Pilgrim's Ponderings

  For those who don’t know, my family is in the process of moving to the UK for a season of our life. Last year when we made this very tough decision to step out in faith a song that gripped my heart was the gospel song – Waymaker. I listened to it often and found comfort in a God who is way maker and a promise keeper. I found delight in proclaiming His faithfulness and His presence over my own life and its problems and decisions that it was encountering. I know many of you who love the song do the same as me and just like me you too have been encouraged and comforted by the truths of the song.  Over the year however God has been moving in my heart to even grander and deeper truths regarding these lyrics and I would love to share them with you.  The truth is we all have areas where we want to God to be a way maker for us. These can be one or a combination of many things. Things like relationships, marriage, finances, employment, health etc. But at the end of the day for a...

A devotional on Matthew 8:2 In verse 2 of the 8 th Chapter of the gospel of Matthew we are told of a man who had leprosy who approached Jesus. The man comes to Jesus and says “Lord if you will you can make me clean.” Now if you look carefully this is a prayer, a very short prayer but a prayer nonetheless. And much like every other prayer this prayer too cannot be looked at in a vacuum but must be understood with the whole volume of context that it carries. The most obvious layer of context that we are given is that the man had leprosy. We must immediately understand that leprosy then was very different from leprosy now. Today a leper is merely someone who unfortunately contracted a miserable sickness. It can relegate a person to a secluded and painful life or maybe to a life on the streets as a beggar. On our way to work every morning, my wife and I drive through this particular crossing where there sits a wonderful and loving old man. His eyes are filled with love and joy...

Imagine being the main speaker at a big event. You spend many hours in prayer and preparation. You have your sermons laid out well and your heart is full of excitement and anticipation to see what the Lord will do. And then the day arrives and you preach your heart out. And you feel the Spirit of God telling you to give a call for any to respond and receive Jesus as their saviour. So with a heart full of both excitement and that sense of “should I?” you go ahead and give a call. It is silent and then just one solitary person walks forward. You wait and ask probingly if anyone else would want to come. But no one moves in that big crowd in front of you. I don’t know if you’ve been there but I have. It can feel pretty deflating. It can leave you with a sense of “did I do something wrong?” We hear of altar calls where thousands came forward but our own experience in that moment can seem so flat. What if some time after that event you get to find out that your single fruit that e...

In my childhood a gym and working out were mainly for those who wanted to have those bulgy biceps and striking calves. In the last few years however, there has been a rise in the importance of workout and fitness programs for pretty much everyone. People have now begun to see importance of walks and jogs and just general all round physical health. There has also been a mushrooming of instagram, facebook and youtube video tutorials for ideal workout plans. In this write-up I want to share 3 tips for a great workout. There’s a catch though. I am talking about a great spiritual workout. In the words of the genie from Aladdin – “made you look.” But now that you are here I hope you will keep reading and be blessed by these three tips. Step 1: Reach up! Any spiritual workout that does not begin by reaching up to God is merely introspection or self-help techniques. Don’t get me wrong, these techniques can be quite therapeutic and calming in their own way and they have a place. B...

Reflections on N.T Wright’s article in the TIME. There was a recent article written by the British theologian, N.T Wright that was titled “Christianity offers no answers about the Coronavirus. It’s not supposed to.” As one reads through the article it becomes evident that the author is arguing for the practice of lamenting which is something the Bible accounts for many a time. Wright, correctly offers many a verse as examples of this phenomenon and he posits that in most of those cases the writer of scripture had to remain content with no explanation given as to why the suffering was taking place. Wright, I believe correctly chastises the “knee jerk reaction” voices that will quickly talk about this being an act of punishment from God and he exposes the desperate need of humanity to find meaning in every event of life – suffering included. I think he is correct in his argument that the God of the bible is often found not answering the question “why is this happening?” In...

It must have started with a piece of bread or some other little bit of food. But he took it and nothing happened. He didn’t live in our place, so he must have grabbed whatever he could and run away to wherever his original home was. Soon this little nibble was not enough and the stolen food must have increased. But we still didn’t notice what was happening and really never found much trace or evidence of him around our place. Over time though the grabbing and running technique must have gotten wearisome and he decided to find a corner in house, where he could stash his loot and enjoy it later. He slowly settled in to a corner of our home and once the lights were off his time of collecting and enjoyment began. But now the evidence against him began to add up. There was a different smell in a corner of the kitchen and bits of crusted bread or watermelon lying suspiciously in places no one would really sit and eat them. The corner was cleaned as soon as the bits of food were fou...

Cloves – those tiny little things which bring so much flavour to food. Indian cooking almost always involves frying up some cloves somewhere. Even though we use a rice cooker to cook our rice I have been known to throw in cloves to bring about that wonderful aroma and a bit of a kick to the taste. But here’s the thing – whenever I do, I always put cloves along with other such little additives in a little muslin cloth sachet that floats in the rice so I can fish it out later before serving the dish. But many people don’t do that and so very often the cloves are in the food.  In the UK I cooked a dish and for want of time I didn’t bother with the muslin cloth and so I just had a small amount of cloves along with other aromatics in the curry I was cooking. Once we began to eat dinner, sure enough after about three or four bites I found myself chomping down on a clove. Now I realise that for some people that is a welcome and most savoury surprise. I am not one of those people...

We live in a world where one of the mantras of living is “balance”. Everyone is trying to find balance in life. We strive to find that balance between work and play, eating what we like and health that we like and so many more areas. For us who are believers we also throw in the expectations of quiet time, church involvement, ministry, discipleship and evangelism and so many more things and life seems to spiral down a roller coaster of craziness and insane expectations that often get away from us and more often than not leave us with feels of burnout. It is in this context that being a Spirit led servant becomes especially important. In Galatians 5:25 Paul says “If we live by the Spirit, then let us also keep in step with the Spirit.” Look carefully at this verse and you see the living by the Spirit and keeping in step are two different things. From verse 16 he has been teaching about what it looks like to walk/live by the Spirit. He talks of the kind of activities that we ...

This February I had the amazing privilege to attend a pastor’s conference organised by the RZIM (Ravi Zacharias International Ministries). It was a spiritual buffet with a line-up of speakers who were simply amazing. After each session there was usually a little crowd of pastors waiting to meet the speaker to talk, to pray, to share and also to get in a picture or two. I unfortunately am still recovering from a bad ankle and so was never going to be able to be quick enough to be part of that bunch (although I did manage to get my own conversations in somehow). But sitting there on the sidelines and observing I learned something beautiful that just wowed my soul again. One of the speakers was pastor Jeffery Vines. He was travelling with a small team. One member of this team with him was his own daughter and another member was his closest friend, his “Jonathan” (A reference to David and Jonathan from the bible) as he called him. I watched as pastor Jeffery passionately encourag...

As I look back on 22 years of walking in faith and 38 years of being alive one of the many blessings that God has allowed in my life is the blessing of community. I am an extrovert and so I naturally love meeting people and therefore am very comfortable in community. The church and Christian community around me has been incredibly influential in my development as a person and has been instrumental in my faith journey as well. I see this community and friends as vital to God’s plan in my life. And this is fitting because when I study the bible I see that God places a high value on community. In the bible narratives, He is the one who builds communities and around and upon whom eternal communities are built on. When we come to the life of Christ we don’t find a loner. We find community, we find many people around him. It is wonderful to see that Jesus had no restrictions for those who sat in audience as he taught or as he performed various miracles. He did not stop to identify true ...