God Centered Dad

   In the last few months, I have written about the lengths that God has gone to in His pursuit of us, and more recently I wrote about the suffering that we go through on earth and why God may allow that to happen to us. These two articles are weighing on me as we ourselves are struggling with news that my family has recently received regarding a friend of the family, in particular a friend of my wife's. I don't want to write this, especially as this is a very recent event and I don't want it to seem unsympathetic, that I am saying that this young lady has brought her circumstances on herself, but God is compelling me to write this anyway and I hope that I don't screw it up. This friend, we'll call her Pamela, has been connected to us for more than two decades. We got to know Pamela in a church that we used to attend. Pamela has always been vibrant and energetic, always volunteering for her favourite local sports team and if there was a Christian music concert any...

   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...