Do you blame God for the messiness of your life? Do you think it’s God’s fault that your life is complicated? Do you think it’d be God’s responsibility to keep your life smooth? You are not alone. But you are still mistaken. You see, ways of God are straight. Always. But sin makes our paths unnecessarily crooked. Hence it is not God who complicates our life. What a God! His road stretches straight and smooth. Every God-direction is road-tested. Everyone…
Do you resist self-examination? Are you afraid of what you will find? And are you not ready to take the trouble or pay the price to fix it? So you continue to ignore the signs because you are somewhat functioning. I don’t need to tell you that the trouble is increasing and the price you need to pay is getting bigger and bigger. Especially if this is happening in your spiritual life. You are supposed to be alive but in…
What if fasting is a blessing? The early church put fasting and prayer together as ways of seeking God’s guidance. Why don’t we? So they commissioned them. In that circle of intensity and obedience, of fasting and praying, they laid hands on their heads and sent them off. (Acts 13:3, MSG) Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his famous book Cost of Discipleship reminds us of the importance of fasting as a part of discipleship ” If there is no element of asceticism in our…
Hope is not dead. Hope is very much alive. No matter what the world wants you to think. No matter what you are experiencing. No matter what is going on in your life. Sure, we must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope like Martin Luther King, Jr. put it. Hope is not dead. How do I know this? Because the Bible tells so. Hope is not dead because the tomb was empty. Hope is not dead because Jesus…
Have you heard the story of a little child trying to fall asleep in a dark room? The child began to cry and her mother came to assure her that God was with her and she didn’t need to be afraid. But soon the child began to cry again. She told to her mother “Oh, Mommy, I want someone with skin on!” She stated something essential to life and faith. God is real but we also need the body of…
Every time I come across this quote by Jim Elliott I cringe. Does this convict you too? “Unwillingness to accept God’s ‘way of escape’ from temptation frightens me what a rebel yet resides within.” When we pray that God would help us….that God would rescue us from our temptations…..and then do exactly the opposite even when God is providing a way of escape….that is rebellion against God. The God-rebel tunes in to sedition— all ears, eager to sin. He has…
Are you out of sync with yourself? Maybe you are out of touch with God. That’s how it usually is, at least, for me. The root reason why we are not doing well is that we have somehow lost our touch with God. When we leave God out of the picture, our lives become rootless and aimless. We are out of sorts, disoriented and confused. We have been created to live with God. Hence when we loose our touch with…
My godfather was buried last week. The verse I chose to him was 1 Corinthians 13:13: And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. That tells you a lot about what kind of man he was. But even I was in for a surprise at the funeral. All his neighbors were telling stories after stories how he had helped them. How he had served them. How he had loved them. I was floored…
There is a need within each of us to know God. We search to know God whether we realize it or not. There are a lot of New Age stuff going on that offer different ways to find God. But the Bible tells us that there is only one way to God: Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me,…
Do you know how to be generous? Or are you stingy with time, money or possessions? We are naturally selfish; being generous is foreign to us. We think we will ensure our well-being if we store money or keep stuff. But that’s not how it works. We are not in control of future. We are not in control of happiness. We are not in control of well-being. But blessedly that’s not the end of the story. We are not doomed….
