Read Reflect Holding your hands up and admitting you’ve done wrong when you’re called out is not easy. It puts a dent in your pride and teaches you a lesson about avoiding the misdemeanor in future. It becomes even harder when you’re not the perpetrator but you keep quiet about someone else’s misdeeds. The sense […]

Read Reflect The story is told of an illiterate woman who a couple of years after hearing and believing the gospel and experiencing the goodness of God in a multiplicity of ways,  genuinely asked her well-educated daughter in their local language: “I hear us speaking all the time of us serving God but really, come […]

Read Reflect Today’s reading in the last chapter of the first book of the major prophets is echoed in the final chapter of the entire Bible. Not surprisingly, the book of Revelation substantially draws imagery from the book of Isaiah. After many years of many people trying to convince me of the rich benefits of […]

Read Reflect In the days of the Book of Kings, the three powers that governed were prophet, priest and king. It was a really good thing when all three worked together well; the kind of relationship that appears to exist between the prophet Isaiah and king Hezekiah as contemporaries during the eighth century B.C. When […]

Read Reflect Welcome to one of the darkest periods of not only Judah’s, but all of history. The irony is that Judah’s most evil king ruled the longest – from age 12 for 55 years! Even King David, the “measuring standard” of good kingship, ruled only 40 years. Every conceivable evil, from idolatry (vv 3-5) […]

Read Reflect What a breath of fresh air – a story in the Book of Chronicles that ends well! As I write this I too am faced with a ‘Sennacherib situation’—something that threatens one’s very existence, essence and well-being. How many times do we feel we don’t deserve such a difficult situation because, like Hezekiah, […]

Read Reflect This psalm has been described as a “psalm of confidence” because of the quiet trust it places on our God. The geography of Jerusalem expressed the emotions of the pilgrims graphically. Although Jerusalem is on a hill, it is surrounded on all sides by a ring of higher hills, and as the pilgrims […]