Josephine Margaret Bakhita: From Slave to Servant of Christ

Josephine Bakhita died on this day in 1947. She was a remarkable believer who reveled in the love of God and lived her life in service to Him, despite the years she suffered in abusive slavery. Born around the year 1869 in the troubled region of Darfur in Sudan, she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders while still a child, in about 1877. This began a horrific 12-year ordeal as a slave. 

Not only did her captors forcibly convert her to Islam, but they also forcibly marched her 600 miles to the city of El Obeid. She was so traumatized by the kidnapping, she forgot her name. Bakhita was, in fact, a name given to her by her slavers. It means “lucky.” 

During the march, Bakhita was bought and sold twice. Afterward, she was sold a third time to a wealthy Arab merchant who assigned her as a maid to his two daughters. For the most part, they liked her and treated her well, though at one point, when she accidentally broke a vase, the merchant’s son beat her so badly that she could not leave her bed for days. 

Bakhita was then sold to a Turkish general, tasked with serving his mother-in-law and wife. Both treated Bakhita with extreme cruelty. They whipped her daily and scarred her body with deep razor lines, even rubbing salt into them. The abuse left 114 scars on Bakhita’s body. 

In the 1870s, Muhammad Ahmad, a Muslim cleric in Sudan, began to agitate for religious renewal and freedom from foreign control. He led a major revolt against the Turks and declared himself the Mahdi, essentially a Muslim Messiah. As the Mahdists were closing in on El Obeid, Bakhita was sold for a fifth time. Unlike her previous masters, Italian Vice Consul Callisto Legnani treated her kindly. When the Mahdists besieged Khartoum, Legnani slipped out of the city, bringing Bakhita with him at her request. Along with Legnani’s friend Augusto Michieli, they traveled 450 miles to the port city of Suakin. There, the party set sail and arrived in Genoa in 1885. Legnani gave Bakhita to Michieli’s wife as a gift. 

Bakhita’s primary job was to be a nanny to Michieli’s daughter. While arrangements were being made to move the family to Sudan, Bakhita and the daughter were sent to the convent of the Canossian sisters in Venice. There, Bakhita learned of a different Master, who was flogged on her behalf, who created her, knew her, and loved her. Bakhita had longed to know the Creator, and now she had found Him. She placed her hope in Christ. 

When Michieli’s wife returned, Bakhita refused to leave the convent. In fact, the convent went to court to protect Bakhita. The court ruled that since slavery had been outlawed in Sudan before Bakhita’s birth and was illegal in Italy, Bakhita had never legally been a slave and thus was not the property of the Michieli family. Bakhita stayed in the convent, was baptized, took Communion, and was confirmed by Archbishop Sarto, the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice and future Pope Pius X. Eventually, she took the names Josephine Margaret and Fortunata (Latin for “Bakhita,” or “Lucky”). 

Bakhita became a Canossian sister and was assigned to the convent at Schio in Vicenza. She was so kind and gentle that she was regarded to be a living saint. The townspeople even thought her presence would protect them during World War II. As it turns out, Schio was bombed but suffered no loss of life during the war. 

From 1935-1939, Bakhita was sent to Milan to help prepare sisters to be missionaries to Africa. According to her biographer, “her mind was always on God, and her heart in Africa.” 

Bakhita died on February 8, 1947, and was canonized on October 1, 2000. Today, the anniversary of her death, also her feast day according to Roman Catholic practice, has become the International Day of Prayer to Stop Human Trafficking. When asked what she would say to her captors if given the chance, Josephine replied, “If I were to meet those who kidnapped me, and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands. For, if these things had not happened, I would not have been a Christian and a [Canossian] today.” 

Written By: John Stonestreet and Glenn Sunshine

Source: Breakpoint

Self-Control in God's Strength

A 1972 study known as the “marshmallow test” was developed to gauge children’s ability to delay gratification of their desires. The kids were each offered a single marshmallow to enjoy but were told if they could refrain from eating it for ten minutes, they’d be given a second one. About a third of the children were able to hold out for the larger reward. Another third gobbled it up within thirty seconds!

We might struggle to show self-control when offered something we desire, even if we know it would benefit us more in the future to wait. Yet Peter urged us to “add to [our] faith” many important virtues, including self-control (2 Peter 1:5–6). Having laid hold of faith in Jesus, Peter encouraged his readers, and us, to continue to grow in goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, affection, and love “in increasing measure” as evidence of that faith (vv. 5–8).

While these virtues don’t earn us God’s favor nor secure our place in heaven, they demonstrate—to ourselves as well as to all those with whom we interact—our need to exercise self-control as God provides the wisdom and strength to do so. And, best of all, He’s “given us everything we need [to live] a godly life,” one that pleases Him, through the power of the Holy Spirit (v. 3).

