Your talk is cheap.
If I want to know what matters to you, I’m going to pay closer attention to what you do than to what you say. I’ll pay attention to where you are willing to put in extra time and effort. When are you willing to suffer? When do you give up easily?
(Read More)During the sermon on the mount, Jesus tells his followers that they are “the salt of the earth”. (Matthew 5:13) It’s a potent analogy because the properties of salt are universally well known: it’s necessary for life, it adds flavor to food, and it works to purify and preserve what we eat. Just like leaven, you only need a little bit to be effective if you work it through your entire dish. The apostle Paul uses salt as an metaphor in Colossians 4 in a very similar way: “Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.”
But what is it that makes his disciples salty? What distinguishes them from anyone else?
(Read More)It’s easy to become desensitized to violence, suffering, and death. This, naturally, can happen to someone in the midst of horrible evil. In those cases, though, desensitization doesn’t necessarily lead to a numbing of the conscience but instead can become a grace that allows one to bear the weight of tremendous suffering. How else could one live in the midst of war, violence, terror, and sin? I don’t fault anyone for this type of “desensitization”, if we can call it that. This state typically drives people to good works, to acts of mercy and love in the face of oppression, persecution, and violence. It can be sacrificial for the sake of goodness. It can bear the sword for the destruction of evil and for justice.
(Read More)Let me state the obvious. Trinity Reformed Fellowship is one of many Christian student organizations on the campus of Indiana University. Each organization differs in size and focus. Some are larger, with many students and lots of cool events. Others, like ourselves, are smaller and less flashy. Some have “good looking” students and some have “not so good looking” ones. Some are “cooler” and some are not. No matter what organization you might find yourself in, though, they all have something in common. No student organization is the Church.
(Read More)As I said in an earlier post, there are countless reasons to move to Bloomington and come to Indiana University. Naturally, many of those reasons will have to do with your career development. You are at IU, after all, because you are interested in a certain field of study and hope to be gainfully employed in that field at some point. But in this post, I want to convince you to think about something else entirely. I want to convince you to think about marriage.
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