Whose side are you on? You know, there’s no middle ground. Even if we’d like it to be so. Jesus said: “Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever doesn’t gather with me scatters.” (Matthew 12:30, CEB) This verse stopped me this morning. I’m either with Jesus or I am against him. I either gather with Jesus or I scatter. No other alternatives. Jesus or no Jesus. Whose side are you on? God wants it all. God wants obedience….
Do you ever wonder how on earth you ended up messing up things once again? Especially when you thought you had asked God’s blessings on your projects? How did everything go wrong when you thought God was in your team? These questions used to haunt me, too. Until I laid them to the Lord and asked him to explain me where I had gone wrong. How could I have avoided these pitfalls? How could I have made wiser decisions? The…
The Bible is full of stories of obedient and faithful men and women of God. I truly appreciate that we have these saints gone before us. We can learn from them what it is to live out our faith in the midst of challenging life events. Today I want to talk about Joseph, a central character in the Christmas story. This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they…
Don’t you just love how strongly God can speak to you through his Word? Just this morning – like pretty much any morning – I was reading my Bible and suddenly Numbers 11 reflected back my own attitude. The riffraff among the people had a craving and soon they had the People of Israel whining, “Why can’t we have meat? We ate fish in Egypt—and got it free!—to say nothing of the cucumbers and melons, the leeks and onions and…
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…
We are all pilgrims on our way to God. We yearn to know how to make it. Psalm 119 provides us helpful ways to ensure progress on our pilgrimage. Let’s see what they are. 1) KEEP ON WALKING This looks too obvious. But too often we sit down and don’t keep on walking. We are on journey. This world is not our home. We are on our way to home and we need to keep on walking. Slowly but surely…
Do you live in fraudulent freedom? Or are you truly free? Some people insists they can do whatever they want and call that freedom. Yet they are miserable. Fraudulent freedom produces just that: pure misery. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All…
