Faith & Code | Reflections by Errong

  The Strength of Humility “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” This truth is clearly displayed in the contrast between Saul and David in 1 Samuel 18. Saul allowed pride and envy to take control of his heart. David, despite his growing success and popularity, remained humble because he understood that his victories and blessings came from the Lord. Saul had been rejected as king, yet he refused to accept God's word and humble himself before Him. Instead, his envy of David grew into hatred. David's success reminded Saul of what he had lost, and rather than turning to God in repentance, Saul tried repeatedly to destroy David. His pride made him increasingly blind to his own need for God. Envy is a dangerous sin because it can quietly take root in our hearts. We may begin by comparing ourselves with someone else, but eventually we can resent their success, gifts, relationships, or recognition. Instead of loving and appreciating others, we begin to see them as our...

  The Glory of God in the Cross As Jesus approached the cross, He entered into deep anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. His suffering was not merely the physical pain He would soon endure. He knew that He was about to bear the guilt of His people and experience the judgment that sin deserved. The weight before Him was the burden of our sin and the wrath of God against it. Yet, in the midst of this anguish, Jesus remained focused on the glory of God. His suffering and death were not an accident or merely the result of human hatred. He willingly submitted Himself to the Father's will because He desired above all things that the Father would be glorified. This challenges the way we often live. We naturally want our own comfort, reputation, success, and happiness. Even our religious lives can become centered on ourselves: What will I get from following Christ? How will God make my life better? But Jesus shows us a different way. His life was centered on the glory of God, even when g...

  What Is True Faith? What is faith? In our time, faith is often described as something uncertain or irrational—a kind of belief we hold when the evidence is not enough. But biblical faith is very different. Faith is not simply wishing that something will be true, nor is it refusing to think about the evidence. Faith is trusting God and trusting what God has said . The Heidelberg Catechism gives us a helpful definition in Question and Answer 21. True faith has two important aspects: a sure knowledge and a firm confidence . First, faith has content. We cannot simply believe whatever we want and call it faith. The strength of faith does not come from how strongly we believe something. If I believe that my car's brakes are working when they have actually failed, my strong belief will not stop the car. In the same way, religious faith cannot be separated from truth. True faith is not merely a feeling that helps us get through the day. It rests upon what God has revealed in His Word...

  Backwards Wisdom Is Good for the Heart Ecclesiastes is not an easy book to read. Its repeated message—“vanity of vanities, all is vanity”—can sound almost depressing. Yet Ecclesiastes is a book of wisdom, and perhaps we could call it wisdom for the wise . Even those who have learned how to live wisely need to be reminded that wisdom does not give us control over life. We may learn to live well, but we cannot control what happens to us. That is one of the great lessons of Ecclesiastes: life is uncertain, and death is unavoidable . Ecclesiastes 7 gives us what seems to be a strange kind of wisdom. The Preacher tells us that “the day of death” is better than “the day of birth,” and that it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting. He even says that sorrow can be better than laughter and the rebuke of the wise better than the song of fools. At first, this sounds completely backwards. We naturally celebrate a birth and grieve a death. We enjoy weddings ...

  Continue in the Word We often know what is good for us without actually doing it. We know that exercise is good for us, that sleep matters, that healthy food is better for us, and yet knowing these things does not automatically make them easy to practice. The same can be true of Bible study. We know that God's Word is important, but knowing its importance does not remove the effort required to sit down, open it, read it, study it, and meditate upon it. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul gives Timothy a simple but important command: “Continue in what you have learned.” Timothy is not being encouraged to move beyond Scripture as he matures. He is being told to remain in it. The Word of God is not something that we eventually outgrow. The more we mature as Christians, the more deeply we should grow into it. Paul gives Timothy several reasons to continue in the Scriptures. First, he reminds him of the testimony of those who taught him . Timothy had learned the Scriptures from his mother Eunic...

  The Power of Love The Song of Solomon reminds us that biblical wisdom is not merely knowing what is right, but learning how to live rightly. In this passage, we are taught wisdom for love. Love is not presented as a fleeting emotion or merely a feeling of attraction, but as a powerful commitment that holds another person close. The image of the seal is especially meaningful. When the beloved asks, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm,” she is asking to be treasured, remembered, and held close. A seal belonged to its owner and was kept carefully because it represented identity and ownership. In the same way, covenant love says, “You belong to me, and I will not abandon you.” This is the kind of steadfast love we are called to pursue in marriage and in our relationships with one another. The passage also describes love as being “strong as death” and “fierce as the grave.” These are striking words because death and the grave are forces from which human being...

