Author: Jojo Agot

Pastor at Victory. Faculty and adviser at Every Nation Leadership Institute (ENLI). MA in Theology and Mission at Every Nation Seminary.

Providence

Be patient in times of difficulties and be thankful in times of abundance. Whatever happens to us, we can place our firm trust in the hands of our faithful God and Father knowing that nothing shall separate us from His love. Since everything is in His hand, not a single creature moves apart from His will.
—Adapted from the Heidelberg Cathechism

Faith Seeking to Understand

Let me look up to your light, even from afar, even from the depths. Teach me to seek you and I ask that you reveal yourself to me when I seek you because I cannot seek you unless you teach me and I cannot find you unless you reveal yourself to me.

Lord I acknowledge and thank you that you have created me in your image. You did it so that you will always be in my mind and so that I will love you. But your image in me has been consumed and wasted by my vices. It is obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing. Now I cannot fulfill the purpose for which you created me unless you renew my entire life.

I do not presume, O Lord, that I could have a full grasp of your greatness. I know I could never reach that level of knowing. But I do desire to understand a certain degree of your truth which my heart believes and loves.

I do not try to understand so that I may believe. Instead, I seek to believe so that I may understand because unless I believe, I know that I will never understand.

–Adapted from St. Anselm’s Proslogium and Monologium. Continue reading Faith Seeking to Understand

The Practice of Grace

Lee Eclov on the life and calling of a pastor:

Doctors enter the practice of medicine. Lawyers, the practice of law. Pastors enter the practice of grace. Grace is the pastor’s stock-in-trade.

Pastors, like all believers, are agents of grace. But we dispense the grace of Christ as no other believers do. We are shepherds. Search as we might for a word more suited to our contemporary culture, shepherd is the only word that will do. If we hope to understand what we’ve been called by God to do, we have to step into a foreign world of sheep and pastures, folds and staffs, night watches and wilderness searches. Look hard at the timeless figures “keeping watch over their flocks by night.” Patient, long-suffering, committed to the often lonely routines of care. That’s how God wants us to see ourselves. In fact, that is one way God sees Himself. Continue reading The Practice of Grace

Leave Your Boyish Ways

Stirring words for boys and men by Owen Strachan:

The boy-man is selfish, young, immature, addicted to games, immune to responsibility, foul-mouthed, and weak. He’s overwhelmed by adulthood, so he chooses to stay in some sort of boyish fantasy. He doesn’t want to build big things, meaningful things, like a family, a six-decade marriage, a socially and personally profitable career, or a gospel-driven church or missions effort. He wants to make music, play games, follow sports, flirt with girls, loaf through life, bend the rules so he’s not accountable or inconvenienced in his selfishness, and ignore the need to help others.

I want to suggest that wherever you can as a young man or one involved in any way in training young men, you point them toward manhood, maturity, adulthood, responsibility, ambition, strategy, vision, focus. Yes, it can be fun to be boyish. But you know what’s far more satisfying? Becoming something. Becoming something greater than you are. Becoming a man. Building stuff… Continue reading Leave Your Boyish Ways