These Lively Oracles

There were times that I was stuck. I hadn’t a clue what to do next. I had reached a certain point in a job, a church, a friendship, and everything had come undone. Things fell apart. And I didn’t know what to do next. I believed that I had carried everything out properly. I believed that I had tried my best. But things just ground to a halt and I didn’t know what to do next. And the age old question always arose – What do you do when you don’t know what to do next? When we lose a job, then we start to look around for another job. When a relationship ends then we rebuild our lives and adjust everything to suit. But, when it comes to our church life, our testimony and our relationship with God – What do we do when it all grinds to a halt? How do we rebuild that? I believe that this was the same quandary that Abraham had when God told him to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis 22 v1-19. And if I didn’t already know the final outcome of the story the only question I could ask Abraha...

While I have spent these last few months thinking about christian faith in older friends and people, one recurring thought that kept coming up over and over again. I was remembering all the other people and occasions that I had been involved with over the years. There have been so many friendships that I moved through, and so many christian events that I attended. And I sit and ponder now about how God has worked through those other people’s lives and built His own   relationship with them also. Many have gone on and grown into deeper, more meaningful relationships with Christ. Others are still moving in the same social circles that they moved on many years ago. And that is all good stuff because it is God who works through us all to build His relationship with each and every one of us individually. By coincidence I came across a little podcast lately where the speaker was speaking on the Old Testament book of Joel. It’s not a book that I have studied deeply at any time...

I have found throughout my life and christian experiences that when a calamity falls on a person or society, sometimes some people’s thoughts turn either away from God, or turn again onto God. A lot of people question God by asking “What sort of a God allows these things to happen”? And invariably, the people who ask these questions never really followed God in the first place. However, some people who follow God will just sit quietly for a while and not question things. Only then, to find that a small glimmer of spiritual hope and light grows up to restore and strengthen God’s Children once again. I have found that after some form of troubles in my life, and after all the predictable reactions of my frustration, anger, and dissappointment that a small glimmer of Christ’s love will soon start to appear again. Not with a blinding flash, but with a tiny shimmer. Which will soon grow and draw my attention back into himself again. After their exile out of slavery in Egypt the Child...

I suppose that as we start a new year the tradition for many thinkers is to turn their thoughts to the analogy of a gateway. Gateways are always used as an analogy for something, or someone, who is transitioning from one state to another. And New Year celebrations are sometimes thought of as a gateway, or a threshold. I shared in an earlier post about our visit to the Tower of London this year to witness the Ceremony Of The Keys. It was the nightly ceremony of the closing up of The Tower of London and the locking of the gates. And has been performed religiously every single night for over 700 years. And the bible has used the metaphor of the gateway many times. Aside from there being guards to defend the gates, gatekeepers were also thought of as guides who helped people to go in the right direction on their journey as they left a city. Sometimes Gatekeepers are not the ones to do God’s work. But sometimes they are merely the one who stands on the threshold and inspire someone ...

As children a lot of us would have got some playing cards of some sort and started to build one of those little structures that involves stacking the cards in little triangular shapes one layer on top of another. I used to love doing this. And I found over the years that it was the older, well used playing cards with their frayed edges that built the best stacks. Because the newer ones were still too new and shiney. Or maybe we would get a set of domino blocks and stand them all on their ends one behind the other to watch them topple. There are plenty of videos on the internet showing these activites, all of them very entertaining in one way or another. It was while watching some of these videos online that my thoughts made a connection between these activites and the sequence of bible studies I have been following lately. The studies were mostly about me getting myself into trouble and then Jesus having to teach me a lesson on the way out of them again. And that has been my re...