How has your new year started? Are you reaching your goals? Or are you again doing the same old same old? It is hard to change. Especially, if we try to change on our own. Self-help does not work in long run. We need something more, we need God’s power. Blessedly, that is what God wants to give to his children. God wants to empower us to become what he has created us to be. We are called to live intentionally…
Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door 499 years ago today. He was worried about the church’s way and wanted to call the church back to the grace of God. My favorite of all the 95 theses is #62 “The true treasure of the Church is the Holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God.” When the body of Christ remembers this, all is well. And this goes to each individual member too. That’s why…
The quickest way to unhappiness is the road the world thinks leads to happiness. Really. We tend to think if we only could satisfy our every whim and want we’d be happy. But we could not be further from the truth. When we focus on earthly and temporal things, we lose track of what really matters. Only when we focus on Jesus, we achieve what we were looking for from the beginning. For there are many, of whom I have…
How do you renew your mind? How are you becoming more Christ-like day in, day out? There’s no shortcuts here. We can only grow in faith by abiding in God. How do we do that? By practicing ancient Christian disciplines like prayer and reading the Bible. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and…
It seems like this same old problem has been around since forever: people want to be like everyone else. The root cause for disobedience is the desire to be accepted and admired by others. Just like the Israelites were hoping to be like the other nations. “‘What you’re secretly thinking is never going to happen. You’re thinking, “We’re going to be like everybody else, just like the other nations. We’re going to worship gods we can make and control.” (Ezekiel…
Did you know that we see up to 3000 images per day? That truly is a total overload and there is no way we could process all of them. Hence you need to be careful how you are filling your mind. Images do have lots of emotional power and most of them are used in advertisements. They want to control us and our wallets. They want to imprint images into our minds. They want us to believe lies. I don’t…
How does Christian living look like? How are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives when Christ lives in our hearts? The Bible gives us some guidance: As a result, they don’t live the rest of their human lives in ways determined by human desires but in ways determined by God’s will. (1 Peter 4: 2, CEB, emphasis mine) Aha. We should look for God’s will for our lives. How do we do that? Don’t be conformed to…
