Christian Living Church, Baptism and Communion Faith Fear, Anxiety and Doubt Gratitude and Thanksgiving Hope and Encouragement Life Lessons from the Bible Love and Relationships Praise and Worship Prayer and Devotion Repentance and Forgiveness Salvation and the Gospel The Holy Spirit
We live in a world that moves fast. Technology evolves, social norms shift, and new ethical questions emerge that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. As Christians who believe Scripture is God's authoritative Word, we face a genuine challenge: how do we take an ancient text, written thousands of years ago to people in vastly different circumstances, and faithfully apply it to the...
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Most of us spend more of our waking hours at work than anywhere else. More hours than in church. More hours than with family. More hours than in prayer. That simple fact raises a question that the Christian faith cannot sidestep: what does it mean to follow Jesus in that space? Not merely to avoid behaving badly, not merely to find opportunities for religious conversation, but to be genuinely, dis...
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Almost every Christian you ask has a story about baptism. For some it was a moment of tears and public joy, surrounded by people who knew them. For others it was quiet, private, almost trembling. For some it happened in infancy, surrounded by a faith community making promises on their behalf. And for a few, baptism still lies ahead, a step not yet taken.
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You had a plan. Perhaps it was a career trajectory you had mapped out, a relationship you were certain would last, a dream you had nurtured since childhood. And then life happened. The job fell through. The diagnosis came. The person you loved walked away. The door you were sure God would open slammed shut in your face.
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Suffering is the great uninvited guest in every human life. It arrives without warning and often without explanation: a diagnosis that changes everything, a relationship that shatters, a loss that leaves you gasping for air, a pain that simply will not relent. If you are reading this in the midst of such a season, you know exactly what it feels like when the ground shifts beneath your feet and the...
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There are seasons in life when the ground you thought was solid begins to shift. A diagnosis comes back with words you were not prepared to hear. A relationship fractures in ways that seemed impossible. A future you had planned unravels overnight. In moments like these, something primal in us reaches out, searching for something that will hold.
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If you have ever sat in church, sung the words of a hymn, and felt nothing, you will know the particular loneliness of doubt. Not the clean, philosophical kind of doubt that makes for interesting conversation, but the kind that surfaces at two in the morning when life has not gone the way you expected. The kind where the words you used to believe ring hollow, and you are not sure if the problem is...
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There is a command in the Bible that appears more often than almost any other: "Do not be afraid." Jesus says it. Angels say it on arrival. God says it to Abraham, to Hagar, to Moses, to Joshua, to Elijah. It appears in some form over three hundred times across the pages of Scripture. That frequency is not accidental. It is the frequency of a God who knows His people well, who knows that fear is o...
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You know the feeling. You scroll through social media and see someone else's vacation, promotion, or picture-perfect family, and something in your chest tightens. Or perhaps it's simpler than that: the bills pile up, the diagnosis comes back uncertain, the relationship frays at the edges, and gratitude feels not just difficult but almost offensive. How can I be thankful when life is this hard?
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There are seasons in the Christian life when faith feels less like a settled conviction and more like something you are fighting to hold on to. The doubts come quietly at first, then louder. You pray and the words seem to bounce off the ceiling. You open your Bible and the words feel distant and flat. You look at other believers who seem to walk with effortless confidence and wonder what is wrong...
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There are seasons in life when hope feels less like a settled conviction and more like a word you're no longer sure you believe. The diagnosis arrives. The marriage fractures. The prayer goes unanswered for so long that you start to wonder whether you're praying into silence. In those moments, the word hope can feel like a cruelty, something people say when they don't know what else to offer.
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The Bible is not primarily a book of rules. Nor is it a collection of inspiring sentiments to be read in difficult moments and then set aside. It is, at its heart, the story of who God is, who we are, and how those two realities come together in Christ. But from that central story flow concrete, practical shapes to human life, patterns of living that Scripture commends and illustrates across hundr...
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There are some words of Jesus so familiar that they slip past us without landing. We hear them in church, see them on walls, quote them in speeches about kindness and community. We nod. And then we go home, cut off the driver who pulled out in front of us, avoid the difficult colleague, quietly write off the person whose politics or personality grates against ours.
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There is a particular kind of suffering that comes not from pain itself but from not knowing why. The illness that won't resolve. The relationship that falls apart despite every effort. The prayer that seems to go unanswered for months, then years. The door that closes on something you were certain God had called you to. In moments like these, the question is not just "what do I do next?" It is so...
