Christian trials

It was 8 a.m. on a Saturday in Southern California while I was settling to watch my four-and-a-half-year-old son play basketball when I received a call from a sister in the Lord, Anne, dying in Minnesota. [1] We never met, but similar difficult providences had connected us for counsel and we became...

Prosper of Aquitaine and His Defense of God’s Grace The fourth-century debate between Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius left a profound mark in church history, with Pelagius’s views condemned as heresy at the ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431. In a nutshell, Augustine explained that, because of...

J. Douglas MacMillan shares how fisherman alerted him about one of his sheep stuck on a lonely cliff’s edge with nothing left to eat. And having had no water to soften and digest the food, it later died. [1] In contrast, Psalm 23 promises that God will always guide Christians where they can eat and...

Augustine of Canterbury – A Reluctant Missionary Augustine of Canterbury, often known as “the apostle of the English,” would have never made it across the Channel if it hadn’t been for the insistent prompting of Pope Gregory I. The eighth century historian Bede tells us in fact that Augustine and...

Catherine Marsh – Loving the Unloved In 1853, thousands of men arrived on the quiet Sydenham hills to build an ambitious structure: the Crystal Palace, where Charles Spurgeon later preached to a crowd of 23,654 people. Building such a capable compound, surrounded by gardens and fountains, took an...

Is it difficult for you to think about joy and suffering in the same sentence? Normally, when we are in the middle of suffering, we just want it to be over. Think of the woman who feels betrayed by her best friend, or the wife who feels betrayed by her husband. Consider the mother who longs for her...

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” – Romans 8:20-21 In John Milton’s classic epic, Paradise...

Adam and Eve were tempted to believe, “You will be like God,” and that lie has been deceiving us ever since. We may not self-identify as deities demanding sacrifices and overt worship, but we may fall for subtler versions. One variation combines ideas that are very common today: I have no limits. I...

“They’re trying to get me” is the catch phrase of the paranoid mind. The question it raises, is the identity of “they”. But the leading declaration of Psalm 129 is quite different. It is not a statement of fears but of memory: “Many time have they afflicted me from my youth, may Israel now say.” (1...

Psalm 125 is about those who have faith in the Lord. For Old Testament believers, like New Testament believers, their trust or faith was in the Lord and no where else. The image in the text is how the Old Testament believer understood union with Christ. The believer whose faith is in God is...