Category: Christian Living

Today I grieve at the passing away of a dear friend and sister in the Lord, Naomie Montes. She’s young, barely out of college, beautiful and smart. I’ve known her since she was in grade school. She was practically a family to me because her father, Pastor Danny Montes, allowed me to stay in their home when I was in college.

She’s gone. I received the text message early today. I cried. I called her parents, I called her aunt Ms Ruth Ramirez, I called our common friends. It’s confirmed. Continue reading We Mourn With Hope

The message of Romans 14: 23 is clear: Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

This is an indictment to all natural virtues that do not flow from a heart humbly relying on the grace of God. This also refutes the idea that a person is righteous because he is not hurting anyone. In the outside, a person could look fine but since his depravity is internal, it is possible for people around him not to know how he has sunk deeper into sin.

D. James Kennedy, in his book What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?, tells of an amusing story about world missions:

During World War II, on a remote island in the Pacific, an American G.I. met a national who could speak English carrying a Bible. “The soldier pointed to the Bible and grinned knowingly. ‘We educated people don’t put much faith in that Book anymore,’ he said.

The islander grinned back. ‘Well, it’s a good thing for you that we [believe this Book],’ he said while patting his stomach, ‘or else you’d be in here by now.'”

When [missionary John G. Paton] resolved to go to the unreached tribes of the South Sea Islands in 1856, a Christian gentleman objected, “You’ll be eaten by cannibals!” To this Paton responded:

“Your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my resurrection body will arise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.”

Excerpted from John Piper’s Thanksgiving for the Lives of Flawed Saints

John Bunyan on Christian conversion:

Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think. It is wounding work, of course, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving… Where there is grafting there is a cutting, the scion must be let in with a wound.

It is only when affliction leads to this discipline of the Word that it becomes a blessing; the lack of this heart-cleansing through the Word is the reason why affliction is so often unsanctified.

—Andrew Murray