The sun bore down on my neck as I walked through neatly laid stones, each row like another line in a massive book. My eyes strained to take in all of the information—name, age, rank, country—and perhaps also death itself, the fragility of life, the harsh reality of war. In that field of graves, a war memorial for men lost as prisoners of war, slaves laboring to construct the Burma-Siam railway, I felt as the psalmist: “laid low in the dust.” Or like Job sitting among the dust and ashes of a great tragedy. Then one stone stopped my wandering and said what I could not. On an epitaph in the middle of the cemetery was written: “There shall be in that great earth, a richer dust concealed.”(1)

It is helpful, I think, to be reminded that we are dust. We are material; when we die, we  remain material. It is a reminder to hold as we move through life—through successes, disappointments, questions, and  answers. For the Christian, it is also a truth to help us approach the vast and terrible circumstances leading up to the crucifixion of God. Beginning with the ashes of Ash Wednesday, the journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Provision for Dust →

We don’t need the movies to show us how much of a disparity there is between truth and lies, though the twists in plot and suspense often remind us. We all hold certain values, and if we’re honest, we might admit how often we fail to honor them. And yet, there is something peculiar about how our minds work. We can so easily bracket our own lives from an acknowledgment of how consistently we miss the mark. It is like a built-in avoidance mechanism.

The issues of self-deception and denial are more serious than we care to admit. Tendencies toward self-pity, self-preoccupation, self-righteousness, and self-aggrandizement are intense and dangerous. Or as Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr describes it: “Sin is thus the unwillingness of man to acknowledge his creatureliness and dependence upon God and his effort to make his own life independent and secure.”(1)

One of the most helpful insights I know toward sorting through truth, lies, and deception is in Scripture’s calling us out of ourselves and always towards God. We are reminded often that the human heart is more deceitful than anything else. “Who can fathom it?” asks Jeremiah. “God alone, who searches the heart and tests inner motivation.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Acknowledging Creatureliness →