Introduction to Joy

We were made for joy. And joy is found in relationship. As Marcus Warner and Dr. Jim Wilder says (“Rare Leadership“), when we can be our authentic selves we live from joy. Conversely, when we’re trying to live up to other people’s expectations, or from our own wounded soul, we’re operating from our counterfeit self. This is living from fear or anxiety. 

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Why we should always be thankful

Since it’s Thanksgiving holiday this week (in the US), here’s a good message (video clip below) by Bill Johnson about the virtue of thankfulness. I want share some things from that clip and add my own thoughts about why we should be thankful in all situations. 

When I heard God’s voice

I still remember the time in 1982 when I realized that I was hearing God speak to me for the first time. It was quite unintentional and surprising. Understand that I wasn’t the type that thought everyone who said they heard God was credible. I was actually quite skeptical at the time.

The door is open…are you?

Salvation is not about escaping something, it’s about finding Someone. It’s not about jumping through the hoops of religion, it’s about accepting an open invitation to something both strange and absolutely wonderful beyond our ability to imagine. Because of what Christ has done, we’ve all been invited to participate in nothing less than His divine life (2 Pet.1:4). 

You are not alone and you matter!

There are two innate human needs that reside deeply in every heart. They can be expressed in the form of the following two questions: “Am I alone?” and “Do I matter?” These unspoken questions haunt us in the quiet dark of night. This is because we’re both relational beings and we seek significance. We look for love, to belong, and we want our lives to count for something. 

Why does God create?

First of all, to dogmatically assert we really know anything about God that He doesn’t reveal to us would be the ultimate in pretentious hubris. The finite mind can no more fathom the infinite Source of Being than Hamlet could comprehend Shakespeare. We simply have no mental grid for anything outside of our “fishbowl” we call the cosmos, so there will always be a degree of mystery here. Yet, we can logically deduce the existence of this infinite Source of Being, and from that, infer the best answer for why God creates.

Why does the secular age still seem haunted?

I’ve been reading an interesting book by James K.A. Smith titled, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. He describes it as a guidebook to Taylor’s scholarly tome, A Secular Age. Taylor’s book looks at our history and how we got here, and proffers that we really haven’t properly understood what the secular age means.