Category: What do you think?

How you treat your animals reveals your character

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

It would be easy to pass over Proverbs 12:10 as a minor verse, a footnote tucked between weightier pronouncements. “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” At first reading, it might seem like a charming sidebar about animal welfare. Look more closely, and it becomes a surprisingly penetrating measure of the human heart.

Righteousness has many visible expressions: prayer, the reading of scripture, generosity with resources, honesty in dealings, love offered consistently over time. These are the markers we readily recognise and rightly honour. But Solomon observes something we might not think to include on the list: the way a person treats the animal in their care.

The reasoning runs deeper than sentiment. God is the creator of all living things, not merely of human beings. To have right relationship with what God has made means extending something of His regard to the creatures He fashioned. The person who cares gently for the animal entrusted to them is expressing, in that small and often unobserved corner of life, a righteousness that is genuine. The person who abuses or exploits creation is revealing something about their relationship with the Creator Himself.

The same principle extends outward. To exploit the earth, to contaminate the waters, to treat the natural world as raw material for consumption without care, these are not merely environmental concerns. They are reflections of a heart that has lost sight of who made it all and why.

Character does not compartmentalise. The cruelty or the kindness that lives in us finds its way into everything we touch.

For the eagerly awaiting creation waits for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God.

Romans 8:19

The freedom of not being easily offended

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

There is a cultural phenomenon that Proverbs 12:16 anticipated with remarkable accuracy. In our present moment, offence has become both a currency and a condition. People are offended quickly, loudly, and in large numbers. A thoughtless word, a clumsy phrase, an opinion that fails to align with the expected position, and the response is immediate and often disproportionate. We have, it seems, produced a blizzard of thin-skinned responses to a world that is undeniably full of careless words.

Let us be clear: genuine offences matter. There are real wrongs that deserve to be named and addressed. This is not a counsel toward passivity in the face of injustice.

But Proverbs names something different here. The prudent person is capable of absorbing an insult without immediately responding to it. This is not weakness or resignation; it is a form of strength.

The person who must respond to every slight, who measures their own dignity by how quickly they can defend it, has become a prisoner to the very thing they are fighting.

He will set right what has been set wrong. He will comfort those who have been genuinely hurt. Our role is not to manage every account; it is to trust the One who manages them perfectly.

Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written: “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.

Romans 12:19

Laying aside what no longer belongs to you

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

There is a recognisable ritual in every household: the clearing out of things that no longer fit, no longer function, no longer belong to the life one is now living. The coat from a decade ago that sits unworn at the back of the wardrobe. The appliance that has not worked in years. These things accumulate quietly, occupying space that might otherwise serve the present.

First Peter 2 calls believers to a similar clearing out, but of a different and more consequential kind. The list Peter provides is precise: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. These are presented not as exotic vices belonging to extreme cases, but as familiar tendencies of the unrenewed heart. And the instruction is as direct as a cleared wardrobe: put them aside, renounce them, be done with them.

Each item on the list deserves honest examination. Malice is the settled desire to cause harm to another without any just cause. Deceit encompasses the many forms of dishonesty, large and small, that corrupt our dealings with one another. Hypocrisy is the adoption of a false appearance, presenting to the world a person we are not. Envy is the quiet bitterness that rises when another person achieves what we wanted. And slander is the willingness to damage someone’s name with our words.

These are the garments of the old life, and Peter’s counsel is not to modify them or wear them less frequently. It is to lay them aside completely.

What we once were, we need not remain.

 that, in reference to your former way of life, you are to rid yourselves of the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you are to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,

Ephesians 4:22-23

Wisdom speaks, but are we listening?

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

Proverbs 1:20 paints a remarkable picture. Wisdom is not a rare commodity locked away in libraries. She is crying out in the streets, raising her voice in the marketplace, calling from the city gates. She is, in every sense, available to all. So, what does this mean in an age of unprecedented information?

We carry in our pockets access to virtually every documented fact in human history. Search engines answer questions in fractions of a second. And yet, foolishness has not retreated. If anything, it has multiplied. It’s not a cognitive problem, it’s a heart issue. To be clear: Our resistance to wisdom is not fundamentally intellectual; it is moral and rooted in stubbornness.

God’s wisdom surrounds us. It speaks through scripture, through the created order, through the consequences of choices made and unmade. The question has never been whether wisdom is available; the question is whether we are willing to humble ourselves enough to receive it.

But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him.

James 1:5

The dead don’t watch the news | Releasing our grip on the world

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

Those who rest in cemeteries hold no opinions about the season’s trending content. They are not concerned with the movements of financial markets, indifferent to the fortunes of sports franchises, and entirely unaffected by the latest shifts in fashion. Death has done what nothing else could: it has severed the connection between those souls and the world that once occupied so much of their attention.

First John 2:15 presses this image into the life of the believer: do not love the world or the things in the world. If the love of the world occupies the heart, the love of the Father cannot. These are not compatible allegiances.

The reasoning behind this command is not that the created world is evil in itself, but that the world as a system, with its values, its powers, and its appetites, is passing away. It is a temporary arrangement, already under judgement, already in the process of dissolution. To invest one’s deepest love in what is passing is to build one’s life on something that will not hold.

The believer has been crucified with Christ. This is not a metaphor for mild detachment; it is a description of a real severance. Reckoned as dead to this world’s systems, we are simultaneously alive to God in Jesus. That life does not compete with the world; it simply belongs to a different order entirely.

The invitation, then, is not primarily about what we give up, but about what we are freed to embrace. Release the grip on what is fading, and find in Christ something that does not fade. Let the world go. Concentrate on Him.

The world is passing away and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God continues to live forever.

1 John 2:17