A beautiful hymn

Paul and Silas sit in prison in Philippi, after causing some havoc in the town (what else is new, right?)

And what do they do? They pray and sing. I pray that someday I will be able to simply be at rest in trial and suffering, praying and singing to the Lord who holds me in the palm of His hand.

If I were in the position of Paul and Silas, this might well be the hymn that I would belt out at the top of my lungs. Enjoy.

Out of the depths I cry to You,

Lord, hear my voice of pleading;

Bend down Your gracious ear, I pray,

Your humble servant heeding.

If You remember each misdeed,

And of each thought and word take heed,

Who can remain before You?

Only by grace, by grace alone.

Your pardon is a gift of love,

Your grace alone must save us,

Our works will not remove our guilt,

The strictest life would fail us.

Let none in deeds or merits boast,

But let us own the Holy Ghost

for He alone can change us:

Only by grace, by grace alone.

Though great our sins and sore our woes

His grace much more aboundeth;

His helping love no limit knows,

Our utmost need it soundeth.

Our kind and faithful Shepherd He,

Who will set all His people free

From all their sin and sorrow:

Only by grace, by grace alone.

- Martin Luther

New Zealand's darkest day

As many of you know, on February 22, 2011, at 12:51pm, the New Zealand city of Christchurch was struck by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that as of 3pm the following day, has left 75 people confirmed dead and roughly 300 missing.

The hard part for me about this situation is resting in the sovereignty of God in suffering. While events like this are obviously consequences of sin in the world, we can still be at peace knowing that God is completely in control of every brick that falls in the streets of Christchurch. I am sure that He has an amazing plan for this that we may never know in this lifetime.

Therefore, lets unite our hearts in prayer together all over the world for the people of Christchurch.
May there be a revival of repentance and faith in Christ in Christchurch that will then permeate through the entire country because of this horrible disaster.

Lets pray BIG.

"Even as you loved me."

"The glory that you have given men I have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me." - John 17:22, 23


What a profound statement!

Jesus Himself declares His desire for people that are in Him to be united to the point of resembling the Father and Son; perfectly united in mind and heart. So we obviously need to strive to live in unity with each other, living lives of love toward each other where we are known as Christ's disciples by the way in which we love each other (John 13:35).

However, the statement that I would like you to focus and meditate on is the last part in bold. Jesus wants the world to know that God the Father loves the people to whom Christ's sacrifice has been offered, AS MUCH AS he loves Christ himself, the perfect God-man!

Just think about that. What an amazing God we serve, who makes Himself known to us in such beautiful, but mysterious ways.

May this be the cry of our hearts

When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
  I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you.


Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
  You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
  Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
  My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
 (Psalm 73:21-26 ESV)


This psalm is one that I constantly return to remind myself of my standing before the Lord. Whenever I fall into sin and self-righteousness, I TRY to crawl back to this psalm and the truth it speaks to my heart.

Out of my own fallen nature, I constantly fall back into sin, causing my Heavenly Father displeasure. BUT nevertheless, God keeps me in His hand and lifts me out of the dirt, cleansing me from my sin and disobedience (v. 23, 24a, 1 John 1:9), until eventually, after sanctifying me through His beautiful gospel (1 Corinthians 15:2), He will glorify me into His awesome, indescribable presence for the rest of eternity (v. 24b).

The Lord is faithful beyond words in the ENTIRE process of redemption and salvation. Our hearts regeneration, the faith and repentance needed, the legal justification, righteousness, sanctification and glorification all belong to the Lord and are splendid gifts to us; an unworthy and helpless people in the hands of a powerful and merciful God.

May we acknowledge the inadequacy of our own flesh and hearts and simply run into the hands of our loving Saviour, who offers rest to all who realise they can no longer run the race by themselves (Matthew 11:28-30).

Striving, side by side.

Something I have been thinking a lot about the last few days is the much neglected ideal of gospel community. Community where believers are constantly spurring each other on to love and good deeds, and where we are also constantly reminding each other of the grace and love that has been lavished on us through Christ.

This is something that Paul urged the churches he was writing to be continually doing and unfortunately, it seems to have slipped away over the past 2000 years.

I know from personal experience how much I need this in my life, a group of people who genuinely love me and who can remind every day of the amazing grace of God shown in the gospel. I also desire to be able to do this for people too.

