Tri-Youth

Another Hand

February 6, 2012 | by Vitalik Glotov | Category: Devotions 1 Comment

“For how many a soldier in a concentration camp, weak with hunger and smarting under the whip of the torturers; for how many a person huddling in the last extremity of ghastly dread in a bomb shelter; for how many on the endless gray road of a refugee trek was it not the great experience suddenly to know: I am not in the hands of men, despite everything to the contrary; another hand, a higher hand is governing in the midst of all man’s madness and canceling all the logic of my calculations and all the images of my anxious sick imagination? I am being led to the undreamed-of shore, the harbor, the Father’s house. And always when things grow dark, suddenly that marvelous helping hand is there. If there is anything that is really bombproof, then it is this.”

Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father (New York, 1959), page 36. Italics original.

No Big or Small Sin

February 3, 2012 | by Stan Glotov | Category: Devotions 1 Comment

But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.” When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him. After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you sold the land for so much.” And she said, “Yes, for so much.” But Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men came in they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things. Acts 5:1-11 ESV

We as people may tend to think that there are certain great sins such as murder, homosexuality or adultery and there are not so big sins such as small theft, a little lie or a curse word. However, after reading this short story of Ananias and Sapphira, we can see that God can punish a person even with death if someone commits a “small sin” such as lying. This story reminded me that any sin is displeasing to the Lord and that we as Christians should be careful not to deceive ourselves by thinking that we can get away by committing a sin that no one else knows or sees. God sees and knows and there will be consequences of it. May God help us all in our daily battle against sin.

Jesus Christ In The Old Testament

February 1, 2012 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions No Comments

Recently I preached a sermon on the Old Testament passage from Joshua 7 (Achan and the lost battle at Ai) and while getting ready for it I really struggled with the fact that it seemed disconnected from New Testament and from Jesus Christ. I tried a number of ways to “connect” it, but all of them seemed very forced and read-into the text. So, sadly, in the end there was not a word about Jesus in my sermon. However the problem of connection between any OT passage and Jesus didn’t leave my thoughts, so I was very overjoyed and encouraged when I heard this quote:

In the midst of the many intrinsically fascinating reasons why Old Testament study is so rewarding, the most exciting to me is the way it never fails to add new depths to my understanding of Jesus.

I find myself aware that in reading the Hebrew scriptures I am handling something that gives me a closer common link with Jesus than any archaeological artefact could do. For these are the words He read. These were the stories He knew.

These were the songs He sang. These were the depths of wisdom and revelation and prophecy that shaped His whole view of ‘life, the universe and everything.’ This is where He found His insights into the mind of His Father God.

Above all, this is where He found the shape of His own identity and the goal of His own mission. In short, the deeper you go into understanding the Old Testament, the closer you come to the heart of Jesus. (Christopher J.H. Wright, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament)

I hope this will help you with your Old Testament study as well!

Read Your Bible More

January 30, 2012 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions No Comments

I found this short quote posted on Desiring God blog extremely encouraging:

Do not think you are getting no good from the Bible, merely because you do not see that good day by day. The greatest effects are by no means those which make the most noise, and are most easily observed. The greatest effects are often silent, quiet, and hard to detect at the time they are being produced.

Think of the influence of the moon upon the earth, and of the air upon the human lungs. Remember how silently the dew falls, and how imperceptibly the grass grows. There may be far more doing than you think in your soul by your Bible-reading. (J. C. Ryle, Practical Religion, 136)

It reminded me of  similar thought from F. B. Meyer:

The renewing of the mind. This is no matter for emotion or ecstasy, but of bringing our minds into close and constant contact with the truth as contained in the Holy Scripture. You have not to study yourself in the mirror, to see whether you are becoming transfigured; but as day by day you steep your mind in God’s Word, without your realising it, you will become transfigured. Moses wist not that his face shone. It was for the crowd that waited for him at the mountain-foot to see it, not for him. (F.B.Meyer, Our Daily Walk, February 15)

Dish-Washing and Diaper-Changing

November 27, 2011 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions No Comments

Continuing on the subject of “all aspects of life are spiritual” here is another interesting read from Desiring God blog. This article uncovers the issue from a slightly different angle: all time belongs to God, so it must be spent accordingly, even if you are doing something mundane. I also liked the washing dishes example, something I can relate too. Anyway, it’s a bit of a read, but you will benefit from it.

One of the attendant aims of missional evangelicalism is to challenge the compartmentalizing of the Christian faith that we see within the Western church. We are fantastic at itemizing our schedules, and even if we don’t assign God a very large bracket, we are constantly remorseful that we “haven’t made much time for him.” While such compartmentalizing — as if “time with God” can or should be hermetically sealed off from everything else — is a natural symptom of our culture and environment, it also reflects a bad theology.

The truth is, the day does not belong to us. It is not our day to do with as we please. We serve a sovereign God. He created the end from the beginning, knows our future exhaustively, and is firmly in control. He made our days and they belong to him. As such, isn’t it a bit arrogant to begin with the idea that each day is ours and then worry about fitting God in? Instead, we should work at the humble awe of knowing all of our moments, every millisecond, waking or sleeping, are perfectly accounted for within the economy of heaven.

