Religion

Christians believe that God speaks to people. But what does God sound like? Learning to recognise the difference between God’s voice and the myriad of other voices in your head takes much patience and practice. But it is possible!

When the fear of war overwhelms our thoughts, let us not forget that we are not alone, that God will end our suffering and give us a new and everlasting life.

Five hundred years ago, Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. How are the motives that led to the Reformation viewed today?

“All I can do is pray and hope.” With those words, I ended an article on infertility. After years of marriage and not one pregnancy, I did one of the only things I could do to help me process the fact that my wife and I might never have children: I wrote about it. 

This coronavirus crisis has, for me, some perplexing parallels with a well-known incident narrated in the Gospel of Matthew (14:22-33). The disciples are confined in a little boat in the middle of a terrible storm, almost as we are confined at home today by the emergency laws of our countries.

The end of the line for Christian perfectionism is not perfection, but atheism. This is because what we imagine to be the constant unsatisfied look of God upon us, is a burden too heavy for any human to bear.

In the choppy waters of Port Doha, Qatar, things weren’t looking good. Moesha was midway through a 10-kilometre open water race in the World Championships. This was her chance to qualify for the Olympics. But she was trailing behind a pack of thirty girls and had been for much of the race.

On May 19th, 1780, a strange phenomenon turned a sunny morning into an unexpected night. The event, known as the Dark Day, was seen as a sign of divine judgment by contemporaries and as a means of ridiculing apocalyptic expectations by sceptics.

I still remember May 21, 2011, like it was yesterday. Thousands of kilometres away in Boulder, USA, an evangelist named Harold Camping, president of the popular ministry Family Radio, was in the news spotlight. He had predicted that on May 21, more than 200 million Christians all around the world would be raptured away to heaven and that five months later, the world would end.

The idea of hell takes up a dark corner in most of our minds, whether we think about it or not.

Seventh-day Adventists have the deep conviction that Jesus Christ will soon return, and the desire to keep His commandments as they were originally written in the Decalogue.

In the first three articles in this series, we examined what Scripture says about the coming of Jesus, and also how the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation remain the foundations of understanding time.

"If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them" (James 4:17).

To be a good Christian, they say, you must not swear, steal, lie, cheat or speak ill of anyone.

Some moments in life fade quickly, like ephemeral portraits in the memory's archive. Others, though we have never witnessed them, haunt us and force us to reconsider our perception of life, time, and our shadow self.