Category: Random

Abiding in Christ

I believe that the real struggle among Christians is not really the struggle to fight off sin but the struggle to abide in Christ on a daily basis. And the reason we are losing our battle against sin is not for lack of faith but our fighting the wrong battle. 

To put it plainly, our real struggle is to get up every morning and open the pages of the Bible, get on our knees and pray. And then to keep that holy fire of God’s presence burning in our hearts all day until we get to our knees again at night and refuel our empty tanks. 

We lose to sin because instead of taking care of our devotions, we rush to the day, trying hard to keep our eyes closed whenever we are bombarded with images of sin and lust, trying very hard not to steal and talk back and harbor anger. We spend our energies trying to quiet down our internal urges, trying to keep ourselves in check.

—Jojo Agot

Broken Clocks

“[There’s a story] of a man who used to go to work at a factory and every day would stop outside a clockmaker’s store to synchronize his watch with the clock outside. At the end of several days the clockmaker stopped him and said, “Excuse me, sir, I do have a question for you. I see that every day you stop and adjust your watch with my clock. What kind of work do you do?”

The man said, “I’m embarrassed to tell you this; I keep the time at the factory nearby, and I have to ring the bell at four o clock every afternoon when it is time for the people to go home. My watch doesn’t work very well, so I synchronize it with your clock.”

The clockmaker says, “I’ve got bad news for you. My clock doesn’t work very well either, so I synchronize it with the bell that I hear from the factory at 4:00 every afternoon.”

If you’ll pardon the grammar, what happens when two wrong watches correct themselves by each other? They will get wronger and wronger all the time. Even a clock that doesn’t work may show you the right time twice a day…but it’s not because it’s keeping time!”

Excerpted from Ravi Zacharias, Address to the United Nations’ Prayer Breakfast.

Losing Our Ability to Reason

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“In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, lyrics and music that gave rise to a new term, ‘the generation gap.’ In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protests. Church, state and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of nihilism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with ‘self’—self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion. It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and few had the nerve to tell them that there was indeed a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.”

Continue reading Losing Our Ability to Reason

What Kind of Generation Are We Raising?

I remember walking through Auschwitz …. I remember seeing the horrors of thousands of pounds of women’s hair, thousands of suitcases, little toothbrushes, little pairs of shoes. Teenagers were walking out of there with tears running down their faces. It was very sobering. And I saw the words of Adolph Hitler against the gas ovens there, “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel.” What happens when you unleash a generation like that—a generation of young people, imperious, relentless and cruel?

—Ravi Zacharias