Daily Devotions

I’m a very amateur and extremely part-time jazz piano player. I’ve had the opportunity to be in a few bands over my life, and I’ve loved the experience. In a band, each member has different skills and different roles. In fact, each role tends to have a personality type associated with it. There’s jokes to go with each personality type that you can tell each other at practice sessions. Keyboard players are pedantic and dull (these are stereotypes, right? Well mostly…). Guitarists are self-obsessed. How do you know if you’ve met a guitarist at a party? He’ll tell you. How do you know if you’ve met a keyboard player at a party? He’s the one hanging around with the guitarist trying to look cool. Bass players are always in the background. How do you know if you’ve met a bass player at a party? Nobody can remember the answer. Drummers are a bit dim. There’s endless jokes you can tell about drummers. And so on. But when you start to play the music, it’s a different story altogether. The joki...

Slogans are catchy. Slogans crystallise our thoughts and capture our imaginations. That’s why they’re so useful for selling ideas. “Just Do It” inspires you to get out there and get active, preferably wearing a certain brand of sporting gear. “I’m lovin’ it” inspires you to get in there and feed the tasty fast food into your system so you can experience the sugar rush. Christians use slogans, too. “Jesus is Lord” is Paul’s brilliantly concise summary of the gospel of Jesus Christ. “What would Jesus do?” was a popular 1990s catch-cry designed to inspire people to imitate Christ. Sometimes, Christian slogans use old languages. The old language gives the slogan weight because it connects us with the great figures of former generations. Take, for example, the Latin slogan  semper reformanda. [1]  It was probably first introduced by seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed preacher Jodocus van Lodenstein.  Semper reformanda  is often translated “always reforming”, and explaine...

And Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to prepare the holy ones, for the work of ministry, for building the body of Christ, until we arrive—all of us—at the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, at the grown-up man, at the measure of maturity, the fulfilment of Christ. Ephesians 4:11–13 Are you a Roman? That is, are you the kind of person who really cares about organisation, strategy, pragmatics, and getting things done? The Roman Empire was famous for those things. And so the Romans ruled the world (or at least the Mediterranean world). In a very real sense, ‘Romans’ today—I’m now using the word to refer to people who care about organisation and strategy and leadership and management and doing stuff—still rule the world. You’ll go a long way if you’re a Roman. I’m a Roman. I’m an engineer by training. I want things to be organised properly. I want to achieve goals. I want to make it all work. I keep my inbo...