Intent vs Action

 

Firstly, we need look no further than our great Saviour. He is perfection personified — a truth no one can deny.

He had passions just as we do. He felt hunger, sorrow, pressure, and temptation. “Yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

That is where the line is drawn.

None of us can make that claim. Not one of us.

So, we look further to men who were not perfect yet stood before God.

Jacob was bold enough to wrestle with God, and he would not let go. “I will not let You go unless You bless me.” (Genesis 32:26) That is intent laid bare — a man refusing to walk away unchanged. But it cost him. His hip was struck, and he limped for the rest of his life.
Intent brought him to the struggle — commitment kept him there until God marked him.

David, a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), shows us another side. He fell — not through ignorance, but through desire acted upon. His intent did not keep him from sin. Yet when confronted, he did not justify himself. “I have sinned against the LORD.” (2 Samuel 12:13) He broke. He repented. Not perfection — but commitment revealed in return.

Samson stands as both warning and mercy. Called and set apart, he walked in his gifting with undeniable power. He was not weak in what God had given him — again and again, he fulfilled it.

Yet alongside that, he was repeatedly drawn to what God had forbidden. The issue was not his calling but his consecration. He carried the power but played with the boundary.

It cost him. His strength left him, his freedom was taken from him, and his eyes were put out.

Yet Scripture does not end there. “The hair of his head began to grow again” (Judges 16:22). And in his final moments, stripped of pride, he called on God: “O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray” (Judges 16:28). In his death, he destroyed more of the enemy than in his life (Judges 16:30).

Not a lack of commitment to calling — but a life that exposes the danger of power without full surrender.

It is not for any man to speak on God’s behalf. What has already been spoken in Scripture stands as the authority — not opinion, not feeling, not interpretation shaped by preference. If anything is to be measured, it must be measured against the Word.

God does not measure by appearance or words.

He sees the intent of the heart — the forming, the desire, the inclination.
But He responds to what a man does with it.

Jacob held on.
David returned.
Samson surrendered.

Each one moved beyond intent.

Action is what is needed.

James leaves no room for interpretation.

“Faith without works is dead.” (James 2:17)

Not weak. Not struggling.
Dead.

That is the dividing line.

Intent can sit comfortably in the heart. It can sound right, feel right, even convince others. But Scripture does not measure a man by what he intends — it measures him by what he does.

A man can intend to obey and never move.
A man can intend to repent and never turn.

That is not faith.

Not hearers only, but doers. Not agreement, but action. Not words, but evidence.

Grace is the gift —
action is the evidence that it has been received.

Intent may speak —
But action is what God answers.

 

Signing off

Tyrone

Two Futures, One Cross

 

Some golden day, Jesus will come again. For the eager Christian, this is a beautiful certainty. For the unbeliever, it sounds like a fable. Yet the difference between those two positions is not emotion — it is truth.

“Jesus in my place” is not a theory to the believer — it is a settled reality. A finished work. A fixed anchor in the storm of time. But for the unbeliever, eternity does not rest. It circles like a restless bird with nowhere to land — where will I go, what awaits me, what if I am wrong? To live there is to live suspended. Uncertainty becomes a quiet torment. Doubt does not visit; it moves in. It clings closer than a brother and whispers when the room grows still. Not knowing the truth about eternity is not intellectual neutrality — it is the most dangerous snare a soul can walk into. Only one ground is solid.

Jesus. In my place.

The difference becomes most evident when life reaches its edge. The saved face, that moment with an anchor outside themselves — not in their own goodness, but in Christ’s finished work. The lost stand with nothing but questions. One rests on a promise already secured, the other stares into a future still undefined. That contrast alone reveals the weight of the gospel. Salvation is not a religious decoration for life — it is preparation for eternity.

That is why Solomon cuts through every age, every culture, and every argument with final authority:

“Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”
— Ecclesiastes 12:13

This is humanity, addressed as a whole. We are not accidents wandering through history — we are created beings acting within God’s story. He directs. We respond. The villain seeks to disrupt, and disruption is exactly what we see around us.

