Only By Grace

In consolidating my blogs, the two most difficult blogs to consolidate are  To God be the Glory and Trinity Covenant Church.   Not only because of the number of articles or the many useful links I posted there, but as I review the articles, I could not remember that I wrote some of them. Take for instance The Book and The Preachers , the article I published in May 2013, I could not recall writing its content. As I review it, the ideas appear strange to me.  I also find in To God Be The Glory some articles that are still very useful. In fact, the cause that triggered me to consolidate my blogs is due to frustration in finding an article that I wrote in the past. We were discussing that time a topic related to the law and then I was reminded of an article I wrote about the three uses of the law. After spending some time browsing all my blogs, still I could not find it. And the benefit in consolidating a blog is like setting your room in order and while doing it, unexp...

Philippians 1:3-11 3 I thank my God every time I remember you. 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. 8 God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. In this age of social media, the impact of your thinking and action as an individual, intentio...

This post will serve as the overarching guide to all my blogs. Only By Grace will be my number one blog that I will focus from this day onward to direct me to all my blogs and posts all over the web, as well as to track my readings and the current topics that occupy my mind.  Consolidated Blogs  has served as the basis for what I have been posting so far in Only By Grace as long as I am not done yet with this task of re-organizing my thoughts. Its permanent role will be as a guide to specific posts in the past that could provide a ready reference just in case I need it. The other two blogs, A Trader's Journey and Studies in Economics  are the two fields that currently I am most interested in. A Trader's Journey is my trading platform while Studies in Economics is my platform for my readings that primarily focused on the Austrian School of economics, classical liberalism and biblical economics. Freedom, Prosperity and Peace appears to be a closed blog by now for it has b...

In this blog, I published three articles on Ecclesiastes, two on Proverbs, and three on Psalms.  In Ecclesiastes, I wrote articles that introduced the book and presented two views of human history. The book's theme is about the hopelessness of a philosophy based on human autonomy. The key word is "meaningless." This theme is elaborated in relation to inheritance and death. The book is not easy to read. It seems to contain contradictions. Examples of such include the contradictions regarding the value of labor (1:2-3;5:18), the value of wisdom (2:15-16; 7:19), and the value of wealth (5:19:6:1).  In the end, the preacher offers the only way out of a destructive philosophy, which is the fear of God and obedience to His commands (12:13). As to the two different views of human history, the dominant perspective of nations around Israel is that human history is cyclical and they used this perspective to interpret the future of mankind. The preacher spoke of such mindset as if i...

Last 05 June, I stopped consolidating my 29 blogs. I am still not finished with the draft summarizing the content of my blog, Pagbubulay-bulay sa Banal na Kasulatan. As I continue writing today, I forgot where I stopped. It took me sometime to understand the framework of my mind when I decided this act of consolidation. Today, as I recollect what I have done so far, I ended up organizing four of my blogs: Planned Chaos, My Portfolio, Only by Grace (WordPress) and Reflection on Economic and Politics. I intend to continue this project by tomorrow hoping that I won't forget it again. I need to remind myself that my task for tomorrow is to organize my thoughts beginning from my Reformed Theology blog onward.  Currently, I am reading a lot of materials that I want to write about. But the problem is if I will do it without organizing my blogs, the articles will just pile up and later I will see myself again looking for a topic that I already wrote about in the past but struggling to find...

George Arthur Buttrick's book, Prayer (1942) starts with a chapter about the necessity of prayer in view of the imminent danger surrounding us. Prayer for him is inseparable from the belief in the existence of God. If God does not exist, prayer is an act of self-deceit and the worst kind of delusion. But if God exists, which in fact He is, prayer then is the primary task of the children of God.  He believes that just as the Spirit of God brought order out of the formless and empty condition of primitive earth, only prayer can bring order amidst chaos that characterize modern life. He describes evidences of this chaotic condition through widespread scientific agnosticism, rampant skepticism, suicidal knowledge and skills, and war. Life in modern city and scientific research illustrate such current chaos.  Life in modern city crushes the spirit of man. His description of city life remains contemporary: "Steam-heated apartments, sex-heated novels, brick chasms filled with gasolin...