Last week’s series on Sexual Detox was quite an experience for me. I figured it would garner a little bit of interest simply because it dealt with an universal issue (sex) and because it included several important peripheral issues (pornography, addiction, and so on). But even then the response surprised me, both in terms of the number of visitors who showed up to read the articles and the outpouring of comments and emails in response to it. All of this showed me that I had tapped into an important issue.
Quite a few people wrote me to ask if I would be able to put the series together into a booklet or e-book. I am hard at work preparing a booklet form of it. I’ll be using a self-publishing printer to prepare it in paperback format and those will soon be available at Amazon for anyone who would wish to have a hard copy. What I’ve done in the meantime is create two different versions of the e-book, one for single guys and another for married guys. There are differences between them with each targeted at its specific audience.
Today I am glad to announce that the e-book of Sexual Detox: A Guide for the Single Guy is ready to go. I added to it a whole new chapter dealing with masturbation and also added study questions for those who are interested in working a bit on application. This version is geared specifically to young men and, even more specifically, to young single men. The version for married men will be ready to go in the near future. Also, Aileen and I are combining a little bit of this material with new things she has written into a guide for women that is based largely on emails she and I received from women who had read the Detox series. This should also be available soon.
But for now, here is Sexual Detox: A Guide for the Single Guy. You are free to download the e-book and to pass it along however you see fit in either printed or electronic formats.
UPDATE
Sexual Detox: A Guide for the Married Guy is also now available. Click here to download it.
This week Ligonier Ministries is offering 50 (count ‘em 50!) prizes. Each of the 50 (!) winners will be given a year-long subscription to Tabletalk Magazine (or a subscription for a friend, neighbor, hairdresser, family member, etc if the winner happens to already be a subscriber).
Tabletalk is a tool that helps you grow in your knowledge of God and in your love for His Son and His people. Each month is packed with more than 60 pages of focused, practical Bible study and insightful commentary by today’s top Christian thinkers. Over the years, Tabletalk has been recognized for its excellence through several awards. Today, people all over the world read Tabletalk on a daily basis. The magazine is regularly found in seminary libraries and churches throughout the country. Many credit Tabletalk with helping them maintain a solid life of study and prayer.
Click here If you would like to view a sample issue.
Please note that it will take 6-8 weeks for your first issue to arrive.
Rules: You may only enter the draw once. Simply fill out your name and email address to enter the draw. As soon as the winners have been chosen, all names and addresses will be immediately and permanently erased. Winners will be notified by email. The giveaway closes Saturday at noon.
Enter here:
Six Flags over Jesus
Jared Wilson writes about the new $130,000,000 building program at First Baptist Dallas. “Nobody should fault FBC Dallas or anybody else for building a building. But this isn’t a building. This, and a bunch of other stuff, is Bible Belt Disneyland. This is evangelicalism with more cowbell. This is
Field of Dreams attractional church. And it stinks to high heaven.”
Inmates Save Guard
Here’s a bit of a feel-good story from behind bars. “Hillsborough County, Florida, Deputy Kenneth Moon was alone at his station at a county jail facility near Tampa when an inmate attacked him with no warning. Moon, 64, was no match for Douglas Burden, 24, in custody on various drug charges. With Moon still in his chair, Burden put him in a choke hold and pulled tight.”
Carsonisms
A reader directed me to this list of his favorite “Carsonisms” (i.e. phrases written or uttered by D.A. Carson).
Compassion Bloggers
Compassion International is taking a handful of bloggers on a journey to see what they are doing in El Salvador (similar to how they took me to Dominican Republic a year ago. Was it really that long ago?). This time Molly Piper is going along for the journey. Be sure to check the link to find out more about the trip and to read along.
A couple of weeks ago I announced that the next book we would read together as part of the Reading Classics Together program would be Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray. We will begin reading that book on November 12, exactly one week from today. Actually, we will begin discussing the book on that date, so it would be best to start reading it before then. This is a final invitation to participate in the program and, for those who have already indicated interest, a final reminder that you’ll want to finish reading the first chapter in the next week.
This Reading Classics Together program exists to give us all a good excuse to read some of the classics of the faith. And this new book is, indeed, a classic, In Redemption Accomplished and Applied Murray explores the biblical passages dealing with the necessity, nature, perfection, and extent of the atonement, and goes on to identify the distinct steps in the Bible’s presentation of how the redemption accomplished by Christ is applied progressively to the life of the redeemed. It is, then, an overview of the biblical account of salvation as understood by Reformed Christians. Monergism Books says it is “One of the best, most concise, theologically sound and helpful expositions of the atonement ever produced. John Murray’s Redemption Accomplished and Applied should be required reading for every Christian. At just under 200 pages, Murray offers page after page of devotional and scholarly study that is nearly unparalleled in its clarity, usefulness and theological depth. Read this book, re-read this book and keep it close at hand.”
