God Centered Dad

   In my Bible reading today, I came again to 1 Samuel 15, which is the story of how King Saul, the first king of Israel, acted in disobedience to God and began the process by which the kingdom was taken away from him by God. This is a story of how one who was anointed by God ended up causing God to be grieved by His own choice. This is, for me anyway, a warning tale of how quickly we can lose the favour of God when we choose to disobey Him. In my last article I laid out how Saul came to be the king of Israel due to the people of Israel rejecting God's kingship over them and desiring a human king like the peoples around them had. The story of Saul's kingship starts back in chapter nine of 1 Samuel, but it doesn't seem to take long to see that Saul's heart is not aligned with God's, and we also see that King Saul is a coward and a weak leader; something that is all too common these days. The first indication that we have that Saul is afraid is at the time of his pub...

  A godly people deserve a godly leader; but does the opposite hold true? What does it say if we get another ungodly leader? In my devotions lately, I have been reading in 1 Samuel. Besides the story of how Samuel came to be born and to serve the Lord, the other thing that the story of Samuel is known for is the institution of an earthly kingdom for the nation of Israel. That is to say that they received their first king to rule over them, a human monarchy. It was God's intention that Israel would operate as a theocracy, that is that God would be their king. They would have no earthly ruler over them, but God's will would come to the people through the prophets and the judges that God would send to them. The problem is that people don't do well when they cannot see and converse with those who are put in a position of leadership over them. It didn't help that all of the nations surrounding Israel had kings who did the bidding of the nations. I suppose there may have been...

   One of the most common arguments that unbelievers have against the Christian theology of a loving God is to question why there is so much suffering in the world. The argument is based on the false notion that a loving God would never allow His creation to suffer, so there must not be a loving God. This is something that many Christians have also struggled with at some point or another. In truth, I think that one cannot truly understand the answers to this if they have not gone through struggles so severe that they could not have overcome them without God's help. Since I am one of those people, I will try to make sense of it. We have to remember that God is pursuing relationship with us. He is not an authoritarian who is looking to wield His power over anyone who does not submit to Him, willingly or not. His desire is to know us and for us to know Him. This is why He has been pursuing mankind through all time in numerous ways, as I laid out in this article . He wants what is...

   A large part of the purpose for this blog is to teach and encourage parents to discipline their children in love. I can teach and preach at you endlessly, but if you don't get to hear about the difference that your love and discipline can make, it is really just noise. Following is something that my wife and I just had the honour to do to step in and help someone else. My family just hosted some visitors for part of this weekend. An old friend of my wife's, from a time when my wife didn't even know me, came for a long overdue visit; I'll call her Theresa. Theresa has had things rough in the relationship area of her life. Theresa brought her young adult daughter along on this visit; let's call her Connie. My wife has been mentoring Connie for a little while, because Connie, regardless of her youth, has also had things rough in the relationship area of her life, and she now has the responsibility of raising a little boy of her own as a consequence of those difficul...

  There are a few things in Scripture that people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. A couple of these things are the nature of the Trinity of God and the notion of predestination. For some reason, I have never really had to wrestle with these things, so I hope that I can shed some light on one of these in this article; that one being the matter of predestination. I think this is a fitting time for me to delve into this since my last article, " Do We Go To Heaven When We Die ?", includes a section wherein I explain my understanding of God's relationship with time. I said that God is outside of and above time, and He views the entire timeline of earth's history at any and every moment, the same way we will see a string that we lay out on a table top. We can see the beginning, the end, and every point in the middle at all times. Because of this, God knows the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10). The notion of predestination causes people to panic because th...

   Today I am going to attempt to explain my understanding of what happens to us when we die. I will not claim that what follows is Biblical doctrine, because there are verses that appear to be contrary to what I believe while there are also verses that seems to support what I believe. While this can be said of virtually any topic, a lot of times that has to do with whether or not one is reading the Word in context or not, and also whether one is trying to read their beliefs into Scripture instead of getting their beliefs from Scripture. This is somewhat different in that I think that God has left this topic intentionally vague for us. I can't presume to understand why He would do so, but I do know that there are some things that we just don't need to know yet. That doesn't mean that we can't develop a theory on these things. The main point of the following is to recognize that we need to use Scripture to interpret Scripture. If your understanding of a verse is contrary...