Ben Palpant's Blog

Happy Thanksgiving Week Everybody! Lots to do, people to see, places to go, and food to eat!

Busy weeks call for faithful labor in God’s strength, not our own. When we work in God strength, he gives us gladness; when we work in our own strength, we give ourselves spiritual heartburn. If anyone needs that reminder this week, it’s me.

Here’s a reminder for me…and all those who, like me, are prone to rely on their own strength.

CLICK THE IMAGE OR CLICK HERE TO FIND A MOMENT OF REST.

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We are dogged by our changeableness because we live in a broken world. We swing between hilarity and deep sadness, anxiety and absolute peace, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, sincerity and flippancy. But God is unchanging and the one to whom, through all our changing, we should direct the ear of our heart, awake to his voice. He is immutable, unchanging, the ground of being.

There are days when faith falters, but God never falters. He has steadily carried you and kept his word and I know that ...

Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” And Christ said, “I came so that you might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The abundant life is the one captivated by the holy, inclined toward God, and spent in the service of people. This abundant life looks ingloriously mundane most of the time, but do not despise the day of small beginnings (Zechariah 4:10).

Life will ebb and flow, sometimes desire for God will be strong and even satisfied to a degree, but...

Simone Weil suggested that the Christian experience has been contaminated by her enemies such that we conflate the search for God with muscular willpower. The Bible promises that if you search for God with all your heart, then you shall find him (Jeremiah 29:13 and Deuteronomy 4:29), but this searching implies not so much willpower as an orientation, a leaning toward, or a pressing toward God with the desires but certainly not a checklist of holy actions.

God tells us to meditate on his words d...

Christ is the one who redeems your past in the present, for his name’s sake and for your future’s sake. In him, the past, present, and future cohere. In him, and him alone, all this mess and muck generates a sweetness for the life of the world. The traits that make us a gift to the world are a direct result of our past experiences. Antoine Saint Exupery wrote, “Your whole past was but a birth and a becoming” (The Wisdom of the Sands). God does not bless you despite your past, but through you...