Archive for the ‘Bio Features’ Category

Help, God is Interfering with my Social Life!

December 18th, 2009 Jojo Agot

http://frenchguyonair.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/socialmedialandscape.jpgIt is so easy to obey God when the obedience doesn’t cost us much like doing a little volunteer work, attending small groups or being friendly with new people in church. But what if God asks you to sacrifice your social life and reputation?

Mary was just a young woman who was supposed to get married when God interrupted her social life with a sudden announcement that she will get pregnant, not by her soon to be husband but by the Holy Spirit. How was she going to explain it to her friends? What will people think?

The social implications of Mary’s pregnancy was serious. People could stone her to death for adultery charges, she could cause her entire family inexplicable shame and Joseph could leave her any moment. And it was not even her fault! Would anybody even care to listen if she tried to explain the baby inside her womb?

Yet her response to the announcement of the angel baffled me. “Be it done to me according to your word…”

Didn’t she care about her reputation? Of course she did, but her sense of obedience to God was greater than her need to maintain her public image. Maybe that’s what made God choose her in the first place.

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SLEEPING, DREAMING, BELIEVING

October 20th, 2009 Jojo Agot

http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/baby-sleeping1.jpgI’m not quite done obsessing over Jacob’s life so bear with me with this yet another post about his misadventures. I was actually planning to write a blog series entitled BEFORE THEY WERE HEROES, making observations about the lives of the big names in the Bible before they became what we remember them to be. But since I’m such a lousy writer, I ended up not doing that project.

It’s interesting really, taking a second look at the ordinary lives of the men who became the prominent figures of the Christian faith, the people whose lives the Bible keeps referring to over and over again. Were they really that great and awesome and popular in their times? The answer is a staggering NO.

Jacob, as I mentioned twice already (why am I repeating myself too often?), was not an all around nice guy. Many could identify with that. What stuck me this morning when I opened the Bible is that it didn’t take one minute of his waking hours to believe in God. Literally. Why? Because he started believing when he was asleep. He dreamed of God and he woke up a believer.

Sure he’s heard about “the God of his fathers” but his personal, one to one relationship with God started in his sleep. How many of us can top that? Some people stumble over the truth and walk away still not believing. Jacob dreamed of the truth and woke up a believer. No wonder he was such a big name in the Bible. His faith was so quick and so raw that it changed his fortunes from a runaway dude to a respectable father of a large clan. What’s more, today we hear of God being referred to as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and JACOB.” Cool, right?

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JACOB: THE NAME YOU CAN'T TRUST

October 19th, 2009 Jojo Agot

http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/images/1099.jpgJacob was on the run. He just committed a very serious breach of trust within his family. He deceived his own father and stole something very important from his only brother. His name means “deceiver” in Hebrew and right at that moment as he was running from home to save his own neck, he was literally living up to his name.

Then he slept in a lonely town and dreamed of a stairway to heaven where angels go up and down. He saw God standing up there and heard him say, “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Genesis 28: 15).

Such grand promises. But wait a minute, wasn’t God supposed to lash out on him? He has never been a good boy. He schemed and manipulated and lied his way through life and now here he was, hearing God speak staggering promises of hope and blessings.

He never deserved any of this, I mean seriously, look at his story. His track record at that time was a far cry from the Jacob we remember from the Bible. But for reasons only God could know, He chose to reveal himself to Jacob at the time of his weakness, at the time when his world was crumbling down, when he was alone in the cold of the night without even a soft pillow under his head.

God met Jacob at the end of his road without any tone of accusation in His voice. His words didn’t even had a trace of rebuke, just overwhelming promises for him and his posterity. It was like God overlooked Jacob’s  obvious flaws.

Psalms 103: 10 rings true:

He does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities…

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RUNAWAYS AND FUGITIVES

October 16th, 2009 Jojo Agot

http://picapp.com/Have you ever gone through a period in your life when you just felt like dropping everything and running away to a place where nobody knows you? We all have. Some people feel this because of a past they can’t get over with, some because of guilt that never goes away while others because of a general feeling of meaninglessness.

You are not alone. Jacob went through a similar situation. After stealing his brother’s birthright blessing, he knew he had to run away until his brother was not feeling murderous anymore. What started as a temporary change of address became permanent estrangement. He never got to see his parents again. (Gen. 27: 41-45)

But something happened to Jacob that totally changed his world. He met God in his wanderings. He didn’t mean to. He didn’t go out to seek the God of his father, in fact, he was running away from family when it happened.

But God has a way of knowing our deepest needs. He hears our hearts’ cry even when we don’t know it. Then He meets us in our crossroads. It is such a comfort to know that even when we sin against God and run away from what is right, he would still meet us in the road to give us new meaning, new life, new start. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” This verse has always been true even in the Old Testament.

Have you been planning to run away lately? Maybe you don’t need to. For it is not new surroundings or people or routines that change us. It is the change of our hearts when we encounter God that truly gives us a fresh start wherever we might be.

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