The Sojourn

Category: Encouragement

  • Side Blooms of the Spirit

    Side Blooms of the Spirit

    With the recent drought, a saguaro cactus copes with the lack of water by conserving its vertical growth and opening unused budding locations further down the side of the cactus. These “side blooms” are both a cause of distress and a rare display of extra beauty.

    Colossians 1:28–29 says, ” Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”

    The work of presenting one another mature in Christ can often seem to be difficult and full of labor. It’s never easy to “warn” and “teach” one another. Sometimes it feels like we see little to no growth. But the Spirit causes us to adapt to this world by bringing beauty out of toil. When we strive with his energy—an energy which only he alone possesses—we can bloom in the most unexpected places.

  • A Reiki Master, A Muslim, and the World Belongs to the Lord

    Three beautiful stories, all from Christianity Today:

    A New Age Healer Discovers a Greater Healer

    But I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Reiki world. Every day I felt a greater burden of conviction to tell people that whatever healing they experienced during Reiki sessions was a gift from God, not me. He was the answer to all their questions, problems, and longings.

    Yet saying this was forbidden. New Age philosophy treats this world as an illusion, a school for our spiritual mastery where many gods, spirits, and guides are honored. To speak of Jesus as one deity among many, equal in power and authority, is permitted. But to speak of him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life is out of the question.

    Read her story.

    A Former Muslim Describes the Olive Skin of the Gospel

    As a Middle Easterner, every time I read Bible stories, a smile crawls across my face because its aphorisms sound so much like those my relatives use. I can almost smell the spices of dishes I came to love as a child. My heart warms at the examples of hospitality. After all, Jesus and his disciples were not sharing apple pies, french fries, or hot dogs as they ministered to those around them. The Bible’s Eastern tang is so pungent that one wonders how Christianity has come to be viewed as a Western, white religion.

    Here the rest of his wonderful description.

    A Global Pandemic Opens Doors for Worship Without Borders

    See how this song, “The Blessing”, created 100 choirs around the world.

  • Not Just a God of Something

    Not Just a God of Something

    Our modern world is filled with people and emptied of gods. In the ancient world, the reverse was true. Nearly every culture had a pantheon of deities, and every god was a god of something. These gods were vain and petty and murderous, but each had a role to play in the operation of the created order. It is in milieu of these deities that the Hebrew Scriptures utter, with decisive authority, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This is not another god of something; this is The God of All Things.

    Later, John circumscribes the whole of created history with this: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Rev. 21:1). The story of the Bible is about how God is not only the Divine Creator, but also the Sovereign King of the Cosmos.

  • “Come to Me”

    “Come to Me”

    And when Jesus completed these words, the crowds were astounded by his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as one of their scribes.

    Matthew 7:28–29

    Many misinterpret the Sermon as nothing more than good advice. Matthew 7:12 (the “Golden Rule”) may in this sense be the most abused verse in the Sermon. An ironic mistake, since it falls directly prior to the teaching that is designed to prevent this sort of thinking.

    The words of Jesus are not one tome in a library of wisdom, nor is the Teacher himself one voice among a pantheon of sages. He stands a world apart from “influencers” and all other self-proclaimed brokers of wisdom. As C.S. Lewis writes, “Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

  • “But Miss Mills was praying, and the Word of God was working…”

    God picked out a couple of schoolteachers, Miss Mills and Miss Thomas, to have a large part in my coming to Christ. Miss Mills was a general science teacher, and I was one of her problem pupils. She wrote my name on her prayer list and prayed for me every day for six solid years.

    On the Friday night I was arrested, she was home with Miss Thomas, looking up verses in the Bible, trying to find ten on the subject of salvation which they could give to the young people to memorize. Little did she know that the boy for whom she had been praying for six years was going to memorize those verses. When Sunday came along, I decided to go to young people’s meeting. The pool hall where I played billiards and gambled was about half a block from the church. That evening I looked around to make sure none of the pool hall bays were looking, and I sneaked down to the church and joined in the young people’s service.

    ….

    During the third week of my renewed interest in young people’s meetings I was on my way to work with these 20 verses of Scripture stored away in my memory. I walked along, minding my own business, with my lunch pail in my hand. I was back in my sin. My promise to God, made that night when the policeman was taking me to jail, did not change my life. Going to young people’s meeting on Sunday did not change me either. I was the same guy. I was spending Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at the taverns and beer joints, and going to church on Sunday and feeling, “Well’ I’m a little better. I guess a little of this good won’t hurt me after all.”

    But Miss Mills was praying, and the Word of God was working; and all of a sudden that morning, as I walked along, the Holy Spirit brought one of those verses to my mind: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My Word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life…” (John 5:24).

    Those words “hath everlasting life” stuck in my mind. I said, “O God, that’s wonderful — everlasting life!” I pulled my little Testament out of my pocket and looked it up, and sure enough, there it was — “…hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”

    There for the first time I remember praying, after I had grown to be a man, when I was not in trouble with the police or something like that. I said, “O God, whatever this means, I want to have it.” And just like that the Holy Spirit brought John 1:12 to my mind: “But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God…” I then looked up that verse, and there it was, just as I remembered it. “O God,” I said, “whatever it means to receive Jesus, I do it right now.” That was my new birth.

    — Dawson Trotman, Born to Reproduce

  • “To what end does he bother to speak to us?”

    JI Packer

    The truly staggering answer which the Bible gives to this question is that God’s purpose in revelation is to make friends with us. It was to this end that He created us rational beings, bearing his image, able to think and hear and speak and love; He wanted there to be genuine personal affection and friendship, two-sided, between himself and us—a relation, not like that between a man and his dog, but like that of a father to his son, or a husband to his wife. Loving friendship between two persons has no ulterior motive; it is an end in itself. And this is God’s end in revelation.  

    — J.I. Packer, God Has Spoken, 50