Source: Our Daily Bread

Written By: Kirsten Holmberg

Faithfulness in All Things

Christian faithfulness, especially at a time of cultural chaos, isn’t really about trying to do great things for God. In a tweet, my friend Katy Faust of Them Before Us explained:   

Afraid for the nation? Buy a house. Plant a garden. Get married. Have lots of babies. Help your children marry well, be great grandparents. You needn’t run for office, start a podcast or lead a thinktank. The most powerful & countercultural work happens in your home.  

Amen. She then cited Jeremiah 29:5-6, in which God told the exiles of Judah to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.”  

It can be easy to equate “greatness” with fame or followers or something loud and big. But God asks for faithfulness in whatever our hand finds to do. That was true for the exiles in Babylon, and it’s still true today.

Written By: John Stonestreet and Kasey Leander

Source: Breakpoint

Effective Compassion vs. Effective Altruism

Earlier this month, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to fraud after the shocking collapse of his multibillion-dollar crypto exchange company FTX. It’s a complicated case, but the central allegation is that Bankman-Fried used money from one of his businesses to pay the debts of a different one, defrauding investors and customers. The fallout has been incredible. Some estimates place what he owes investors at up to 8 billion dollars. 

As he tells the story, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried never set out to be a billionaire business tycoon. While in college at MIT, he was approached by William MacAskill, a well-known philosopher, professor, and author, who encouraged Bankman-Fried to join a movement of philosophers and philanthropists called Effective Altruism. 

Most effective altruists deny the existence of both a Creator and that the universe has any ultimate purpose, although there are some who claim to be Christians. Most believe that human beings are here by chance, but as long as we are here, we have a moral duty to alleviate the suffering of the most people possible. Mostly, this is meant in a mathematical sense. 

Allegedly, MacAskill convinced the promising young techie that he had a responsibility to make as much money as possible and give a lot of it away. After all, not everyone can become a billionaire investor, and even fewer would become charitable billionaire investors. Sam Bankman-Fried believed he could and decided he would, often talking about causes as diverse as supplying mosquito nets for malaria-vulnerable areas to protecting the world from killer robots. 

This focus on consequences, rooted in an ethical theory known as utilitarianism, is a first concern with Effective Altruism. In this view, a good end justifies any means. Effective Altruism tends to measure “good ends” in terms of the number of deaths prevented. Of course, protecting vulnerable life is also a biblical value, rooted in a belief that every human being has inherent dignity and eternal value. However, in a biblical view, a life is not only measured by its length. How we live matters as well. 

Ethical utilitarian Peter Singer, also a self-described “Effective Altruist,” has a favorite thought experiment. If you see a small child drowning in a pond, should you always jump in to help? What if you were wearing a new pair of expensive shoes that might be ruined in the mud? The correct response, of course, is that a child should always be prioritized over shoes. Based on this hypothetical, Singer preaches that it’s therefore wrong to ever buy nice shoes because that money could be used to prolong life somewhere.  

This kind of moral reasoning often leads to prioritizing human life en masse over human lives in particular. Certainly, we ought to work to prevent as many deaths as we can. Preventing and treating malaria, for example, is to address the No. 1 killer of human beings in the history of the world. However, it’s essential to remember that human life has infinite value because every human life has infinite value. Thus, the effectiveness of our compassion cannot be adequately measured only in totals. 

Measuring the effectiveness of Effective Altruism requires an omniscience that human beings simply do not have. In Singer’s thought experiment, we are able to see the boy in the pond. However, we’re not able to see whether or not employment, economic mobility, and community development would have led to a fence around the pond, better schooling opportunities, or some other positive developments that could prevent future drownings or perhaps even this one. In this view, anything less than knowing everything makes living a moral life impossible. The result is kind of like a parent telling a stubborn child to eat his or her dinner because a different child is starving on the other side of the world, as if the two scenarios are related. 

A Christian moral vision does not reduce humanity or humans to a math equation. As ethicist and theologian Oliver O’Donovan has put it, “to love everybody in the world equally is to love nobody very much.” Rather, as Paul instructed the church at Corinth, real good is brought to the world when we each “lead the life that the Lord has assigned. …” In this view, an expensive alabaster jar of perfume poured on the head of Jesus, rather than being sold to help the poor, is not wasted. A widow’s mite can have infinite value, while a multimillion-dollar collaboration of government charities that prop up dictators, corruption, and horrific evils could bring more harm than good. 

This call, to steward the gifts God gives us for His ends and in His way, motivates the “Hope Awards,” given each year by our friends at WORLD News Group to nonprofit organizations that not only have worthy goals but also successfully employ moral methods. WORLD calls this “effective compassion.” The kind of wisdom we need to help without hurting God gives generously and does not require omniscience, at least not from us. 

Written By: John Stonestreet and Maria Baer

Source: Breakpoint

Kindness is Not Weakness

Years ago, when I was serving as a preaching pastor in a church, I was approached by an eleven year-old in our congregation who wanted to introduce me to his friend, Jared. Jared was on his soccer team, and had never been to church before. After a few minutes of talking, Jared told me that he needed prayer, that his Dad had left, and he didn’t know what his family was going to do. He wondered if I might pray that God would “put my Mom and Dad back together.” I prayed with him, and he turned to go back to his seat. He was wearing a shirt celebrating the inauguration of a President who was unpopular with most of the people in my mostly white, blue-collar congregation. As I watched this young man walk down his first-ever church aisle, to hear the gospel perhaps for the first time, a middle-aged man walked past him and huffed, “We need to get you a better shirt.”

