God's sovereignty

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Blowing with the wind

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Blowing with the wind

The wind was blowing right down from the Arctic this week. The Americans said it came from Canada, but the Canadians reported it came from Russia.

And we were experiencing extraordinary variations in the weather. One morning I was driving in to a breakfast appointment in minus 28 degrees Celsius (minus 18 F). It was so cold schools, government offices and many businesses just shut down. The day before, it never got above minus 26 the whole day. We had some frozen pipes at our place, but thankfully jacking the heat up managed to thaw them out.

Fast forward a couple of days, the wind had changed direction, and it was above freezing and sunny. We left our coats in the car when shopping, and turned the heat back down.

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Lessons from the whirlwind

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Lessons from the whirlwind

After about an hour listening to a man’s story the other day, I said to him, “You’ve been living in a whirlwind.” He thought that was a pretty apt description.

Life seems like a whirlwind every so often. When we’re caught up in it, things can seem to be out of control. We lose sight of God, we find it hard to see any purpose in what’s happening to us, and we feel helpless, abandoned and lost.

But I think God operates in the whirlwind. The fact that he created the world and he also sustains it means he is always in control. The whirlwind that looks like confusion to us may in truth be full of his purposes.

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Following the cloud

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Following the cloud

People allow their lives to be directed by all sorts of things. Some people follow careers, some follow sports, some follow money, some follow pleasure, some follow happiness.

But as for us, we are (or should be) following the cloud.

I am alluding, of course, to Numbers 19. When the cloud rested over the tabernacle, the people remained. Whether it was a day or a month or what the Bible describes without further definition as “a longer time,” they stayed put. But as soon as the cloud lifted, they set out, and kept on following the cloud until it came to rest again.

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Dumbing down or calling up?

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Dumbing down or calling up?

Just the other day, I had a discussion with a good friend. He was expressing his frustration with the popularity of certain Christian media personalities who have the ability to attract enormous crowds, sell millions of books and take in vast offerings, without seemingly having the capacity to make a single decent Biblical or theological point when they preach.

Some people seem to think that we need to adjust our preaching in a downward direction in order to accommodate the fact that we live in the age of attention deficit. It’s a little bit like the idea that the purpose of a youth group is mainly to provide light spiritual entertainment for teenagers who would never have the ability to sit in church and listen to a proper Biblical message. Doing this, I suspect, will produce a generation of youth group graduates who want to be entertained the rest of their lives. Or a generation of millennials who are checking their phone throughout whatever shreds of truth are left coming out from behind the pulpit.

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How to win your battle

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How to win your battle

A man testifies to being immersed in crisis. He cries out to God so intensely he can hardly talk. At times, all he does is moan. God helps him by keeping his eyelids propped open, and miraculously holding up his hands so they do not become numb and fall. He wonders if God has forgotten him.

But something happens. He decides to start moving beyond his complaints to thinking of all God has done in the past. And the more he thinks about it, the more his spirit revives.

The man’s name is Asaph. His testimony is recorded in the seventy-seventh Psalm.