We have reached a point where human opinion has crowned itself the final authority over God. Solomon’s instruction is treated as outdated. Everyone now claims the right to define godliness on their own terms. Men and women alike speak as if they know better than the Creator, and entire movements claim divine approval while rejecting divine order.

The woke movement is not a harmless social trend. It is a theological claim dressed in modern language. It claims that humanity can redefine morality, identity, truth — and even God’s created order — without reference to God. Scripture is explicit that order itself is not accidental. “So God created man in his own image… male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). Creation is structured, intentional, and declared good by the Creator.

That is not progress; it is the oldest rebellion in history repeating itself. Eden already ran that experiment. The first crack in creation began with a question, not a sword: “Yea, hath God said…?” (Genesis 3:1). The moment humanity places God’s word and God’s order on trial, it re-enacts that ancient scene. Every age invents new vocabulary for it, but the rebellion remains unchanged: the creature challenging the structure established by the Creator.

Scripture warns of what follows when that order is exchanged for human invention: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools… and changed the truth of God into a lie” (Romans 1:22–25). When truth is untethered from God, confusion is not liberation — it is a consequence.

When any movement — woke or otherwise — speaks as if it has authority to revise God’s design, it steps into territory reserved for the Creator alone. Sin does not become righteous because it gains cultural approval. It remains what it has always been: a breach of God’s order that required the death of Christ to repair.

The modern voice says sin is harmless, flexible, negotiable. Scripture says the opposite. Sin cost Christ His life.

If anyone believes God took sin lightly, they have not lingered long enough at the cross.

The depths to which the Father went to redeem sinners are almost beyond comprehension. When I slow down long enough to consider it, I am floored. Silenced. Paralysed by the magnitude of grace. That moment alone should shatter every illusion that rebellion is small or trivial.

This is not hatred of people. It is a refusal to lie about what destroys them. Grace never denies reality; it confronts it so it can heal it.

So, the plea is simple:

Set aside prejudice. Ask God for grace. Ask to be freed from deception.

The Bible must become the final authority again. We cannot carve out the parts we prefer and discard the rest, pretending God will adjust to match our lifestyle. Judgment is not a metaphor. It is a coming reality that no human escapes.

For the Christian, the miracle is this: Christ has already stood in that judgment in our place. The price has been paid. Yet that truth raises a piercing question — are we content to remain in the very chains He died to break?

To treat sin casually is to treat the cross casually. That warning applies to me as much as to anyone reading this. Ignoring obedience reveals misplaced value. Grace was never permission to remain enslaved.

To those caught in the modern illusion that freedom means redefining God: understand the severity of the lie. Repentance is not oppression. It is a rescue. Sin promises liberation but delivers bondage. Christ promises surrender and delivers freedom.

The devil wants humanity to be comfortable in chains. Christ died to unlock them.

The invitation still stands.

Fear God. Keep His commandments. See the brilliance of a Creator who does not enslave but redeems.

Signing off
Tyrone

A house Divided

 

A House Divided

“A house divided cannot stand.”
Jesus said it plainly. It is not poetry. It is not merely a metaphor. It is a structural truth.

A divided house collapses. Every time. No exceptions. That principle applies to families, churches, nations, and hearts. Remove unity, and you remove the load-bearing wall.

That is why the household is always under attack.

But let’s stay focused.

The place where division most often enters is not outside Christianity — it is within the handling of Scripture. The same Bible that unites believers is the same Bible that leads denominations to different conclusions. This is not new. It has followed the church from the beginning.

Yet there are truths that every Christian instinctively affirms. These are not negotiable. They are not elastic. They do not bend with culture, personality, or preference.

Scripture has a centre — and it has a horizon.

The centre: non-negotiable clarity

Christ
The cross
The resurrection
Grace
Faith
Final judgment
The authority of Scripture

These are not obscure verses hidden away. They are repeated, reinforced, and unmistakable. They are the spine of the faith. Christian unity lives here. Remove the centre and you do not have Christianity — you have something else wearing its clothing.

