Category: Christian Living

John Piper in A Hunger for God:

The greatest enemy of [our] hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable. Continue reading The Deadliest Enemy of Our Souls

Genesis 34

Jacob’s family is spiralling out of control. Judah, the direct ancestor of the priests and Levites, is here seen in a killing spree. This is family dysfunction at its worst. A father with a weak resolve got pushed around by his sons who were blinded by their anger, a daughter with questionable night life, a bunch of unreasonable men whose revenge was far greater than the crime committed against them. At the last scene, Jacob was seen worrying more about their nighbors than the grave offense his sons did against God.

This hardly looks like a family from which the Messiah would be born. The story ended without a single reference to God. Continue reading Spiralling Out of Control

The Mayans got it all wrong, everyone knows that now. And let me just say for the record that I didn’t believe any of it. Not one bit.

But there is something more troubling about this “end of the world” brouhaha than it’s being incorrect– and that’s our total mockery of the whole idea of eschatology. In the past few days, my Facebook news feed has been filled with slapstick and mocking posts about the apocalypse. Most of them were correct but the attitude behind the posts were less than charitable.

In the Bible, when the end of the world is mentioned, it is almost always within the context of how we should live holy lives in anticipation of the coming of Christ, not in the dismissive and cocky attitude of being on the right side of the fence. Continue reading The Mayans Got It All Wrong!

One lesson I learned from Exodus:

God heard the cries of the Hebrew people. I am aware that that doesn’t sound very spectacular to our ears. We all know that God hears our cries, no big deal. In fact, we, people of the 21st century, even have this twisted sense of entitlement that God is supposed to hear us. He is God after all. It is His job to hear us when we cry. And so the fact that God heard the cries of the Hebrews doesn’t amaze us that much.

But what’s really interesting about the Hebrew story is that they were simply just crying to no one in particular. There is not a record that their cries were directed at Jehovah. Yet all the same, God came down to respond by delivering them in a very spectacular way. Incredible, isn’t it? God, in His amazing grace, swooped down to intervene in human affairs even if it is unbidden by the initiative of their prayers.