provide for a family until they’re older. Of course, it’s fine for a man to marry for the first time in his late thirties or forties, and when he does marry, who will he choose? Someone in their twenties.

So a women who gets to be thirty to thirty-five or older most likely will never marry. Because this causes so much despair, culturally the preferred method of suicide is drastic and painful and harsh, and it’s done through self-immolation. 

That is, they set themselves on fire, mistakenly believing that the flames will somehow purify their female deficiency in this life. Bereft! Enter Christ!.

Pedina was a disillusioned Iranian young Muslim woman who had attempted suicide unsuccessfully several times. As her mom was dying of multiple sclerosis, with three months left to live, she lost most of her body functions. Pedina and her mother decided to commit suicide together. But miraculously, the Lord changed their lives that night! He visited them, and they met Christ.

After salvation, they became underground church planters, and today the two of them are leading one of the largest underground house church networks in Iran! Underground church leaders made from women who were formerly oppressed and desperate, but are now secure in Christ—where women are respected, joint heirs of Christ’s inheritance alongside men!

They reported, “Mohammed does not address women once in the Koran! Yet Christ walked and talked and dined and invited the women on the margins into His circles!” They have a new relationship with God, who loves them and sustains them in the hard life they’re living. They are mighty in spirit, imprisoned alongside the men in horrible conditions for their faith. Then they emerge again to return to their stealth work, facing risk all over again! 

One more location . . . off to the desert in an undisclosed location. My friend Deborah (which is not her real name), a single woman living among an unreached people group in the middle of the desert: three generations of people stripped of their dignity, their identity, and their significance.

Systemic injustice has brought this entire population to a place where there is no electricity or water—no water. There are very few economic opportunities and not much hope. Everything around them is the color of sand, and time passes very slowly!

And Deborah, who understands what it is to be at one time bereft, forgotten, on the margins, is serving among them, bringing the same message of hope that transformed her life! The message that God hears, that He sees, that they matter to Him. Holy Spirit creativity is her weapon against despair.

One time a new believer wanted to get baptized and she was like, “How are we going to do this? We’re in the desert, and you know we don’t have any water! How are you going to baptize somebody with no water?!”

She actually solved the lack of water with a trip to a community shower several miles away. It’s an open community, so the whole family wanted to come. “You guys are going to the showers!” And she figured out how to baptize them quietly. There’s always a creative way to navigate every obstacle!

 

These are things that are straight out of Acts! You’ve heard of “straight out of Compton?” (laughter) These are straight out of Acts! (Somebody needs to make that T-shirt be available within the week, watch for it: ‘Straight Out of Acts’!)

My point is this: as we practice James 1:27, as we visit widows and the fatherless in their distress, as we move from pitying the bereft to empowering them for kingdom service, God breathes life into us! He breathes life into our churches and into our communities and into all who are spiritually bereft!

These are the things these women from the margins—now no longer bereft—teach those of us who live in comfort and privilege. Here are four principles from the margins that I have been blessed to observe.

One: live for today with your eyes fixed on tomorrow. Some aspects of Christianity place a lot of emphasis on the reality of this world, other aspects of Christianity focus on “the sweet by-and-by" and they ignore the “nasty now-and-now” altogether! But those who persevere deal in both—they use their future hope to shape their present reality.

Second: there’s beauty in stealth and in kingdom creativity. The power of powerlessness can change people, families, communities, cities, and even nations from the bottom up and from the margins in!

Third: political power is fleeting. No matter how much political clout you think you’ve assembled, there will always come a day when “a new pharaoh comes to the throne who knows not Joseph.” A Christian is always one cultural wind away from dwelling in the land of Goshen.

Fourth: they have taught me that making a mark in the Lamb’s Book of Life—the book that we will study for eternity—is far greater than any mention in the history books of men that will pass away. And let me tell you, the subject matter between those two different books is completely different!

The heroes are different; the victories are recorded very differently, and the subject matter and the way the story gets told, the bottom is up and the top is bottom. I am persuaded that the future of Christianity in America is on America’s margins. It’s on the world’s margins.