But tension enters at the horizon.

The horizon: interpretive tension

Timelines
Prophetic imagery
Symbol vs literal
Sequence of events
Mechanics of spiritual gifts
Details of the future

These require inference. They require humility. They require the admission that faithful believers may see differently without denying Christ.

The danger is not disagreement. The danger is when disagreement becomes identity. When edges become more important than the centre. When fellowship collapses over secondary conclusions, the house begins to fracture.

Once fracture sets in, the deceiver has achieved something. Not the war — Christ has already secured that — but a battle. Division weakens the witness. Pride replaces submission. Certainty replaces charity.

Was this inevitable? Was it permitted for a reason?

One conclusion remains unavoidable:

God does not make mistakes.

The existence of interpretive edges is no accident. It exposes the real test.

The test is not:
“Do we agree on every edge?”

The test is:

Do we submit to Scripture?
Do we guard the centre?

 Do we stay humble at the edges?

Charles Spurgeon addressed this tension directly. He refused unity that diluted truth, yet he warned against tearing apart fellowship over secondary matters. He wrote:

“We shall see eye to eye when we get to heaven;
till then let us walk hand in hand.”

And again:

“If I differ from a brother in some interpretations,
am I therefore to cease to love him? God forbid.”

For Spurgeon, the house's collapse did not begin at interpretive edges — it began when Christ was displaced from the centre.

A divided house collapses when the centre is abandoned. But a house anchored at the centre can survive tension at the edges. Unity is not sameness. Unity is a shared submission to Christ.

A house stands not because every wall agrees — but because its foundation is Christ. - “For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
(1 Corinthians 3:11)

 

Signing off

Tyrone

Time

Time stands still for no man.

I say it that way because I am one, and the words fit the bones.
Time stands still for no one — true —
But the clock feels personal when you hear it ticking inside your own chest.

So much life spilled and splashed and evaporated.
Not lost exactly.
Just poured into the cauldron of time, where everything goes eventually.

Throw it in and watch it turn:

School first —
cricket whites, soccer dust,
rugby green grass ground into the knees.
Accolades in soccer, cricket, rugby —
small hands lifting small trophies
to the sound of applause that felt endless.
The field my first stage,
applause my first language.
I learned early how intoxicating it is
to believe the noise will never fade.

Greenside matric:
a boy standing tall
inside the echo of cheers,
stacking applause like promises,
mistaking recognition for permanence,
believing time itself was clapping with me.

Then navy whites.
Salt air stitched into the fabric.
Simon’s Town.
Coxswain.
Oudtshoorn Infantry School.
Boots striking a rhythm,
orders snapping clean in the air.
Another stage.
Another kind of clapping —
discipline, ceremony, approval.
A body drilled into obedience
while the heart rehearsed rebellion in secret.
Uniform bright, future blurred —
disobedience to the cry from above
already visible,
even if I refused to read it.

Then the sudden halt.

A head-on collision.
Six weeks beneath a hospital ceiling
With traction teaching stillness.
No applause there.
Only the quiet hum of machines
and the sound of my own breathing.
Weights hanging from my leg
like a curtain dropping.
The stage empty.
The clapping gone.
And in that silence
a truth louder than any crowd.

And after the stillness, the blade:

HIV at twenty-seven.
A line carved across the calendar.
Before.
After.
No audience now.
No pretending.
Consequence does not clap.
It calls your name.

Because that is the hidden curriculum of a man:
rebellion…
and the slow discovery
that obedience is not a cage —
it is rescue.

All of it boiling now —
trophies, navy whites, hospital rooms, diagnoses —
steam rising from the cauldron of time.

And in the clearing air
the single lesson that survived the heat:

Jesus in my place.

Not repair.
Exchange.

Where disobedience wrote the sentence,
Obedience carried the cross.

Time keeps stirring.
The past does not vanish.
It becomes testimony.

