Thinking Aloud

             How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations! She who was the queen among the provinces has now become a slave!      (Lamentation 1:1) This is Jeremiah, the man known as the “weeping prophet” . He reminds us of another who sat weeping over Jerusalem . The only difference is that Jerusalem was in ruins and the temple already burned as Jeremiah gazed upon the debris. Jesus wept over the same city about six centuries later because of what was going to happen to her . To Jeremiah, the destruction of Jerusalem was a matter of history. To Jesus the destruction of Jerusalem was a matter of prophecy. The key verse in the Book of Lamentations explains the reason Jerusalem lay in ruin: “The Lord is righteous, yet I have rebelled against His commandment: listen, all you peoples; look upon my suffering, my young men and ma...

                                                               PSALMS 23:4-6 [Continued] 4. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Yes. The idea of path and walking flows from the previous verse. The Bible talks about people who walked with God: “Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters”.     “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.” The three Hebrew young men in the book of Daniel walked through fire accompanied by God. St. Paul exhorts new believers to walk worthy of God. Death is called the ultimate enemy. Death is frightening because we are helpless before it. For a man who lives without God, death is the end of all things....

                                                           PSALMS  23:1-3 The word “psalm” comes from the Greek word psalmos, meaning “ a poem to be sung to a stringed instrument”. The book of Psalms forms the heart of the Holy Bible and speaks directly to our heart. All grief, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, anxieties – in short, all those tumultuous agitations man encounters in his short life – are addressed here. It’s simple beauty never fades due to familiarity; nor is it possible to study its contents to exhaustion. 1.The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. Its author is King David who was a shepherd boy, tending to his father’s sheep until his heroic encounter with the giant Goliath would change his life forever. It is safe to believe that David must have loved his sheep and tended them consci...

John the Baptist was in prison for rebuking Herod Antipas, the half-crazed tetrarch of Galilee for divorcing his wife and unlawfully taking his brother’s wife. It appears there had not been much contact between the Baptist and Jesus Christ since that momentous day when the Lord was baptized by John at the Jordan . Then John had witnessed the heavens opening and the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus and a voice proclaiming from the sky “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!”. Later on John pointed out Jesus to the public naming Him the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’. Now he developed doubt in prison and sent his disciples to Jesus to find out ‘‘Are You the One who was to come, or should we look for someone else?’’. Jesus didn’t directly answer his question, but instructed the men to “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raise...

I. Mary and Martha   Lazarus is a New Testament figure who lived with his two sisters—Martha and Mary in the small town of Bethany near Jerusalem .      Jesus Christ was a frequent visitor to their home. There is evidence the family had lived earlier in the Galilean town of Magdala earlier. Perhaps Jesus knew them from that time. It is also thought that the youngest sister Mary and the ‘famous’ Mary Magdalene is the same person. The familiar interaction between the Saviour and the humble family is dwelt on by St. John when he tells us that "Jesus loved Martha, and her sister Mary, and Lazarus". (11:5). As we study the characteristics of the two young women in the way they responded to Jesus’ love, certain interesting facts—based on their personalities--come to light. In entertaining Jesus and looking after to His needs, Martha would not leave anything to chance. Everything had to be absolutely perfect. She was working under a certain amount of stress. By...