Serving Christ in México
Unless the Lord builds a house,
its builders labor over it in vain;
unless the Lord watches over a city,
the watchman stays alert in vain.
In vain you get up early and stay up late,
working hard to have enough food
Psalm 127
You moved across the country to start a new job. A dear friend has wronged you. Your husband has cancer. Your child is rushed to the hospital.
Continue reading “The Parts We Leave Out”
It is easy to draw a bold, black line through the empty page between the old and new testament and to think that what God did in the past with Israel is largely separated from what he is doing today in the church.
Continue reading “The Same”
Is the Christian life one of sustained joy and blessing? Does the Christian ever suffer from forces outside their control? Does our prosperity in life correlate closely with the strength of our faith?
Continue reading “A Sojourn in Meshech “
The Book of Psalms is, among other things, an instruction book for how to speak to God. The psalms give us just the right words to speak when we are at a loss for words, or when we are stuck in the common rut of repetitive prayers. But even more than allowing us to borrow God’s own language, they demonstrate the appropriate way to approach God in prayer.
Continue reading “Remembering to Believe”
We are all saved from sin by the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. But that does not mean our salvation stories are all the same. Sin leads us into all sorts of damning situations, and God’s steadfast love is always there to redeem us.
Psalm 107 is a good example of this; urging the redeemed of the Lord to praise their Redeemer for his manifold redemption. In this Psalm we encounter four different scenarios that allude to Israel’s past, but are not identified with any one specific event. These four places of deep trouble offer us a glimpse into the varied and wonderful ways in which God redeems his people.
Continue reading “Manifold Redemption”
For my morning devotions I have been meditating on Isaiah’s famous “to us a child is born” prophecy. I wanted to read the prophecy in its context and see what fresh light might be cast over these well-trodden verses. So often we take the familiar words of the Old Testament and transplant them directly into their New Testament application without giving thought to the context in which they first applied. Our application of the words may be correct, but we miss something of their full meaning by pulling them out of the soil in which they existed.
Continue reading “Unto to Us a Light Has Dawned”
What do you do when you lose everything?
That’s what ran through my mind recently as I watched footage of the floods in southern British Columbia. The rising waters forced hundreds to evacuate the area, leaving behind homes, farms, and businesses. And the rain continues. For those hardest hit by the floods, what they had spent years building was gone in a moment. They experienced not just a loss of home or business, but a loss of a life’s work, a dream, perhaps even a loss of hope.
Continue reading “The Lord Is My Portion”
In his first epistle the apostle John gives us the familiar command, “Do not love the world or anything in the world”. But what exactly does it mean to “not love the world”?
Some Christians have taken it to mean that we ought to shun earthly delights and goods and focus our lives on heaven above instead. They do their best to not participate in culture and remain separate from the heathen world.
Continue reading “Don’t Love The World”
The world is a dark place. It is darkened by an abundance of famine, injustice, war, abuse, destruction, addiction. The list goes on. At the root of it all is the persistent and pervasive presence of sin. Sin darkens every corner of the earth, including the pews of the church and the depths of the human heart.
Continue reading “The Light Now Shines”
One night at the supper table our kids were taking turns praying before we started the meal. Moments earlier our second youngest daughter had been kicking and screaming because she didn’t get to sit beside her sister. Consequently, she didn’t feel like praying so I attempted to convince her that God still wanted to hear from her even if she was angry. Through sniffles and snobs she prayed: “Father Heaven, I’m sad. Amen.”
Continue reading ““I’m Sad””
The Rabbi's Burrito 