I was incredulous. I wanted to yell, “He’s lost. He’s wounded. He’s hurting. He doesn’t know Christ, and you’re worried about this shirt!” My church member was lacking the full context, and he didn’t ask. All he knew was that he didn’t like the President on the boy’s shirt. I wondered how often I’ve done the same thing. How often have I fought the fight I saw in front of me, instead of the one that was really there to be fought.

The Lord’s servant is not quarrelsome, Paul commands. This is part of a more comprehensive gospel reality: as we are conformed to Christ we seek to diminish ourselves, and, by the Spirit, to live more the life of Christ within us. That’s why Paul told Timothy he must “patiently endure evil” (2 Tim. 2:24). Quarrelsomeness, the desire to fight for the sake of fighting, is a sign of pride. How often are our most bitter, sarcastic clashes with those who disagree with us less about persuading them and more about vindicating ourselves? This is especially true when we fear that those who oppose us think we’re stupid or evil (or both). We want to prove to them, and to ourselves, that they are wrong about us. That’s quite a different spirit from the Spirit of Christ.

Our Christ does not “cry aloud or lift up his voice,” and neither does he “grow faint or be discouraged, till he has established justice in the earth” (Isa. 41:2, 4). Jesus doesn’t defend himself against personal offenses, and he doesn’t allow injustice to stand without shining light upon it. This is because Jesus has a broader vision of what’s going on. Jesus doesn’t blink before Pilate because he knows, ultimately, he is setting the agenda, not Pilate (Jn. 18:36-37). This is not because Jesus doesn’t’ see the fight before him, but because he sees a bigger, more seemingly intractable, fight in the distance. Kindness and gentleness grow, not when we downplay warfare, but when we emphasize it. For Paul, kindness is not politeness. It’s a weapon in spiritual warfare. We teach and rebuke with kindness and gentleness, so that “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to his will” (2 Tim. 2:25-26).

The Scriptures, we know, present a picture of the universe as a war zone, with the present age a satanic empire being invaded by the rival kingdom of Jesus. Talk of such realities rise and fall in the history of the church, oscillating between preoccupation and embarrassment. The church around the world—especially in what sociologist Philip Jenkins calls the Global South—grasps the kind of demon-haunted universe presented in the Scriptures. But many North American and Western European Christians wince at the “spiritual warfare” novels of the previous generation, with invisible angels and demons duking it out over small town America. We cringe at the latest television faith healer describing the demons that were persecuting him right around the time he was caught with the cocaine and the prostitutes. Many liberal Protestant churches excised “Onward Christian Soldiers” and other such “martial” hymns years ago. They are not the only ones. When was the last time you heard an evangelical praise chorus speaking of the war against the satanic powers?

Listen to Christian media or attend a “faith and values” rally, and you’ll hear plenty of warfare speech. Unlike past “crusades,” however, such language is directed primarily at people perceived to be cultural and political enemies. If we are too afraid of seeming inordinately Pentecostal to talk about the Devil, we will find ourselves declaring war against mere concepts, like “evil” or “sin.” When we don’t oppose demons, we demonize opponents. And without a clear vision of the concrete forces we as the church are supposed to be aligned against, we find it very difficult to differentiate between enemy combatants and their hostages.

The Scriptures command us to be gentle and kind to unbelievers, not because we are not at war, but because we’re not at war with them (2 Tim. 2:26). When we see that we are warring against principalities and powers in the heavenly places, we can see that we’re not wrestling against flesh and blood (Eph. 6:12). The path to peace isn’t through bellicosity or surrender, but through fighting the right war (Rom. 16:20). We rage against the Reptile, not against his prey.

We hear many calls, from across the religious and political spectrum, for civility. But civility is not enough. Civility is a neutral ground, a sort of mutual non-aggression pact, where we agree to respect one another and not to belittle one another. That’s important, and a good start, but that’s not enough. Just as we are not for “toleration” of those who religiously disagree with us but for “liberty,” so we should not be for mere civility, but for, from our end, kindness. Civility is passive; kindness is active and strategic.

The gospel commands us to speak, and that speech is often forceful. But a prophetic witness in the new covenant era never stops with “You brood of vipers!” It always continues on to say “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” We make arguments, even as we understand that arguments are merely the equivalent of brush-clearing, to get to the main point: a personal connection with the voice that rings down through the ages from Nazareth. We want not simply to convey truth claims, but to do so with the northern Galilean accent that makes demons squeal and chains fall. Kindness isn’t surrender. Gentleness isn’t passivity. Kindness and gentleness, when rooted in gospel conviction, that’s war.

Source: Crosswalk

Written By: Russell Moore