Skip to main content

Our Greatest Battles

The greatest battles take place in the smallest moments
PAUL DAVID TRIPP

There's a lot of truth in that for battles of every kind.

I know from personal experience that one does not work one night and discover that they are have suddenly put on weight. It is through small acts of bad eating choices and then bang, you have put on weight. And what is challenging is that those battles are difficult to win because they are repeated often and seem so inconsequential in isolation. 

I have also found that areas where it is most difficult to be a light for Christ is in day by day faithful discipline. For example, it is easy to do an evangelism event, but much harder to know your neighbours. It is easy to pray for world peace but harder to greet that colleague who says nasty things. It is easier to give money to foreign missions but much harder to spend 10 minutes with a homeless person down the road.

The challenge of Christian living is to allow God to be God in these smallest moments.

Comments

  1. I'm with you all the way on this!

    It reminds me of a line spoken by Linus of the Peanuts comic strip:

    "I love humanity . . . it's people I can't stand!"

    It's easy to do big, popular, and distant good works. It's much harder to show Christ's love and light to the people we see and deal with every day--especially the annoying ones. Yet that's where the real test of a true Christian lies. Loving our neighbor as ourselves.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Am Mother

I think it is true to say that the Netflix film I Am Mother is one the most disturbing movies I have watched for a long time. The film is set in a near future. Human life has been wiped out. An artificial intelligence (AI) called Mother is living inside a bunker where thousands of embroyos are stored. It selects an embryo and initiates a program to grow a baby within 24 hours. The AI then goes on to raise the child as its mother over the next few years.  After 16 years, the girl, who now goes by the name of Daughter (Clara Rugaard) is a teenager. She has never been outside because Mother has told her that the air is toxic. Her time is spend being home schooled in science and ethics so that she can become a perfect human being. The bond between Daughter and Mother is unusually strong. To our surprise there does not appear to be any mental or pyschological trauma of having a machine as her mother.  The strength of the bond between man and machine is tested when a nameless Woma...

Images of God (Legislator)

We have already seen that God reveals himself  in the Bible as judge, prosecuting attorney and defence lawyer. The final image of God from the court of law is that of God as the legislator or law give. The most well known scripture on this is Isaiah 33:12, which declares “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; it is he who will save us”. God is the legislator, the one who sets forth the law. This is not the place for a full treatment of this area. But suffice to say that God’s law is a revelation of God himself. And this law goes beyond “moral laws” set out in the Bible. His law includes his general standards and norms with respect to the cosmos as a whole. God has put in physical and spiritual laws for the functioning of the universe. These laws are for our good and for His great glory.

I am what I am by Gloria Gaynor

Beverly Knight closed the opening ceremony of the Paralympics with what has been dubbed the signature tune of the Paralympics. I had no idea Ms Knight is still in the singing business. And clearly going by the raving reviews she will continue to be around. One media source says her performance was so electric that "there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen as she sang the lyrics to the song and people even watching at home felt the passion in her words" . The song was Gloria Gaynor's I am what I am . Clearly not written by Gloria Gaynor but certainly musically owned and popularized by her. It opens triumphantly: I am what I am / I am my own special creation / So come take a look / Give me the hook or the ovation / It's my world that I want to have a little pride in / My world and it's not a place I have to hide in / Life's not worth a damn till you can say I am what I am The words “I am what I am” echo over ten times in the song. A bold declaration that she ...