Making the Most of the Time

Discerning the times is a difficult task when one is living in the midst of them. It can be like driving in a big city without a map to orient yourself to your surroundings. Likewise, when we stand in the middle of history as it is happening, we don’t have access to the map which tells us how our present moment fits into the big-picture. Since our present moment is a complicated mess of events it can quickly become disorienting, much like the maze of skyscrapers in the big city. We find ourselves asking questions like: What will our country look like in five years? Is severe persecution in the future for the church in the West? Will our freedoms be stripped in the name of progress?

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12th July 2020 0

Turning the Cheek

Nobody likes being treated unfairly. When we see injustice in the world it can be easy to turn the other way, but when it happens to us, it’s nearly impossible to ignore. The sense of being treated unfairly draws out feelings of anger and outrage otherwise kept at bay. The urge to retaliate against a personal injustice begins already as children. What child enjoys seeing all his friends get a chocolate but not himself? Where is the child who is willing to take the blame for what her brother did wrong?

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28th June 2020 2

Grace in a Graceless World

If anything has become clear in the last while, it is that our society does not understand grace. In an age filled to the brim with violence, injustice, anger, confusion, and the like, grace is needed more than ever. But grace is in short supply. Rummage the pages of the newspaper, flip through the news channels, or take a scroll among the Facebook comments – wherever you look you’ll be hard-pressed to find grace.

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14th June 2020 2

Impossible Faith – Part 3

This is part 3 of a series on the impossible faith of the saints mentioned in Hebrews 11. Find part one here, and part two here.

Daniel

Daniel was given a clear choice – obey the king or obey God. There was no confusion over what King Darius’ decree meant or what God’s will required. There were no fuzzy grey areas or possible loopholes. Either Daniel obeyed the king and ceased praying for the next thirty days or he obeyed God and prayed anyway. To obey the king was clear disobedience to God and to obey God was clear disobedience to the king.

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31st May 2020 0

Impossible Faith – Part Two

This is the second in a series about the “impossible” faith of the saints listed in Hebrews 11. For part one click here.

Gideon

Like Noah, Abraham, and others, God asked Gideon to do something which seemed very strange. Yet, Gideon believed God, and as a result he was used by God to win an improbable victory.

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17th May 2020 0

Impossible Faith – Part One

In one sense, faith in God is impossible. From the point of view of the lost sinner – blind to the action of God in the world and deaf to the words of God – faith is utterly ridiculous and one giant leap too far. Faith is only possible when the Spirit of God opens the sinner’s eyes to the unseen. Until that happens, the life of faith will appear to be utter nonsense.

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3rd May 2020 0

Why Is Faith So Hard?

Why is faith so hard? Sure, there are mountaintop moments and golden summers where we feel God’s presence as real as anything. But more often than not, especially in the muck and madness of the world, God appears distant and faith seems a scandal. Both skeptic and saint have wondered how there can be both a good, all-powerful God in heaven and a world full of death and decay down below. And that is just the beginning of a landslide of questions which threaten to smother our faith and leave it for dead.

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19th April 2020 0

What It Means To Live

When your world gets turned upside down it can leave you disoriented and afraid. You suddenly find yourself in a place you have never been, nor imagined, and everything you thought you knew gets called into question. That’s kind of what has happened with the sudden emergence of COVID-19 as a world threat. Our lives have either already been turned upside down by this new reality, or they are at the tipping point and it doesn’t take much for us to imagine what it might be like. We start asking the big “what if” question and it’s not hard to think it could come to fruition.

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5th April 2020 0

Boasting in Our Faith

Those who have grown up within the walls of a Reformed church know well that good works do not save and are nothing to boast about. All glory to God! We hear this truth repeatedly from the pulpit, the catechism classroom and around the supper table. And so it should be. If God compares our good works to something worse than filthy rags, then what folly it is to boast in them.

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1st March 2020 0