Christian Living – Page 6

On Death and Losing a Loved One

Last week, I received news that the father of two of my friends died. These siblings used to attend my discipleship group in Caloocan before I transfered here in Tacloban about a year ago. I didn’t know why but even at a distance of over a thousand kilometers, I could feel the sense of loss and devastation in the family.

The news really got me thinking about the place of death in the Bible. I realized that even believers of Christ are not spared from the fangs of death for now. We all lose someone, and one day, someone will lose us too. Such is the destructive effect of the original sin on humans. Death came as a result of the fall. Death tears us apart, it puts a sudden stop to our relationships, it leaves us in mid-sentence, it doesn’t give us the chance to finish saying the things we needed to say. Continue reading On Death and Losing a Loved One

You Don’t Need to Become a Monk to be Holy

Holiness is not a separate compartment of your life that you can switch on and off at will. It is in full effect 24 hours a day, seven days a week and it happens in the context of your relationships, not just in the secrecy of your prayer closet.

You don’t cut yourself off from the rest of the world in order to live a life of holiness. The monks and the ancient mystics got it wrong. When God called you to be holy, he meant that you live it out in the middle of the usual busy-ness, boredom, and drama of life, not just in the middle of the sugary sweet smiles of people in a church service.

Stop Hiding Behind Your StrengthsFinder Results

Holiness has a lot to do with our temperaments. Many Christians hide behind psychological terms (and StrengthsFinder results) in order to excuse their unsavory behaviors. They’d say they are sanguine, or choleric, or futuristic, or activators in order to explain away the fact that they are mean and uncaring. J.I. Packer, in his book Rediscovering Holiness, argues that we are not victims of our personalities. When we got saved, Jesus redeemed our personalities too. Holiness is supposed to temper our personalities so that we will gradually become Christlike. Holiness is in fact another term for Christlikeness.

Why Let Them Suffer?

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was (John 11:5-6 ESV).

Unbelievable.

He loved them so He let them face death and grief on their own while he was just a few miles away. He could have come and saved Lazarus right away. He could have come and gave them comfort. He could have come and fulfilled his role as a friend. He didn’t.

Why would God do this? Why would he allow us to face pain and suffering?

The answer was given in verse 4: “It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Did you catch that? His glory supersedes our comfort and happiness. John Piper has been heralding this for years. Our happiness is not God’s number one priority. His glory is.

When God Seems Silent and Uninvolved

The place Dothan is mentioned only twice in the Bible, first in Genesis 37 where Joseph was sold to a caravan of Ishmaelites, and second in 2 Kings 6:13 where Elisha and his servant were surrounded by Syrian army. The events surrounding these two accounts are interesting in that one of them involves the seeming total silence of God and the other involves a fantastic story of miraculous deliverance.

In Genesis 37, Joseph was thrown into the pit by his brothers and was later sold as slave to the Ishmaelites. He was later sold to the household of Potiphar in Egypt. We know the rest of the narrative about how God used Jospeh’s terrible experience to deliver the entire Hebrew race from starvation in the seven years of famine that came afterwards. Where was God when all these were happening? Why didn’t He intervene? How could he be absent when one of His children was suffering?

Continue reading When God Seems Silent and Uninvolved

Domesticating God

Read Exodus 32:1-6.

This passage has always puzzled me. Barely three months after crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites were found worshipping a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. What’s more puzzling was that Aaron seemed to be under the impression that they were actually worshipping the LORD Himself. How come?

Drew Dyck, in his book Yawning at Tigers, suggests a few reasons. He mentioned that Egypt was an idolatrous nation. When the Israelites slipped back to idolatry, they were simply reverting back to the way of life they were most familiar with. Old habits don’t die easily. Idolatry was Israel’s default religious practice for 400 years. Crossing the Red Sea didn’t change it yet.

Dyck believes, however, that something more was at play. When God appeared to the Israelites in Exodus 19:16-19, the spectacle was very terrifying. The writer of Hebrews summarizes the scene with words like fire, darkness, gloom, storm, trumpet blast, and the disembodied thundering voice of God that Moses ended up saying, “I am trembling with fear.” The presence of God was too much for the Israelites that they asked for God to stop speaking to them.

When the people gathered gold and asked Aaron to fashion an image of a god, what they were doing was basically create a manageable, domesticated, less frightening, totally tamed version of God. They didn’t want the awesome presence of divinity; they preferred something or someone that is scaled-down to their level. Dyck writes:

Continue reading Domesticating God