The shock is not the wreckage.
The shock is mercy standing in it
without asking for applause.

And here remains the evidence:

a man corrected,
a man interrupted,
a man still being rebuilt —

not by willpower,
But by substitution.

Jesus in my place.

And the verdict that outlives time itself:

“For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
— Romans 10:13

 

Signing off

Tyrone

 

Our Father

“Our Father” — Where Prayer Begins and Where Judgment Follows

When we consider the prayer, “Our Father”, we must slow down at the very first words. The Lord Jesus did not begin with requests or needs. He began with a position.

“Our Father.”

Relationship first. Geography second. Reverence immediately thereafter.

Christ directs our attention upward before anything else moves. The question posed to Him was simple: How should we pray? His answer establishes a hierarchy that modern Christianity often inverts. We rush to provision, protection, and personal blessing. Christ begins with acknowledgment, identity, authority, and holiness.

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
— Matthew 6:9

That is not decorative language. It is orientation. Prayer begins by placing God where He belongs and us where we belong. Heaven is not mentioned to inform God of His location; it is mentioned to remind us of ours. We are earthbound creatures addressing the eternal King. The first act of prayer is submission disguised as praise.

Is praise actually submission?

It is worth asking the question plainly: when Jesus begins his prayer with “hallowed be your name,” is the first act of prayer really submission?

Yes — but not because praise is pretending to be something else. True praise and submission are not rivals; they are inseparable.

To hallow God’s name is not flattery. It is not emotional language. It is an act of agreement with reality. God is holy. God is above. God is the Creator. We are not. The moment we acknowledge that order, we step out of the centre and place Him there. That movement of the heart is submission.

Scripture binds worship and surrender together:

“Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.” — Psalm 95:6

Praise is not a camouflage for surrender — it is surrender expressed as honour. You cannot genuinely hallow God while clinging to personal sovereignty. The first movement of prayer dethrones the self and restores God to His rightful place.

When Christ teaches us to begin with reverence, He is not offering a polite introduction. He is reordering the soul.

Prayer begins where reality begins: God above, man beneath, and peace found in the right arrangement.

And immediately after reverence comes desire:

“Your kingdom come, your will be done…”
— Matthew 6:10

Not my kingdom. Not my will.

His.

This links directly back to creation and the garden. Eden is not merely the story of human disobedience; it is the battlefield where wills collide. The serpent introduces the ancient temptation: autonomy from God.

“You will be like God…”
— Genesis 3:5

The war between light and darkness did not begin with humanity, but humanity stepped into it the moment it chose independence over obedience. Scripture reminds us that rebellion existed before man’s fall:

“He was a murderer from the beginning… the father of lies.”
— John 8:44

Every generation relives that decision in its own clothing.

The importance of hallowing the name of God cannot be overstated. It is the anchor of a sane worldview. Once reverence collapses, substitution follows. Creation replaces the Creator. Language shifts. People speak of “the universe” as if it were a conscious authority, a giver, and a moral force. Scripture diagnosed this exchange long ago.

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”
— Romans 1:25

Romans 1 lays it out with uncomfortable clarity: mankind did not lose its way by accident. It exchanged truth for a lie. From that inversion flow moral confusion, spiritual blindness, and societal decay.

“Claiming to be wise, they became fools…”
— Romans 1:22

The slippery slope is not random; it is the predictable consequence of dethroning God from the mind.

History shows us the pattern repeats. Typology is not just a literary device in Scripture; it is a warning system.

“These things took place as examples for us…”
— 1 Corinthians 10:6

Civilisations rise, reject divine authority, redefine morality, and collapse under the weight of their own rebellion. The lesson is never hidden. The tragedy is how often it is ignored.

We like to study past ages as if they were safely contained behind glass. But Scripture does not permit that distance.

“Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction…”
— 1 Corinthians 10:11

Our age will also be weighed. Judgement is not merely historical; it is personal and generational.

