Is your soul satisfied? How do you feed your own soul? What does shape your soul? It does make a huge difference what we let enter into our souls. We can harm our souls with wrong choices. “We work to feed our appetites; Meanwhile our souls go hungry. (Ecclesiastes 6:7, MSG) “Don’t dabble in the occult or traffic with mediums; you’ll pollute your souls. I am God, your God. (Leviticus 19: 31, MSG) “Look at that man, bloated by self-importance—…
One of the biggest blessings in my everyday, ordinary life is God’s presence. Faith is not an abstract theological construction but an on-going conversation with God. Faith and life are meant to be intertwined. God is with us as we peel potatoes and as we converse with our neighbors. When we pray as we go God is in small details of our lives. Psalm 15 gives us a glimpse what faith in ordinary life could look like. God, who gets…
Waiting is -as we all know- hard. But if we see it as an art form or a spiritual practice it gets easier. Not easy but easier. I find it helpful to use the distinction found in the New testament between chronos time and kairos time. We are familiar with chronos time, something we can measure with clocks and calendars. But kairos time is more essential when we learn to practice the art of spiritual waiting. Kairos is the God’s…
We all know God is love. But God is also Joy! All the joy in the world derivatives from God. And there is no joy apart from God. No matter how hard people try to tell you so. All the attempts to have fun are poor substitutes for joy. God was, is and will be JOY. “God sovereignly made me—the first, the basic— before he did anything else. I was brought into being a long time ago, well before Earth got…
As we enter this fall season I invite you to do little self-examination: How is your relationship with God? Hopefully not on the rocks! Where is God in your life in this season? Hopefully not in the margins or in the back of your mind! (But even then remember God is only a whisper away. A fresh start is always possible!) I’ve come to understand that if we approach God only when we need something from him our relationship with…
Grace invites us to try on a new kind of wardrobe. One that God has chosen for us: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Did you just audibly sigh? Don’t worry, I know. The godly wardrobe doesn’t quite fit! But I know a Master Taylor who can help us: The Holy Spirit. When we invite Jesus to live in our heart the Holy Spirit starts working on our new kind of wardrobe. Gently he keeps on working on us and…
Living in grace is liberating and empowering. Grace gets us into the loving presence of God and it validates our existence. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is in relation to God: We are God’s children and we love because God loved us first. I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure…
Don’t you just love how God works? How he gives us a fresh start time after time? How he pulls us out of chaos and shows us the right way to go? But me he caught—reached all the way from sky to sea; he pulled me out Of that ocean of hate, that enemy chaos, the void in which I was drowning. They hit me when I was down, but God stuck by me. He stood me up on…
You have heard the good news of Easter: Jesus is risen. And you have heard of the general resurrection of the dead in the future. What’s going on between the resurrection of Jesus and the promised resurrection of all? This is no time of zero activity! God is active and at work in us. Christ is resurrecting his children every single day. My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received…
Yesterday we talked about how we all need Christ because we are fallen. These two verses from the letter of Paul to the Colossians sum up the previous post pretty well: For he [God] has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Col.1: 13-14, NIV) Let’s continue to look at what living in this freedom really means to us, how…
