Mar 7 2013
How God chooses a King
There were two kings: Saul and David. God rejected Saul and elected David. Why? The answer is simple: God saw their hearts – Saul’s heart was bad and David’s heart was good. This teaches us a lot about electing leaders. We need to see their hearts – but how?
Imagine steering an aircraft with your mind. You think ‘tilt left’ and it does, you think ‘climb higher’ and it obeys. An air base in Dayton, Ohio is researching this capability. They are developing monitors that read a pilot’s brain signals and turn them into the kind that guide aircraft. Certain thoughts activate certain mechanisms. It’s strange; but an aircraft will soon tell us what a pilot was thinking! But there is a similar link between the heart and human behaviour. Specific behaviour reveals a specific thought, and consistent, habitual behaviour reveals more; it reveals a heart.
We see this with Saul and David. Saul kept doing things that revealed a bad heart, and David kept doing things that testified to a good heart. More
Nov 28 2013
‘The borrower is slave to the lender’
Proverbs 22:7 and Matthew 18:21-35
“Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother who sins against me? Up to seven times?” asked Peter. “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” answered Jesus (Mt 18:21-22)
Peter thought seven times was generous and godly. The number seven was sacred in his culture, and it was usually used to symbolize completion. Surely anyone who forgave seven times had done what God required? But Jesus chose another number – seventy seven. By compounding the sevens Jesus was saying that God’s people should never stop forgiving. His reasoning was simple: If God has forgiven us; we should always forgive each other. He then illustrated his point by telling a story about a servant who owed his master money. The master took pity on him and released him from his debt. But the servant refused to do the same for a fellow servant down the road. When the master heard about it he reinstated the first servant’s debt and threw him in prison. So Jesus concludes that if we do not forgive each other our heavenly master won’t forgive us. We must always keep on forgiving.
Now, this makes a lot of sense with spiritual debt, but what about financial debt? Does it make sense to lend money seventy seven times to someone who promises to repay but never does? More