Truth

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Destiny

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Destiny

I have written a year-long devotional on the Psalms. As I’ve been editing the daily segments, it occurred to me that every day is significant to God, including the date each of us was born.

And that is because our mindset is, or should be, fundamentally different from the people around us. I’ll explain what I mean. The ancient Greeks believed our lives were controlled by fate. Supernatural beings policed the lines of fate to make sure no one stepped outside of what was predetermined for them. And in practice, many people believe the same kind of things today. That’s why they say things like “touch wood,” have “lucky” pieces of clothing or other items, or are superstitious in various ways.

The mentality of the Greeks is on display every day in horoscopes. Everyone born under a certain sign of the Zodiac has all the aspects of their life predetermined. There are plenty of people around who can’t bring themselves to believe that the God who created the universe could raise his Son from the dead, but they have no trouble at all believing that their daily horoscope tells them how the inanimate stars are controlling what is going to happen to them today.

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The root of the problem

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The root of the problem

A lady was sharing her woes with my wife in the changing room at the gym. Her problem was simple. She had to keep dying her hair every couple of weeks, or the roots would start to show.

And this is a pretty decent description of how people handle more serious problems in their lives too. We coat our issues with something that makes them disappear, but before too long they all come back. The reason, of course, is that the roots of our problems have never been dealt with.

A frequent mistake in pastoral care is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. An over-the-counter painkiller will deal with an ordinary headache, but it won’t do anything much for a brain tumour.

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Finding success in failure - how to hit the ground running in 2019

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Finding success in failure - how to hit the ground running in 2019

I saw two amazing statements quoted on social media this week. Here’s the first:

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

Few people in the last century had the ability to express profound truth more clearly than C.S.Lewis, and this statement proves it.

People make two mistakes in relation to past failures. The first is refusing to admit they failed at all, papering over their issues with other peoples’ alleged shortcomings, and moving on fearlessly to new failures in the future. And they succeed in reaching their goal.

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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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Challenged by change

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Challenged by change

Youth With A Mission is an amazing movement in which there’s rarely a dull moment. In fact, its motto was once described as constant change is here to stay.

We’ve been in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne this week, working with South African friends planting a great church here. Elaine grew up nearby, and used to work in the city centre. She made the observation that while some things were the same, most things had changed, and some things were unrecognizable. And that’s always a bit of a shock - because we don’t like change.

For the most part, we understand that what we believe does not change. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.