As my dear brother in Fairfield, Alabama, Rev. Alton Hardy, who ministers on the margins just said a few days ago, “The truth is, without affliction and hardship, we would be trivial, superficial, flat-sided beings, people without depth or substance, people with a shallow faith.” The margins prepare us to live with a persecution hermeneutic and a virtue of perseverance. 

History is lo-o-ong. Sometimes it’s so long we get comfortable, sometimes it’s so long we forget who we are, and we forget what we are capable of accomplishing. We forget that God is as large and sovereign as He says He is! Or perhaps we even begin to doubt. Satan has never stopped whispering in our ears, “Did God really say . . .?”

Who are we going to be as our cultural winds become more and more hostile toward those who want to live a biblical life? Who are you going to be? Will we teach our children to see themselves as perpetual victims, be it of persecution or oppression?

Are we training them to rely too heavily on government legislation or to grasp for power to accomplish the kingdom work that the church on the margins does best? Or are we teaching our children to see themselves as called-out, set-apart people on task and moving with purpose through their Father’s world?

The “margins” is our heritage. There’s life on the margins. The power of the kingdom of God is on the margins, because God visits those on the margins! He visits the widow and breathes life into them!

I say let the bereft of the world—including the widow—show us the way. How should we love the widow? To encourage the widow is to love her, to empower the widow is to love her, to sit at the feet of the widow and learn is to love her. 

They will remind us who we are: capable of being powerful, creative, strong, decisive, trusting, teaching, believing, Bible women because His kingdom is not of this world! If that doesn’t make you want to shout for joy in the midst of this broken, cruel, idolatrous, and punishing world, ah, well, then God help us! I can’t help you, if that doesn't make you want to shout!

Everybody stand to your feet and let this good news wash over you! Because this is the good news which we’ve received, in which we stand, and by which we are saved—that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried and that He was raised on the third day and that He appeared to the women first . . . because they were looking for it!

His own mother no longer a widow! And then He appeared to Peter and to the twelve and to many faithful witnesses. We believe He is the Christ. Do we? We believe He is the Son of the Living God. Do we? We believe He is the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, He is our Lord and our God! Amen! Amen! Amen!

Nancy: Well, Dannah, as I’ve heard it said in the South, “If that don’t light your fire, then your wood’s wet!”

Dannah: Yes, I think that’s probably true! We just heard Dr. Karen Ellis speaking at an event for women sponsored by The Gospel Coalition. She was talking about loving those in the margins. And it’s an area where most of us need to grow a little bit. 

That’s one reason we’ve made compassion our theme all this month here on Revive Our Hearts. Compassion-—the idea of suffering alongside someone.

Nancy: Yes, I love that theme, and our emphasis really comes out of a statement in the True Woman Manifesto. Let me read it here: 

We commit, as True Women, that we will reflect God’s heart for orphans, widows and others who are vulnerable, marginalized or oppressed by extending kindness, ministering to their needs in the name of Christ, and promoting justice for all people as bearers of God’s image.

Dannah: That idea is what should make us ask, “How can I show more compassion?” Right?

Nancy: How do we do that? How do we become channels of the compassion that we’ve received from God and show that compassion to others with His compassion? It’s something that our world desperately needs to see Christians doing!

Dannah: Well, to help us grow in this area, Erin Davis wrote a booklet called Uncommon Compassion. In it she walks us through the various Scripture passages that show us the compassionate heart of the Lord, and she helps us think through how we can live that out in our own lives.

The booklet, Uncommon Compassion, is our gift to you for your donation of any amount. Be sure to ask for it when you make a donation at ReviveOurHearts.com. If you’d rather give over the phone, our number is 1-800-569-5959.

Well, our compassionate, loving, heavenly Father sometimes brings us through some dark valleys. Tomorrow we’ll hear from a mom who had to learn to entrust her child’s difficult future to God. I hope you’ll join us for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ!

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

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