Lockdown (Page 7)

John the baptiser was a solitary man. Being confined to a suburban neighbourhood was not for him. However, he didn’t start his life in the wilderness avoiding clothing outlets and looking for beehives for dinner. He was a miracle baby. The son of aged parents. His dad a priest. Brought up in the faith of the One true God amidst the holy practices of the temple. Everyone within earshot of his birth announcement, or the day he was named ‘John,’…

If Jonah was claustrophobic, he was out of luck. You would think a man of God who had his levels of faith would just do what God told him to do. However, great faith doesn’t necessarily issue forth in great acts of obedience. Nineveh was a no-go zone for this prophet. If preaching in Nineveh meant salvation for the wicked Assyrians, then Jonah was sailing in the opposite direction. And that he did. No one anymore believes that God deliberately…

The Lock-Down—Bringing Hope to the Confined CircumstancesDay 2. In Jeremiah 38, the prophet Jeremiah found himself at the bottom of a well – sunk down and up to his armpits in mud. We can’t be sure of what else may have been down there, whether vermin, insect or rubbish, but we do know that he had neither food nor water to sustain him. His days were numbered. King Zedekiah’s cronies had lowered Jeremiah down into the well by ropes in…

The Lock-Down—A Christian’s guide in Confined CircumstancesDay 1. Jail is a miserable place. It is the antithesis of freedom. For most Christians being arrested, beaten and confined in a cell with their feet in stocks would be a sure sign from God that their missionary days were well and truly ended. By the time that Paul and Silas had arrived in Philippi (Acts 16), they had accepted that all of this kind of thing was merely ‘grist-for-the-mill’ for the preacher…