Christian living

Doing life better

Death – the commercial

Is your channel-surfing age imposing its culture on your views of eternity? I’m told the attention span of the modern couch potato is four seconds. If it isn’t grabbed by then, down goes the thumb on the remote. (If you are still reading, either this is riveting or you don’t qualify for the couch potato Olympics.) But is that remote […]

Where is your home?

“I wonder how they’re doing back home?” I caught myself saying the other day. England has suffered badly with Covid, with still no sign of relief. We have friends there who’ve recovered from the virus. My wife and I moved to New Zealand in 2005. Surely, it’s home by now? How long do we live in a place before it […]

Four Keys to a Winning Lockdown

I confess to feeling grumpy. The Lord took me to Paul’s letter to the Philippians. He wrote from prison, in chains. Seriously locked down. How did he survive? 1)   He refused to be frustrated What has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel (Philippians 1:12). The devil intends the virus and pandemic to spread fear and restrict […]

The key to godly decisions

When the Apostle Paul returned to Troas, he found the Lord had opened a door for him to preach the gospel there. On his first visit, he’d had no opportunity, being guided to Macedonia instead. Normally, he would have been delighted, thinking that the Lord had purposely led him back to Troas. Peace of Mind However, he writes in 2 Corinthians […]

The wings of compromise

One thousand women has the flavor of fiction. Even Casanova is only credited with 120. Many believe the size of King Solomon’s harem is posthumous, political spin. But the Bible is true. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines . . . (1 Kings 11:3). Solomon was rich with a well-equipped army, and the local […]

The greatest sin of our day

Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes this (completely dependent) little child [Greek, paidion] in my name welcomes me . . . For he who is least among you all—he is the greatest” (Luke 9:48). Who today is completely dependent? Who is the least? Slaughter of innocents Manasseh, king of Israel, shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem (2 Kings 21:16). […]

Has immorality caused the virus?

“Nah, nah, blame China. It’s just flu. We’ll beat it with lock-downs. We’ll beat it with vaccines. We’ll throw money at it, and it’ll go away. What’s immorality got to do with it?” Immorality, idolatry, and plague A story in the Bible links these three. Despite Balaam’s sorcery, the Moabites failed to curse Israel. Instead, their women seduced them, inviting […]

The wages of moral decline

My father’s best man divorced his wife. Shocked to the core, my parents whispered the news so we children wouldn’t hear. Divorce was a dirty word. So was “illegitimate”—a child born out of wedlock in the fifties carried the stigma for life. A decade later we—I identified but wasn’t brave enough to join— embraced the hippie movement: long hair, pop […]