Articles
Essential information for Christian Living
This selection of basic but essential articles focuses on Christian living and understanding – tactics and strategies – with topics which aim to help you in your daily Christian walk as well as in your understanding of the biblical writings and the goals they set. The article topics are searchable using the SEARCH button at the top of the page.
Christian Living
Moving Ahead by Stopping More Often
You know the feeling. You are about to do or say something, or you pause in a chain of thought, when you suddenly tell yourself that something is not right, that it may not be good to continue with the thought, word or action. There is nothing mystical about it, but...
Job’s Friends
They’re the Biblical characters we “love to hate” – the friends who said more unfriendly things than they should have done, the friends God reproved for what they said. Yet were they all bad? This week, on the Tactical Living page, we...
Before You Ask
You know how a compass works. The floating needle or direction arrow points toward the earth’s magnetic pole. You also know what happens if the compass comes close to a local magnetic source – the direction arrow gets pulled away from its...
Healthy Incompatibility
Recent statistics suggest that as many as 40% to 50% of marriages in some developed countries end in divorce. The divorce statistics for second and third marriages are even higher (practice evidently does not improve performance), and these sad statistics...
The Second Step of Forgiveness
When it comes to forgiving others as we know we should (Matthew 6:12), we sometimes need to remind ourselves of advice the apostle Paul gave to the Corinthian Christians. The church at Corinth apparently included an individual who had caused some problems for the...
What Pleases God?
In Ephesians 5:10 Paul wrote “… try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord,” and it is a clear indicator that we are making progress in the Christian life if we feel the desire to do exactly this. But what is pleasing to God? Is it just becoming...
Studying through BibleGateway
BibleGateway.com is, of course, one of the leading Bible translation websites used to provide hyperlink scripture references on this and many other sites. If you only use BibleGateway occasionally to look up a verse or an alternative translation, you are missing...
Battle Plans
In Deuteronomy 20 we find the special instructions God gave to ancient Israel as it was about to enter the Promised Land. These instructions were the “tactical briefs” given to Israel’s fighting forces. At first sight they may seem...
Meditation
By Ken Ryland It's a lost art among Christians. There is a stigma about meditation because of the popularity of Eastern Hindu-style meditation, but that is only a symptom of the problem that Christians have with meditation. I can't think of any Christian that I know...
Biblical Understanding
What Forgiving and Forgetting Really Means
We all know the wisdom of the old saying that we should “forgive and forget” and although that exact phrase does not appear in the Bible, it does summarize Biblical principles of forgiveness. There are, of course, many scriptures telling us that we...
Not Rushing to Anger
The Bible gives us good advice on how to deal with feelings of anger - something that we all experience from time to time. However, perhaps the clearest and most detailed example of this strategy comes from an unexpected source which most people miss in their...
Why the Spies?
What do your problems and the spies that we are told God sent into the Promised Land have in common? For that matter, what does a book written fifty years ago by Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of the CIA, tell us about God’s spies and the...
What Do You Want?
A wise man once said that the first things we do in life are to map our world and to want what we don’t have. But do those things bring us happiness when we get them? In this season of frantic holiday buying and wanting, many find no real happiness in...
The Growing Seed
Perhaps the most difficult concept for the original hearers of the teachings of Jesus to understand was that of the Kingdom of God. Doubtless because of that fact, and its centrality in his message, Christ gave his disciples more parables on the Kingdom than on any...
Forgiveness Day
There are so many special “days” now, it’s impossible to remember many of them. I’m not talking about national holidays such as Thanksgiving and other significant days which apply to many of us, but the burgeoning number of days which...
