bible and theology on Drifting

If you’ve ever spent time in the ocean, whether it be swimming, body-surfing, boogie-boarding—you know how easy it is to drift. One minute your family is right in front of you on the beach, the next m...

Perhaps the most intense place to experience drifting is commonly known as the EAC, the East Australian Current. If you’ve ever seen the Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo, you’ve been exposed to the EAC,...

To reach a port we must set sail – Sail, not tie at anchor Sail, not drift.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromis...

Holy God, to Your grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be. Let Thy goodness like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I l...

“I live in a small, rural community. There are lots of cattle ranches around here, and, every once in a while, a cow wanders off and gets lost . . . Ask a rancher how a cow gets lost, and chances are ...

The other enemy of the soul, meaninglessness…chokes out life with equal vigor. Meaninglessness woos us into spending our one shot at life on insignificant and trivial things. If we are not vigilant, w...

God, we come with hesitant steps and uncertain motives to sweep out the corners where sin has accumulated, and uncover the ways we have strayed from Your truth. Expose the empty and barren places wher...

When I graduated from college I was given one of the greatest opportunities of my young life. A group of my friends were told that if we were able to purchase a flight to the Cayman Islands, we would ...

God has come to us and revealed Himself fully to us Yet too often we hide ourselves from His love and salvation Instead of focusing on you, Lord God, we focus on ourselves Instead of trusting yo...

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws....

Loving, good, and kind God, you sent your Son to endure the cross so that we might know you. You desire a relationship with us, and you are interested in the condition of our hearts. Too often our hea...

The watchman was a very common theme in Old Testament days. In Biblical days, the Jews had vineyards with grapevines. On that farm with acres of grapes, the Jews built a tall tower called a watchtower...

The history of repentance is as old as humankind. We each carry the remembrance of wrongdoing in burdensome satchels, hoping that eventually someone will ease them off our back. We each know the feeli...

A strong church once inscribed these words on an archway leading to the churchyard. Over time, two things happened: the church lost its passion for Jesus and His gospel, and ivy began to grow on the a...

I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in ...

Robinson's Winsome Faith I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson's novels and essays for some time now. Of her fiction, I’ve read Gilead , reflections of a retired minister written for his ...

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea. You have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, ...

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.

In her book, Invitations from God, Adele Ahlberg Calhoun shares a great analogy of the difficulty of faithful discipleship: it’s not always easy to follow: Recently I had to follow another car to a ...

In the summer of 1986, two ships collided in the Black Sea off the coast of Russia. Hundreds of passengers died as they were hurled into the icy waters below. News of the disaster was further darkened...

The disciples are tossed on the waves again. They are in a storm, fully as bad as the previous one. Gently and by degrees he excites and urges the disciples on toward greater responsiveness, even to t...

[Describing many of his friends] Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach...

Keeping sabbath may involve us in relinquishing certain kinds of power on behalf of other kinds. If we allow it, sabbath may bring us to true authority, true power. The road is that of letting go, rat...

Allow the presence of God to be the bridge through your uncertainty. The axis of uncertainty is disorientation, and let’s face it, who wants to be spinning in all directions while in transition? Resea...

Cars have allowed us to spread out our living patterns significantly. Historically, cities have had a natural limit set by how far people could comfortably walk from place to place. Then, with the dev...

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

Never follow anyone else’s path. Unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path. Then by all means follow that path.