Gives and Takes Away

When we think of God giving and taking it away, we often think of God giving us His blessing and taking it away as He did with Abraham’s son Isaac.  We read Job 1:21 and we sing it in the song “Blessed Be Your Name” by Matt Redman.

But I’m reading Genesis 8 today and it occurred to me that God also gives and takes away our punishment. 

Genesis 8 1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down.

God punished the men with flood for their wickedness. It rained and rained for 40 days to destroy all living things on this earth. But God later removed the water from ground and made it dry as God pushed the water back so Moses and Israelites can walk on the dry ground.

I praise God for not only God exercises His sovereignty by sometimes taking away good things in our lives but also pains and suffering as well. Ultimately Christ came to give us His righteousness and take away our punishment for sins.

Is It Christmas Day or NBA Day?

I myself, honestly, am excited to watch Kobe and D.Rose play basketball on TV this Christmas day. But I must wonder “Is that what Christmas has come down to now?”
As we forget about what Christmas day is all about we’ll be looking for anything to capture our bored minds. On Christmas day we’re bored from the scene of family gathering(if not family drama), playing video games, or playing with a newly purchased gadget.
We must remember why Christ came down to earth on Christmas day. Or at least think about that reason on this Christmas day before we grab a TV remote.

What has five heads, wears short pants and is a danger to your family? If you answered AC/DC, you would have been right, in 1980. But in 2011, the correct answer appears to be the NBA’s Christmas Day quintuple-header, five games from noon through midnight that few parents will relish playing in or coaching in or broadcasting.

Last year, Magic coach Stan Van Gundy memorably said: “I think the NBA is so important to Christmas that we really need to increase from five games to 10, and we need to start them at midnight on Christmas Eve and play them all through the day so there’s not a minute of Christmas Day when there’s not an NBA game on TV. Because it’s great. The NBA is Christmas … It’s what it’s all about.”

Why We Evangelize

We are like the medieval people who thought the earth was the center of the universe. They were wrong, and so are we. We think we are the center of the universe, and God and Jesus Christ and the angels all revolve around us. Heaven is for us; everything is for our benefit.

We are wrong. God is the center. We must change our center of gravity. He is the sun, and we revolve around Him.

But it is very hard to change. Even our motivation for evangelism is man-centered. I remember hearing many times in Bible school, “Oh, students, look at the lost souls. They are perishing. The poor people are going to hell. Each time the clock strikes, another 5,822.5 persons go to hell. Are you not sorry for them?” And we wept. We said, “Poor people! Let’s go and save them.” You see, we went not for Jesus’ sake, but for lost souls’ sake.

That may look nice, but it’s wrong, because everything must be Christ-motivated. We do not preach to lost souls because they are lost. We go to extend the Kingdom of God because God says so, and He is the Lord.

(Juan Carlos Ortiz)

Blind Faith and Matter of Doubts

There is no such thing as blind faith. Blind faith is not same as leap of faith. Leap of faith requires ‘seeing’.
Bible says
    “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV)

The Greek word for substance is hupostasis: underlying (hupo) state (stasis)of a thing. The English word “substance” can be broken down to: sub (under) and stance (stand ). Substance is that which stands under a thing. Faith is the understanding of things hoped for. Faith is seeing of things not seen.

Now you cannot see of things not seen by just blind-folding yourself and ignoring all doubts aside. If you have never struggled and wrestled with your belief but just blindly accepted it for whatever reason, that belief cannot withstand real storms in life. We have to keep asking questions about our understanding of God and his ways. Doubts are not always bad as long as you doubt to believe. Doubt has a purpose if done right. Some people will doubt only to not believe and they become skeptics. But when you doubt in order to believe, your faith will be solidified when you do believe.

“Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself.” (The Reason for God, Tim Keller)

Faith is acknowledging my doubts and inability to comprehend and also acknowledging that what God says in scriptures is true. Faith is saying, “I am not but God, you’re able.” It is the faith that comes by hearing the Word of God, the faith that believes the promises of God. Faith is not our wishes floating in the air but true faith must have a ground to stand on. As Christians we must place our faith on the solid ground of fact that Jesus loves us and He died and resurrected.

We need to be “Christians who have a concern for justice in the world but who grounded it in the nature of God rather than in their own subjective feelings(Timothy Keller).”


We need to care about the oppression in the world but we need not make social justice replacement of our gospel of Jesus Christ.