Asiel's Musings

Typically Jesus taught in parables. One of those has to with the labourers reporting to the master that they had gone to inspect the fields and they found that the wheat that they had laboured to plant had been contaminated by tares that appear to have been sown during the night by a ruthless enemy. I have never seen a wheat or a tare plant, but what is clear is that they had a striking morphological resemblance. S much so that unless one painstakingly scrutinized them, he/she could unintentionally destroy a wheat plant thinking it was a tare. I am still in the hermeneutical process with this passage to arrive at the precise meaning behind this parable. What i will say at this juncture is that a cursory examination of the church will certainly cause one to seriously question the validity of the discipleship of some members. There seems to be in every congregation some persons who have all the external trappings of a genuine disciple yet they are a constant source of problems in t

So whats the big deal anyway. We each have 24 hrs each day... or do we. We assume that we have 24hrs in our day when we wake up. What In the first place when you wake at 6 a.m hrs out of that 24 has already been gone never to return. If you die at 10 a.m it means that God would have allocated 10 hrs of that particular day to you. How well do you spend your day. Should we be spending our days or should we be investing them? Our days, our time is a charge that God gives us to manager to be stewards just as with everything else that He gives us. How well then are you at being a steward of God's time, note God's time, not your time! A good measure of this is to ask yourself, how much of the day do you spend doing things that have eternal value? Sleeping, eating , watching television... Do they have eternal value. How much of your typical day is spent in communion with Him? how much is spent sharing the Good News with someone who needs to hear? How much is spent bearing

Give till it hurts! Can giving hurt? Should it hurt? In the famous sermon on the mount Jesus teaches us that we are to give to everyone who asks of us. We are to give even more than they ask of us. We read of the Macedonian church, who gave beyond their ability to give, we read of the Galatians who regareded Paul with such love that they would have plucked out their own eyes to give to him if it were possible. Can giving hurt? Should it hurt. I wonder if there is any one living in Jamaica today who can say that a day goes by (while they're out and about- not locked away in a house)- that they are not met by a beggar who is doing just that begging. From the boys and the stop lights, to the ones staggering in the New Kingston Parking lots, to the ones on the street corners kneading a spliff in their palms(who somewhere think that every male that they approach has a child since they address you as fadda or dadz), to the ones who come knocking on office door or ringin the buzze

Have you counted the cost? Luke 9: 57 - 62. What is the cost of discipleship? We live in an age of easy believism...cheap grace...mouth only committment...shallow discipleship. Have you counted the cost of following Jesus? Jesus is walking along teaching as he usually does and this bright scribe pipes up form the crowd, "Lord I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus must have smiled to himself. Maybe the scribe thought that was the proper thing to say, maybe it was the religiously correct thing to say, maybe it would have made him look good in the eyes of the crowd, but Jesus knowing the need for a distinction between mouthed commitments and commitments of heart and mind and body and will placed the reality of the cost of discipleship right before the Scribe. "Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place t0 lay His head"... This statement by Jesus flies in the face of those who teach that Jesus was rich and that if He were alive today he