“You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3). Job is quoting Jehovah here (see 38:2). It’s easy to overestimate what we can handle, and thus our frustration with God when He withholds […]
Stirred by Bunyan’s “Visions of Heaven and Hell,” drunkard miner Billy Bray sought the Lord. For days in soul trouble, finally, he writes: “I said to the Lord, ‘Thou hast said, They that ask shall receive…and I have faith to believe it.’ In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express […]
There are times to flee (for example, 2 Tim 2:22), but at other times God calls us to stand our ground. Some suggest that the title for Psalms 9 and 10, Muth-labben, should be translated as “Death of a Champion” and describes the long defiance and eventual defeat of Goliath and the Philistines. If that’s the […]
CHRIST the BRIGHT and MORNING STAR (Rev 22:16). Our Lord here presents Himself as the herald of His own dawning. All the world shall see the Lord arise as the Sun of Righteousness, but only those looking for Him will see His appearing as the Morning Star. John Fletcher of Madeley (1729–1785), close friend of […]
“I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me” (Ps 119:19). Excuse the irony, but nothing could be stranger! A person always on earth but “born from above.” A heavenly citizen living as a stranger in this world. A possessor of life that is to be lived “more abundantly,” yet […]
William MacDonald writes: We teach our children to accumulate; Christ calls them to forsake all (Lk 14:33). We teach them that it is not respectable to be poor: Jesus said, “Blessed be ye poor” (Lk 6:20). We tell them to stay home and make good; the Lord tells them to “go…into all the world and […]
Both the patterns and the inter ruptions are important in seeing the way God works in our lives. It turns out that Psalms 9 and 10 are a couplet. Psalm 10 has no title, and the subject of God being both the dispenser of wrath against the wicked and the hiding place of those who […]
CHRIST our MESSAGE: “…that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” (2 Cor 4:10). Whatever outward forms it takes, Christian service fundamentally is transmitting Christ. Some years ago, in an old church in an English village, an elderly preacher was almost at the end of a very ordinary sermon, when he […]
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Lk 18:25). Microminiature sculptor Nikolai Syadristy has actually placed three gold camels inside the eye of a needle! Of course, the masterpiece misses the point. When Matthew and Mark tell […]