It’s hard to be a parent when the time comes to discipline your children. You need wisdom, persistence and a strong love, knowing that discipline, (though painful at the time) when applied in the right measure will produce the desired outcome. As far as we know, the Apostle Paul wasn’t a parent, but he knew […]

So far in his letter to these Corinthian believers, the Apostle Paul has had to tackle many things head on. The church was clearly divided with a party spirit and wrongly paid too much emphasis to the flashy skills of gospel preachers at the expense of the gospel itself. But at the root of all […]

After the Apostle Paul took time to dismantle the false edifice that the Corinthians were putting in place around gospel preachers in 1 Corinthians 3, in the next few verses of the 4th chapter, (1 Corinthians 4:1-5), the Apostle took time to correct their perspective. Gospel preachers aren’t everything. In fact, they are just servants […]

No church is perfect. The work of sanctification of God’s people is an ongoing process. Every church falls short of the ideal of ‘what we should be’ in Christ. However, not all churches, like the one in Corinth, had the benefit of having the Apostle Paul tell them where they were going wrong. Paul does […]

The Church in Corinth was in a bit of a mess. It was out of balance. Too much emphasis on one thing at the expense of another. Sometime churches can get like that. Out of balance. In these verses, 1 Corinthians 3:5-17, the Apostle Paul seeks to correct that balance and get the Corinthians back […]

The onset of Elijah’s spiritual depression in 1 Kings 19:1-18 is well documented. From being on a spiritual high on Mt Carmel, Elijah very quickly was running for his life and yet praying that he might die. There were many kinds of factors involved in this, not the least being his sense of failure and […]

After the showdown on the top of Mt Carmel, the text of 1 Kings 18:41-46, tells us of Elijah’s prayers that broke the drought. Given that the drought had begun through the prayers of Elijah 3 years earlier, it is a helpful things for us to read of Elijah at prayer – even though we […]

In 1 Kings 18:20-40, the rubber really ‘hits the road’. All that Elijah has been through in chapter 17 and all his interactions with King Ahab have been leading up to the showdown that these verses describe – fittingly, upon the top of a mountain (Carmel). Lots of important events happen on mountain tops in […]

After the miracle of raising the widow of Zarephath’s son from death, Elijah was instructed by the Lord to go back and present himself to King Ahab. As the events unfold, the story then introduces us to one of Ahab’s servants, Obadiah, who turns out to be a faithful servant of the Lord also. In […]

In 1 Kings 17:17-24, a further piece of a strange puzzle becomes clear for Elijah, even though for the widow with whom he was staying, this puzzle piece must have been quite a puzzle. After keeping Elijah and the widow and her son alive through God’s miraculous provision, the widow’s son suddenly died. This drove […]