“It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.”
— Hebrews 9:27

The question is not whether decline has happened before. The question is how we respond while standing within our own cycle.

Prayer, then, is not a ritual escape from reality. It is in line with the ultimate reality.

When Christ teaches us to begin with “Our Father,” He is teaching us to restore the correct order of things.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
— Proverbs 9:10

Creator above creation. Will above desire. Kingdom above comfort. Reverence above expression.

If that foundation is wrong, everything built on top of it leans toward collapse.

The recovery of a culture begins where true prayer begins, with the hallowing of God’s name.

“Those who honor me I will honor…”
— 1 Samuel 2:30

Not sentimentally. Not symbolically. But with a conscious refusal to replace Him with abstractions, trends, or cosmic vagueness. The universe is not sovereign. God is.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
— Genesis 1:1

And the age that remembers that has hope.

The age that forgets it writes its own indictment.

The unavoidable conclusion

If Christ were removed from the equation, all that would remain would be religion, argument, and speculation. With Him in His rightful place, truth becomes visible, prayer becomes possible, and God becomes known.

Everything begins and ends there.

Jesus in my place — or I understand nothing.

Jesus in my place is not a detail of faith — it is the reason I understand anything.

Signing off

Tyrone

Do you love me more that these?

 

Do You Love Me More Than These?

“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”
— John 21:15

This is the question we all need to answer.

Although the Lord Jesus posed it to Peter on the shore after the resurrection, there is still room for every one of us to hear that same question as if the Lord were directing it personally to us:

Do you love Me more than these?

Do we love anything more than the Lord?

The immediate reflex is obviously no. Our minds rush to the right answer: Of course I love the Lord above all else. But let’s be real. If we place anything in our lives as a priority — anything — over the Lord Jesus, that is where our treasure lies.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
— Matthew 6:21

And the more I reflect on my own heart, the more work it needs.

Not patchwork. Not religious effort. Not moral polishing.

Because the greatest of all miracles has already been accomplished on Calvary.

“It is finished.”
— John 19:30

The Lord Jesus has paid the price for the repentant sinner. Fully. Completely. Eternally.

My mind sometimes wants to drag me back to a place where I earn salvation, where I contribute to the cross, where I patch together righteousness with effort. But Scripture calls that what it is: dead work.

“…let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity… not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works…”
— Hebrews 6:1

Any attempt to add to what Christ finished is futile. Salvation is not a collaboration; it is a rescue.

I want the penny to drop on the magnitude of the Lord Jesus’ victory on Calvary. We say we understand it, but to what extent?

Regardless of how we slip and fall, that sin has already been accounted for. The Lord Jesus has the authority to forgive, thereby silencing the accuser of the believer.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
— Romans 8:1

It has already been judged. The sentence has been passed. The punishment has been served.

When I slow down long enough to digest this truth, it blows my mind.

Our sin — the very thing we sometimes allow to live comfortably within our domain — caused the Lord Jesus to suffer separation and judgement in our place.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
— 2 Corinthians 5:21

God made a way out for sinners by sending His own Son.

“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
— Romans 5:8

I’ve already written about “Jesus in my place,” but this truth has no bottom. It is eternal, continual, and inexhaustible.

Satan, the accuser, has no claim over the believer’s failures because the price has been paid.

“…the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.”
— Revelation 12:10

With that established — and it should already be foundational to every believer — the Apostle Paul devotes much of Romans to unpacking what this means.

Which brings us back to the question.

“Do you love Me more than these?”

“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!”
— Romans 6:1–2

Grace is not permission to drift. Grace is the power to live differently.

Love is the issue.

Not fear. Not an obligation. Not a religious performance.

Love.

If Christ has done all of this, if the cross truly stands where Scripture says it stands, then the question is unavoidable:

Do we love Him more than these?

More than comfort.
More than reputation.
More than habit.
More than sin, we refuse to bury.
More than the small kingdoms we build for ourselves.

Final thought:

Do you love Me more than these?

Signing off,
Tyrone