Reminding believers of their standing in Christ, based purely on His work and NOTHING else, is something ALL of us need. Choose one person you can help with this and get reminding! If you need to, make notes to remind you to remind them!

Rejoice! It's a command! (Part 2)

Personally, I see this next topic as being MUCH more difficult than the last post. Paul Washer addresses this issue very well in a video of his on YouTube, titled "Joy from Christ, not your performance."

And it is: Rejoicing in the Lord and his saving grace when things are going fine and there seems to be no suffering going on in your life. You are doing a good job at fighting your sin, you are reading your Bible daily and spending an hour in prayer every day. You shared the gospel with four people this week! Things are just looking up man! The sky is the limit!

But then, things change. A sin that you used to struggle with sneaks back into your life, you don't read your Bible, you forget to pray for people that have asked you to pray for them, and you feel like you have completely gone off the rails of your faith. To be straight up, Washer calls this idolatry. And he is right. This person is beginning to place their confidence and faith in themselves and their own performance. We know that this is pointless, because our attempts at righteous deeds are as filthy rags before a holy God (Isaiah 64:6). The only thing that we can cling onto and put forward before God as the source of our justification is the blood of Christ, spilt from His completed work on the cross.

Take joy from Christ's performance and not our own. Otherwise it is idolatry.

Give thanks to the Spirit for giving you the power to live a life that is glorifying to God, but ultimately all the merit you can ever have, is due to the finished work of Christ and His precious blood.

Rejoice! It's a command! (Part 1)

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." - Philippians 4:4


Again, another extremely difficult discipline to put into practice, but yet again, one that is absolutely essential for growth in the Christian life.

It is always hard to rejoice in hard times. For example, someone who falls into constant sexual sin will often fall into a prolonged state of despair, which can often be the worldly regret that 2 Corinthians 7 talks refers to. Learning to rejoice in these difficult times is something that the apostle Paul so masterfully described later on in that same letter. After praying to God to remove the "thorn" in Paul's flesh, Jesus replies:

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I (Paul) will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong." - 2 Corinthians 12:9, 10


This is a beautiful truth! We need to be content in our hardships, no matter what they are, because Christ covers us with a grace that exceeds all sin, enabling and empowering us to cling fast to the gospel of redemption through faith, by which we were made right with God purely by the merit of Christ. Our daily sin cannot revoke the invaluableness of Christ's blood, but rather helps us to realise our hopelessness in mortifying our sin with anything other than the gospel.

Join me next blog for something much more challenging, I find. Rejoicing in the Lord when things are going really well! Man, I can't wait!

How to handle our desires, according to Piper

I found this while doing some YouTube surfing sometime ago.

How can I long to be married without obsessing about it?

John Piper has an awesome habit of giving amazing practical advice to people who are in situations where they are in desperate need of guidance and wisdom. This is no exception. Relationships (in particular, marriage) is an amazing way to glorify God and live out the amazing narrative of the gospel in a practical manner. I desire to be married myself someday, in the not TOO distant future hopefully!

Keeping desires such as these in check can be challenging. I often find myself struggling to keep them under control, having them at the forefront of my mind which is not the place I want them to be whatsoever.

In this video, Piper explains how our hearts, like Blaise Pascal famously once said, have a void within them that is designed to be filled with God. So when we begin obsessing about these desires that we have in our hearts, they can be because of gaps in our hearts that are supposed to be filled with unquenchable passion to know God. We will always fall short in our love for the Father because we do remain fallen humans in the hands of a loving, merciful God, and it is at these times when we can continue to fall away from him in our pursuit for our other desires.

"Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday." - Psalm 37:4, 5


Search for your delight first and foremost in the Lord of our salvation, and then through that relationship, He will purify your desires and conform them to His will.

The greatest act of faith

Great quote from Paul Washer:

"What is the greatest act of faith? For me it is to look into the mirror of God's Word and see all my faults, all my sin, all my shortcomings, and to believe that God loves me exactly as He says He does."

Working it out

"Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." - Philippians 2:12, 13

It is a clear Biblical command to test yourself to see if you are in the faith (2 Corinthians 13:5, Philippians 2:12, 2 Peter 1:10). We need to weigh up our lives and our deeds to see if we have indeed been born again. A fig tree cannot produce thorns and vice versa. BUT REMEMBER - these good fruits present in our lives, through our new hearts and minds, are proof of our salvation, and not the reason for it. Look for fruit. This is working out our salvation, the fear and trembling coming from our utter helplessness is gaining our salvation in the first place.