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Of all the things Jesus taught, forgiveness may be the one most people claim to believe in and find hardest to actually do. It is easy to say the word. It is easy to agree that forgiveness is important, that bitterness is destructive, that we should not hold grudges. What is not easy is sitting with the specific face of the person who hurt you and choosing, genuinely, to release what they owe you.
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Humility is one of those words that almost everyone agrees is admirable and almost no one fully understands. It tends to get confused with its counterfeits. People mistake it for low self-esteem, for the refusal to acknowledge one's own abilities, for a kind of perpetual apology for one's existence. Others mistake it for a strategic posture, a way of appearing modest in order to be thought well of...
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There is a kind of suffering that surprises you, and a kind that wears you down. The first kind arrives suddenly: a diagnosis, a phone call, a collapse of something you had taken for granted. It knocks you off your feet, and everyone around you can see you have been knocked off your feet. The second kind is quieter and, in many ways, harder. It is the trial that goes on and on. The grief that does...
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Few struggles are more universal than the struggle to love well. We want to love ourselves but find ourselves caught between self-contempt and self-obsession. We want to love others but find ourselves exhausted by difficult people, wounded by betrayal, or simply indifferent to strangers. And somewhere in the background, we know that God has something to say about all of this, but His standard seem...
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The word "love" appears more than five hundred times across the pages of Scripture, and it sits at the centre of everything the Bible says about God, about human beings, and about how the two are meant to relate to each other. Jesus summarises the entire law in terms of love. John declares that God is love, not merely that He is loving. Paul places love above faith and hope as the greatest of the...
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Every Christian has had the experience of going through the motions. You are in a church service, the congregation is singing, the words are on the screen, and you are producing the correct sounds at the correct moments, but something essential is absent. The body is present; the heart is somewhere else entirely. You know this is not what worship is supposed to be. What you are less sure of is wha...
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Ask most Christians what worship is and they will describe a moment: a song that broke them open, a Sunday morning when the music stopped and the room went still, a private morning of prayer that felt genuinely like contact with the living God. These are real experiences and they matter. But if worship is only a feeling we reach for in the right conditions, it is far smaller than what the Bible ac...
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You know the feeling. You set your alarm fifteen minutes early, determined that this time will be different. This time you will have a consistent morning quiet time with God. And it works, for three days, perhaps a week. Then the demands of life crowd in. The alarm gets snoozed. The Bible sits unopened on the nightstand. And a familiar guilt settles over you, whispering that you are somehow failin...
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There is a phrase so common in Christian circles that it has almost lost the capacity to surprise: "a personal relationship with God". You hear it in sermons, read it in devotionals, and encounter it in the conversion stories of Christians across centuries. And yet, if you stop to think about what it actually claims, it is one of the most audacious things a human being can say. A relationship, per...
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Most people have prayed, or tried to. There is something in human beings that reaches toward the unseen at moments of great need or great wonder, something that looks remarkably like prayer even when it doesn't use that word. But for Christians, prayer is not simply an instinct or a cultural habit. It is, according to Scripture, genuine communication with the God who made the universe and who has...
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Most Christians have a complicated relationship with the word "repentance". They know it matters. They have heard it preached, and they understand in principle that it is central to the Christian life. And yet, for many believers, the practice of repentance tends to produce something closer to guilt than to freedom, something that leaves them circling their failures rather than moving away from th...
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The word "salvation" can start to sound like church vocabulary, a word used so often it loses its weight. But the concept it names is the single most significant claim Christianity makes. It is the answer to the deepest problem human beings face, accomplished at enormous cost, offered as a gift, and carrying consequences that extend beyond this life into eternity. It is worth taking the time to un...
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There is a particular kind of grief that belongs to believers alone: watching someone you love live as though God does not exist. A spouse who once knelt beside you in prayer, now dismissive. Children who were baptised, who memorised Scripture, who sang in church, now absent from anything resembling faith. Family members you love deeply, whose eternal destiny you cannot see and cannot control. If...
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There is a version of the Christian life that looks exhausting from the outside, and feels even more so from the inside. It is the version where you are constantly trying to be more loving, more patient, more gentle, more self-controlled. Where growth means gritting your teeth harder and trying to be a better person. Where every failure is another reminder that you are not measuring up.
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