SwordProject

The problem of evil has puzzled humanity for ages, its even recorded in one of the oldest texts in the bible, the book of Job. Job's friends were as confused as many are today, not comprehending how an all powerful God would allow evil to take place. There are obviously diverse reasons for evil and human suffering, some of which cannot be explained in this place or time. This devotion will be an attempt to go through some of the more general reasons for evil in this world. With the power of the Holy Spirit, let us uncover some of them. We need to recall that in the beginning, when God created all things, from start to finish, He persistently saw that it was GOOD. Our ancestors, did not know good and evil but only good, i.e. Adam and Eve. They knew good and evil after having disobeying God. Things became lesser good than initially were. This explains how evil started from the perspective of human beings. In the angelic realm, the rebellious acts of Satan and his angels can be def...

Sin by definition means to miss a mark or standard. It's to fall short of what is expected, sinning in itself is inevitable. You can sin knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or by error. How the sin is handled depends on the one sinning and the one sinned against. To sin does not necessarily mean against God, being sinned against is not a performative of God, even though essentially it should be. I'm what is called "The Lord's prayer", we are told, to ask forgiveness for our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This shows that its not only God Who get sinned against but us as well. Perhaps someone said or did something to you, which may or may not be covered by the commandments but is sort of part of your standard. They have, wronged you or sinned against you, whether they are aware or unaware is beyond is not important for now. How you handle that, matters because it determines how God handles you. This is important, in the Christian fait...

When God created man in His image, He not only created a creature which would resemble Him in looks. But a creature which be able to perform certain things on His behalf, at a lower scale. God gave His powers to mankind while keeping others to Himself. While He is present everywhere, we're present somewhere, while He's all knowing, we know certain things and are ignorant of others and while He can forsee all things we can forsee some. Same applies to His character, He is all loving, we can love at lower scale, He is all good, we can be good but not most of the time. Omnipotence, God has power to every single thing, there is nothing impossible for Him. It takes the same effort for God to create an atom as would be required to create a star. This often confuses us, because we often weigh the requests we make to God thinking that the difficulty of it matters to Him. All God needs from us is Faith the size of a mustard seed, whether to walk on water or heal the sick. Because, f...

The words of Jesus on the cross, are words we still recite to this day as Christians when going through pain and suffering. If the Son of God felt the need to ask this question, how much more is it expected from us? The reason/s God allow suffering have baffled us for ages, we really do not have a perfect answer to fit every individual and every situation. To the believer, suffering often opens doors to certain things which we were ignorant of, and prompts us to seek answers. To the non believers,there's no hope beyond suffering and depending on the degree, some would resort to suicide, turn to drugs or alcohol. These in turn causes more suffering than initially they had. This article may touch on some subjects which affect individuals, but is mostly being focused on the general reasons for suffering. 1. God allows suffering for greater good. Remember the story of Joseph? How his brothers sold him to slavery, then his master's wife forced him to jail, until he eventually becam...

The Kingdom of God is an open invitation, God has called each of us to work in His Kingdom. God never invited anyone or created anyone to be a spectator. The calling into His Kingdom is not child play, its not a popularity contest, in fact it is anything but a competition. It does not grow on the best of us but through the worst of us. This is a blind invitation. It's not a case of who does God get along with the most, or who is the most eloquent amongst us. Remember that God chose Aaron not for His Own sake but for Moses, who kept insisting that he was not a good speaker. Each day, God invites us, just as He gathers His angels in heavenly meeting, we have an open invitation, to work for Him or against Him. It can neither be both or none, you have to either be cold or hot but not lukewarm. The first person to follow Jesus into paradise was a vile man, an extremely corrupt man. We know this because of 1. His own admission and 2. His punishment by the Romans. But that's the th...

The Gospel of prosperity, as preached by the likes of Noel Jones, Joel Osteen, TD Jakes,Joel Osteen and other preachers esp of megachurches, deals basically with wealth and health. It's utilizes scriptures that focus on material things and encouraging believers to have material wealth. It has a grand number of followers, especially the physically poor and chronically ill, with so called healing ministries and crusades around the world, taking advantage of gullible believers. Or is it the other way round? With a certain preavher once pointing out that the multitudes of followers of such gospels are not victims but rather accomplices to such, because they raise them up and rally behind them with itchy ears. The prosperity gospel isn't Christian at all, for one, the bible emphasizes that the love of money is the root to evil, Jesus himself said that we cannot have both. You cannot love both God and money, to put in perspective, Jesus said that it was easier for a camel to go thr...

This is a teaching of Jesus Christ as recorded by Matthew aka Levi. Jesus started off by stating that whenever we agree on earth the same shall be done by the Father. Then going on to say where 2 or more are gathered in My Name, I shall be there with them Almost all church meetings comprise of at least 5 individuals, so obviously they'll be at least two of them. But this scripture is not as straight forward as most would have us think. I would imagine that Abraham had the same thoughts when he stood with God outside of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In his intercession, it would seem that his intention was that God should not destroy those cities. "Are you going to destroy the just and the righteous? Far it be from you", he did not think that God would destroy the cities with the number of righteous people who were there. So he counted down and stopped at 10, in contrast Jesus counted down and stopped at 2. But 2 is still a huge number. When God went to Sodom and G...

We as human beings, living in the world created by our loving Father, to have a relationship with His creation and most importantly with Himself. He determined what right and wrong were, good and evil. It was all right and all good until one day Adam and Eve fell out of His Grace and determined for themselves what good and evil are. Even this day, if we're not careful, we could fall into the same pit. We may strife all we can, but all our good is a far lesser good than God's. If I decide that I can be good, I may on the natural man level good, in fact even the best but not at His level. I may work hard, isolate myself, or even deny all of my carnal desires but at no point will I reach God's goodness, I will never be righteous in His sight. Consider what I would like to call, the story of the cleaner, which goes as follows. There was a man going through the paper for classifieds, looking for work. He went through some well paying jobs, most of which required certain quali...

Jesus never gave titles to any of His parables, He would simply say "learn the parable" and start telling the story. Over the years, this parable has gotten diverse names e.g. the Pordigal Son, The Prodigal Sons, Loving Father, Lovesick Father. Whichever title we may regard as more appropriate than the other, we can surely agree on some if not most of the implications of this story.Ref Luke 15 We have 3 characters in the story, not a true story but rather given to the listeners to draw a conclusion. The story starts with the youngest member of the household making a rather rash decision. He goes to his father and asks to have a share of the inheritance while the dad is stil alive. From the beginning of the story we realize that some problems have already risen. First of all, why wouls a son make such a request to his father? It wouldn't be much different from of he were to say "I wish you were dead". We could say he figuratively killed his father, and as any p...