Praise God for  his bestowing upon us the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which is completely revolutionising our depraved hearts and minds. May we rest in the gospel everyday and continue being sanctified by it's splendour.

Isaiah 41:10

"Fear not, for I am with you;
be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you,
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." - Isaiah 41:10


I believe that something that all people who have placed their faith in Christ have been found guilty of at least in their lives, is the underestimating of God and the extent of his character.

This text obviously promises us aid from our Heavenly Father, and an upholding of our souls that we cannot maintain ourselves. But how often do we fall back into doubting that he will deliver us, but rather let us fall? That may indeed be God's ordained plan for you that you fall, so that you can be raised up again stronger, but there remains a crucial truth here that has helped me immensely in my walk.

God, the Lord God Almighty, the Creator of the heavens and the earth. This, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, holy, righteous, self-sufficient, PERFECT being, promises to help me?! He has already given His own Son that we might enter into relationship with Him, but now he promises more?

Charles Haddon Spurgeon puts it much better than I. Please read, let it sink in and then worship the Lord.

"I will help you"

Like a child

"Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." - Mark 10:15, Luke 18:17

I always find these verses incredibly convicting. I used to often wonder to myself: How am I supposed to be like a child? I thought that I was supposed to grow up and mature into my salvation?


But it is not these qualities that these verses are talking about, as Christians are all called to grow in maturity in the faith (Ephesians 4:11-16), but they are rather talking about a child's helplessness and lack of power. In this instance, a lack of ability to obtain the benefits of the kingdom for himself.

For all of those who are in Christ Jesus, he has become to us our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30), and in order for these gifts to be ours, we need to realise our utter depravity and inability to save our souls, but for the precious blood of Christ, which cleanses us from our sin and makes us righteous before God.

In vain, many try to obtain the kingdom and their salvation through other means, mainly trying to live a good, moral life, in their own power. But they will never inherit this promise until they, like a child, fall before their Heavenly Father, with a broken and contrite heart, acknowledging ONLY the finished work of Christ and begging for mercy from a God who is both the definition of justice and love.

May we all be like children in our response to the gospel call of Christ.

How NOT to memorise Scripture

As of the 1st of January, 2011, some friends and I have taken it upon ourselves to memorise the book of Philippians. As part of an attempt to encourage Christians around the world to memorise Scripture, the Resurgence put this idea forward and I personally know a substantial amount of people taking part now.

As of February 8, I am up to verse 9 of chapter 2. It has been a very challenging experience but also very enjoyable. However, through a discussion with a friend recently, I realised an awful truth; simply seeing Scripture as a bunch of words that are solely stored in your memory banks, nullifies the entire point of Bible memorisation, and the fact of the Bible being, "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16). 


One of the marvelous truths that I let slip through my fingers is found in Philippians 1:27, where Paul is addressing the church, urging them to be living side-by-side for the faith of the gospel. The importance of living in gospel community is something very dear to me and I can't stress enough the importance and need of having godly people around you to encourage you in the faith, due to our tendencies to constantly fall short in our own unbelief. Were it not for my friend, I doubt that I would have picked up the importance of Paul's statement, despite my ability to recite it word for word.


My prayer is that we will all be taken captive by the Word of God, letting it dwell in us richly (Colossians 3:16), so it overflows out of us in prayer, worship, love for one another and a transformed life. Don't simply throw it into the storeroom of your mind, but engrave it on the tablet of your heart.

A picture says a thousand words...

A friend of mine found this picture online and I think it is beautiful. The conflict and tension that is present in Egypt at the moment would be a terrifying thing to be a part of, and this wee bit of love gives a wee bit of hope for the people of the country.

Christians protect praying Muslims in Egypt

My first post

Hello there all who are reading,

I intend for this blog to be a recording of my thoughts about every facet of life, from my faith in Jesus and my work for Student Life on the Victoria campus, to sport, from music to movies, from things that may or may NOT make you say, "Hmmmmmm", to the most seemingly random musings on mundane everyday activities.

Enjoy.