Why Your GitHub PR Checks Get Stuck Forever and The Fix TL;DR If you open a pull request against one branch (for example, develop ) and later retarget it to another branch that has GitHub rulesets requiring specific workflows (for example, main ), the newly required checks can become stuck showing: Expected — Waiting for workflow to run Not queued . Not in progress . Just permanently stuck, with no workflow run ever created for that check. The fix is simple: push a new commit (even an empty commit) . However, understanding why this happens can save a lot of debugging time. The Setup We use an organization-level GitHub ruleset to enforce that certain workflows must run and pass before a PR can be merged into protected branches. Example: target: branch conditions: ref_name: include: - "~DEFAULT_BRANCH" rules: - type: workflows parameters: workflows: - repository_id: <container-build-repo-id> path: .github/workflows/ruleset_build.yaml ref: refs/tags/v1 The reusable wor...

Building a GitHub Copilot Skill for Spring Boot Modernization at Scale What starts as a simple prompt for one application quickly becomes an engineering process problem at scale. This post shares the design principles behind a reusable GitHub Copilot skill that standardized Spring Boot upgrades across dozens of services while reducing manual effort and review overhead. The Real Challenge of Framework Modernization Upgrading a single Spring Boot application is usually straightforward. An experienced engineer can handcraft a prompt, point GitHub Copilot at a repository, review a few changes, and work through the upgrade. The challenge isn't upgrading one application. The challenge is upgrading the next ten, twenty, or forty applications with the same level of quality, consistency, and safety. That is where a reusable GitHub Copilot Skill becomes valuable. Rather than relying on engineers to repeatedly write the "perfect upgrade prompt," a skill encodes the entire moderniza...

One of the things I sometimes struggle with when reading the Bible is feeling a little lost. It can feel like the first day of school. You open the textbook, look at the material, and wonder, “Where do I start? What is this really about?” Some parts of the Bible are especially difficult. We read the prophets, or some of Paul’s letters, and we know there is something important there, but we are not always sure how everything fits together. This sermon reminded me of a simple but very important truth: The Bible is about Jesus Christ. Lord’s Day 6 asks who the mediator is who is both truly God and truly righteous man. The answer is our Lord Jesus Christ. He came to bear the burden of God’s wrath in His human nature and, through His divine nature, to accomplish what we could never accomplish ourselves. That is the gospel revealed throughout Scripture. From the beginning, God promised a Saviour. The sacrifices and ceremonies of the Old Testament pointed forward to Christ. The prophets spoke...

  This Sunday’s sermon from Proverbs 8 gave me a helpful way to think about wisdom, learning, and how we live in God’s world. The sermon’s main theme was simple: To get wisdom, you must go to the school of Christ. When we think of wisdom, we often think about being intelligent or having a lot of knowledge. But biblical wisdom is more practical. Wisdom is the skill of living rightly in God’s world. We may know many things, but knowing how to live faithfully before God is something we need to learn. Proverbs reminds us that we are not naturally wise. We need instruction. We need someone to teach us. The sermon described two “schools” presented in Proverbs: the school of Wisdom and the school of Folly. Every day, we are being taught by something. The question is: Who are we listening to? Who is shaping our minds, desires, and decisions? What especially stood out to me was the connection between Wisdom and Christ. The New Testament tells us that Christ is the wisdom of God. In Him are...

One illustration from this sermon stayed with me: the difference between a pilot and a paratrooper . When we travel by airplane, passengers can easily become anxious. We sit in our small seats, looking out the window, wondering what is happening. Is the flight delayed? Will the weather affect us? Why is there turbulence? But the pilot has a different perspective. He knows much more about what is happening. He can see the bigger picture and has information that the passengers do not have. The Apostle Paul also had this kind of perspective. Earlier in Colossians 1, he reminds us of the greatness of Jesus Christ. Christ is before all things. All things were created through Him and for Him. In Him all things hold together. Christ is Lord over everything. Paul also understood the reality of this fallen world. He knew that human beings were once "alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds" (Colossians 1:21). He was not surprised by sin, suffering, rejection, or opposition. ...