Pressure

How to win your battle

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. 

Time for a test

Time for a test

“Everyone loves a test!”

If that were a true or false question, the correct answer would be easy.

I’ve spent the last few days marking exams for the course on Revelation I’ve been teaching at seminary this summer. It was nice to be on the judging side, rather than the student side. I can’t remember how many hundreds of tests and exams I wrote, but I wish I’d had a party after the last one.

Times of testing

Times of testing

I hate the thought of being tested.

I spent a morning this week going through a battery of medical tests, and have more to come. My new doctor loves the idea of preventative medicine, which seems to involve his patients utilizing all available diagnostic services, in the good cause of forestalling worse to come in the future. It has nothing to do with my age, of course.

James 1:2-4 tells us pretty clearly that testing is not only from my doctor, but from God. In fact, he says, testing leads on to maturity and the state of lacking nothing.

And there you go. I thought the prosperity gospel had it all figured out that endless financial blessing is what leads to me lacking nothing. Evidently not.

The challenge of change

The challenge of change

Change comes to all of us, whether we like it or not. Personally, I’ve never liked change a whole lot. I get settled in a routine and it’s hard to get me out of it.

God thinks differently, of course, than we do, on this subject as on everything else. He continually uses the pressure of circumstances to force change on us.

Next weekend, we move out of the house we have lived in for nineteen years and the community we have lived in for thirty-four years, in fact for our entire married life. We move out of a relatively secure job I have held all that time and into a who -knows-what-will-happen self-employment role.

Defeat is not an option

Defeat is not an option

Some years it seems like spring will never come.

It’s so bad here there is snow in the forecast, and it’s the first week in May.

Both you and I know there are times when life is just like that. One thing piles on top of another. We pick ourselves up off the mat only to get hit by the next oncoming train. The enemy seems to have more power than God.