Let us stake the flag of Christ’s kingdom into the soil of our first waking moment. Drink your coffee when you get up, of course, but drink it to the glory of God. Then carry on in this way all day, no matter the task, be it menial or notable, so that each day may be a living prayer that God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is what it means to live a gospel-saturated life: it means being so conscious of the greatness of the gospel that changing diapers or cutting the grass is as much an act of worship as singing a praise chorus in a church service….

Jesus Christ is Lord over my heart, and he is Lord over my hands, and he is Lord over what I do with these hands, and he is Lord over what I say in my heart while I’m doing it. In submitting to the lordship of Christ, then, I do not treat washing dishes as wasting time I could be spending doing something “meaningful,” but rather as a service to those who eat in my home, as a service to those who would have to wash the dishes if I did not, and as an offering of thanksgiving to God that I have food to eat, dishes to eat it on, and running water inside my home to clean with.

To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, there is not a square inch of our lives that is not claimed by God and counterclaimed by ourselves. If we believe God is sovereign, however, we will see all of life as mission and be led to submit the square inches we otherwise hold so tightly to the Maker of inches and hands.

Gospel Wakefulness, Jared Wilson, pp.90–92.

Shallow and Profound

November 22, 2011 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions 2 Comments

It’s interesting how in the past three weeks all of our Bible studies were circling around the same issue: the value of our daily (mundane) life as a Christian. We talk about school and work. We talked about food. We talked about life tasks in general (I still have to listen to this one, since I missed it). So I was very encouraged when I came across today’s reading from My Utmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers. Here is what he said:

Faith and Prayer

November 17, 2011 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions No Comments

Dwight Lyman Moody noticed an interesting relationship between the strength of our faith and the amount of time we spend in the word of God. It is, often times, the easiest thing just to ask for faith and justify the lack of it by the “unanswered prayer”. But God meant it to grow differently. Here is what Moody said:

I prayed for faith and thought that some day faith would come down and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” I had up to this time closed my Bible and prayed for faith. I now opened my Bible and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.

Honesty in Prayer

November 14, 2011 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions No Comments

Prayer is such a vast subject in the life of the Christian. It’s something we are told to do often, but not much attention is given to how we pray. And no I don’t mean the words that we use in our prayer, but the kind of heart and attitude that we come with into the presence of God. Honesty is one such characteristic that we should strife for in our prayers. Here is an excerpt from the article by A. W. Tozer on the need and benefit of being honest in our prayers:

The saintly David M’Intyre, in his radiant little book, The Hidden Life of Prayer, deals frankly, if briefly, with a vital element of true prayer which in our artificial age is likely to be overlooked.

We mean just plain honesty.

“Honest dealing becomes us,” says M’Intyre, “when we kneel in His pure presence.”

“In our address to God,” he continues, “we like to speak of Him as we think we ought to speak, and there are times when our words far outrun our feelings. But it is best that we should be perfectly frank before Him. He will allow us to say anything we will, so long as it is to Himself. ‘I will say unto God, my rock,’ exclaims the psalmist, ‘why hast thou forgotten me?’ If he had said, ‘Lord, thou canst not forget. Thou hast graven my name on the palms of thy hands,’ he would have spoken more worthily, but less truly.

“On one occasion Jeremiah failed to interpret God aright. He cried as if in anger, ‘O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived.’ These are terrible words to utter before Him who is changeless truth. But the prophet spoke as he felt, and the Lord not only pardoned him, but met him and blessed him there.

A great Christian of the past broke out all at once into a place of such radiance and victory as to excite wonder among his friends. Someone asked him what had happened to him. He replied simply that his new life of power began one day when he entered the presence of God and took a solemn vow never again to say anything to God in prayer that he did not mean. His transformation began with that vow and continued as he kept it.

We can learn something there if we will.

What is sin?

November 2, 2011 | by Stefan Slonevskiy | Category: Devotions No Comments

I’ve heard a number of definitions of sin. One was as simple as “missing the mark”, which is true, but leaves me hanging in wonder which mark am I missing? Another definition went deeper declaring sin to be a “violation of God’s character”. And that is also true, but I am left thinking how or which character and so on. But recently I stumbled across this definition from Piper. This is probably one of the most detailed and insightful definitions I have seen so far!

Sin is…
The glory of God is not honored.
The holiness of God is not reverenced.
The greatness of God is not admired.
The power of God is not praised.
The truth of God is not sought.
The wisdom of God is not esteemed.
The beauty of God is not treasured.
The goodness of God is not savored.
The faithfulness of God is not trusted.
The promises of God are not relied upon.
The commandments of God are not obeyed.
The justice of God is not respected.
The wrath of God is not feared.
The grace of God is not cherished.
The presence of God is not prized.
The person of God is not loved.

The infinite, all-glorious Creator of the universe, by whom and for whom all things exist (Rom. 11:36) – who holds every person’s life in being at every moment (Acts 17:25) – is disregarded, disbelieved, disobeyed, and dishonored by everybody in the world. That is the ultimate outrage of the universe.

–John Piper, The Greatest Thing in the World: an Overview of Romans 1-7

Дары Божии

November 1, 2011 | by Dmitriy Belous | Category: Devotions No Comments