No safe investment

Tonight, I don't feel like posting. So, I rather share with you one of the quotes that have impacted me deeply this week.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell

Till next Thursday.

Worst viper in the heart

"Pride is the worst viper in the heart. It is the first sin that ever entered into the universe. It lies lowest of all in the foundation of the whole building of sin. Of all lusts, it is the most secret, deceitful, and unsearchable in its ways of working. It is ready to mix with everything. Nothing is so hateful to God, contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, or of so dangerous consequence. There is no one sin that does so much to let the devil into the hearts of the saints and expose them to his delusions."

Let Your Kingdom come

"[...]Our focus in prayer has to be not that I have this need "God, would you answer it?" but it has to be "God, I'm all about your glory. But if you can advance this glory through meeting of this need, then please do it. If not, then let me lay here bare." See, it's all about Him. John Piper says this and it is very good: Prayer is nothing more than a wartime walkie-talkie. Prayer is not for a person who is not in the battle of advancing the Kingdom. Because prayer it's all about advancing the Kingdom. It's not about getting our needs met or advancing our own needs. It's about advancing the Kingdom. So, prayer functions when you are a person who is given his life -whether you're a preacher, a missionary, a factory worker, a carpenter, a homemaker, whatever- to follow suit to what God has called you to do, to advance His Kingdom, and while you're working to advance His kingdom, you're praying for all things to fall in place in your own personal life and everywhere else in accordance with whatever will advance God's kingdom.[...]"

Total Depravity illustrated

Some people overreact to the words “Total Depravity” thinking it means one is as bad as one can be.

And so I thought in the past.

Yet, it is difficult to avoid the force of the following verses and the direction they point us to:

“…the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead” (Eccl 9:3)

“The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45)

“…All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one…” (Rom 3:12)

“for all have sinned and fall short from the glory of God” (Rom 3:23)

These verses teach clearly that good is not intrinsic in man. Before the Fall, man was good because God pronounced all His creation to be good. But man fell from God's glory. Man became corrupted with sin and so his offspring.

Therefore, it is not difficult then to realize that evil is only the corruption of the good -as Augustine astutely noticed it. The following illustration helped me grasp that concept.

"Behold two pieces of bread in each of my hands. One has little mold in it while the other a bit more. If I were to ask you to tell me what I'm holding in each hand, you’d likely say: 'this (or that) is a piece of moldy bread.' Therefore, you realize that it doesn’t matter how much mold any slice has, because you have rightly noticed that both are 'moldy bread'."

And so is with us.

And this is what I understand total depravity to mean: that man is a sinner no matter how much sin he carries in his being. But it doesn't mean he is as bad as he can be. Otherwise there will be a point when he would cease to be a man, like that piece of moldy bread ceasing to be bread to become just mold.

Simple faith

A few weeks ago my church received several people into membership. Sitting there I watched as the new members were introduced to the congregation. Some of them were going to be baptized and join us in partaking the Lord's Supper for the first time. It was a momentous moment.

As the pastor baptized each of the members, he prayed for each one of them. The congregation did pray too. And as I listened to his words, I was pleasantly struck by my pastor referring to their simple faith. See, some of them may not have a formal education like mine yet they have something far better: the promises of God and Christ himself.

That reminded me of Jesus' words praising childlike-faith in his disciples: "...Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." (Lk 18:17)