Harmony of Grace

Image Source:  Quino Al We are faced with a landslide of hopelessness and despair. It is difficult to blame people for being afraid to bring children into a world as seemingly broken and cruel as the one we are currently facing. It is easy to be consumed the never-ending spiral of negativity. Without minimizing the severity of the issues that are stacked against us, I would like to argue that we still have a sliver of hope to cling to. For those of us who identify as Christ-followers, we believe that we have a saviour who became one of us, fully human. He suffered as completely and utterly as any human ever could. Not only did he go through excruciating torment on his personal journey to the cross, during his crucifixion he took the sins of the world upon his shoulders and experienced the anguish and pain of the entirety of humanity - even to the point of crying out in the words of the Psalmist, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?...

Image Source:  Martin Brosy Welp, it happened... In my last blog post,  an apple a day , I mentioned that I always seem to get sick after travelling home to East London from Pietermaritzburg. My wife, Mel, and I got to go home in December for a nice long Christmas holiday. For 2 weeks. I was as fit as a fiddle. But then it happened... I woke up one day in immense pain with my throat on fire and my sinus's all clogged up. In my previous post, I wrote about strengthening our spiritual immune system to prevent us from becoming spiritually sick. But what about those times when we realize that we are already sick? It is pointless to take multivitamins to prevent ourselves from getting sick because our immune systems have already taken a hit. We now have to try to cure our sickness. Often our first instincts are to treat the symptoms. Immediately after realizing I was sick, I decided to self-medicate, taking shots of Corenza C, Sinutab, pain-killers and the like. Bu...

Image Source:  Rawpixel In Mark 7, we encounter a strange story of Jesus healing a deaf man with a speech impediment. You can read the full story in Mark 7:31-37, but here is a brief summary: A deaf and mute man is brought to Jesus for healing. Jesus first takes this man aside in private, away from the crowd, and then proceeds to stick his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. Strange right? Jesus then looks up to heaven and with a big sigh, says to the man: “Ephphatha,” which means “be opened” and the man’s eyes were opened and he began to speak plainly. One could argue that if Jesus indeed had the ability to heal the sick, surely he could have just clicked his fingers and it would have been done? So why then do we read countless stories in scripture of Jesus healing people in a variety of different ways? Here are a couple of other examples where Jesus uniquely healed people: In Mark 1, Jesus shouts at a man to drive out an impure s...