Words4Wonder Blog

Revelation 3: 20   “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me”   I think a lot of us are modern day pharisees. We’ve developed a society where we are fixated on what we can and can’t do in the bible, and we condemn people when we don’t think they fit our own criteria of what a ‘true Christian’ is. But who is in the position to validate our faith if not God? Who has ever fit the criteria of a ‘true Christian’? When we adopt this thinking it’s almost as if we are rejecting the very premise of Jesus’s resurrection. The very foundation of our faith is rooted in the fact that someone died for our sins, so that we may have a relationship with God, not a religion. And I think we must first understand the distinction between the two terms before we can reject this modern-day thinking.   Religion are customs and practices we follow. This can be things like going to church on Sund...

James 1: 2   “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”   Have you ever not been in a good mood? Have you ever felt like things are just not going your way? If you answered yes to any of those questions, it shows that you are human. Problems occur and things happen that can make us upset, and that is an unfortunate reality we have to face in this world .   For me, one of my resolutions this year is to be more joyful. If I had to make a book about the year of 2024, the title of it would be “ A sequence of difficulties” . In my life, it seemed I was experiencing problem after problem and issue after issue. I couldn’t escape them. The bitter truth is that problems and issues are inevitable, but our attitude towards them isn’t .   At th at time, I was angry at God for allowing all those things to happen to me, but in retrospect I can be grateful to see the work God was doing inside of me, the resilience he was building, ...

1 John 10: 27   “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow me”   Recently I was having a conversation with my friend about how God speaks to us. For my friend, God spoke audibly, through visions and through emotions and for me God spoke through scripture, through people and sometimes dreams. Ironically through our conversation, God was speaking to me. I may not have heard an audible voice, but God was saying to not limit how he communicates. Seeing the different ways God spoke to me and my friend, led me to talk about it today.    Let’s not trap God’s voice through our expectations as to how we want to receive it: God will speak however he desires , we just need to position ourselves to receive the message.   Focussing on the verse, with something so short, a lot is being said. For one, if we are to hear God’s voice, God has to know us. When we say we know someone, we measure them through their character. One of the ways to see if we are known...

Philippians 3:20   “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ”   One of the main things that pulled me away from God growing up was the fear of hell. I went to churches that embedded uncertainty about my afterlife, and through that fear , I pictured God to be a judge but not also a saviour .  When the root of our relationship with God is built on fear instead of love, it removes the intimacy God desires with us.    For a long time, I positioned my relationship with God as if I was on thin ice. Fear made me feel like I had to earn my relationship with God . Adopting this fear mentality makes us believe that we must constantly ‘get right’ with God through our actions. The truth is, we have never ‘been right’ with God, in fact by our own works, nothing we can do can ever make us right with God. ( Ephesians 2:8-9) We are not saved by our good wor k s; we are saved by grace. Our good works are on...