There is still time for you to order a copy of the book and read the first chapter before next Thursday.
If you are interested, you can purchase the book at:
Amazon | Westminster Books | Monergism Books
Check in one week from today and we will begin to discuss it together. I can’t wait!
Multiple Perspectives on Multi-Site Churches
A panel at Southern Seminary discussed this topic. The participants are R. Albert Mohler Jr., Gregg Allison, Kevin Ezell, Greg Gilbert, and Daniel Montgomery.
The Day I Went to Church
I enjoyed this article simply for the perspective it offers on a person’s first strange and perhaps terrifying attempt at going to church. It is good to remember how foreign church is to people who are not accustomed to it.
Stand By Me
This is a cool little video. The producers went around the world and recorded the song as performed by an international contingent of people.
Guardian Angels
Randy Alcorn addresses this question: Do you believe in guardian angels? He answers in the affirmative.
The Case for Modesty
This article in TIME has a few good things to say about modesty and humility. “Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny. But some virtues go dormant for generations, as we’ve seen with thrift, making its comeback after 40 years in cold storage. I’m hoping for a sudden outbreak of modesty, a virtue whose time has surely come.
How many times have you heard a person claim that he has “accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior?” Have you ever asked him what it means that Jesus is his Lord? Have you ever asked him how Jesus is his Savior? What makes him his Savior? And what does it mean that he is his personal Lord and Savior?
How many times have you heard a person open a prayer with the words “Dear God?” What do those words really mean? Why do we begin our prayers with an address? Is this necessary or merely customary?
How many times have you heard a person thank God that Jesus is present, for “where two are more are gathered together, Jesus is there?” Have you ever asked him why Jesus is only there where two or more are gathered? Have you ever asked if he is present in a more special way when people are gathered versus when they are alone?
The fact is, there are many times when we flippantly speak of God and his attributes without knowing or perhaps even caring to understand what we are saying. We repeat things we have heard, but have never thought about. But what is incredible to me is that we don’t need to understand all of these things to be God’s children. We do not need to devote ourselves to endless studies in theology and doctrine in order to be saved. God sees and knows and values the heart more than the mind. Yet if we want to grow deeper in our love for God, we need to begin to understand these things. We need to grow deeper in our knowledge of him.
On that day that I got married, I loved my wife deeply. On our wedding day, as I looked at her walking down the aisle towards me, I never would have believed that I could love her more than I did at that very moment. I had known her for four years and had spent thousands of hours just being with her, listening to her talk and watching her interact with other people. And now she was walking towards me, looking absolutely radiant, and intending to pledge her life to me. I began to sob like a child and felt my heart would nearly burst with the love I felt for her. But you know what? More than a decade into that marriage I can honestly say I love her far more now than I did when we got married. Why is that? It is simply that I know her so much better now. The more I learn about her, the more I know her. The more I know her, the more I love her.
I use that illustration to show that you can really only love God inasmuch as you know him. When you are an unbeliever and do not know God you cannot love him at all. When some day you die and go to be with him, you will know him in a perfect way, and will accordingly love him in a perfect way. The time between when you come to love him and you are called to be with him is your opportunity to experience that love and get just a foretaste of heaven here on earth.
I love God more now than I did when I first believed. As a child I loved God with a childlike love, but I barely knew him. I can think back to distinct moments as I grew older when God taught me something new and amazing about himself. I can remember moments where something hit me like a lightning bolt and I was awakened to a new reality about God that I had not known before. There were times when my whole body broke into chills as I grew in my knowledge of my Creator. There were other times when I broke into tears as I began to realize the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice for me or the vast depths of his love for me, the sinner. As I learned about my God I learned to love him more. As I learned about my God I had to love him more!
You can be a true believer and know almost nothing about God. The man who hung on the cross beside Christ new little more than that Christ was the Son of God and that God had forgiven his sins. And that was enough. But if you want to love God more you need to know him more. I know that I’m a mere preschooler when it comes to knowing God. I look at others and see some who are in primary school, some who are in high school and some who must be about ready to finish up their post-graduate studies. And how I yearn to know him that much, knowing that the love I feel for him now, as great as it may be, is nothing more than a child’s love! I long to love him, and therefore long to know him. And I look forward to the day when I will know him even as I am known by him, that I may love him with the perfect love with which he loves me.
The Prosperity Gospel in Africa
This may make you feel sick.
Ask John Piper Live
Today from 8 to 11 CT, you can tweet your questions to John Piper. He will be answering them live. See the link for details.
Apple’s Magic Mouse
Here’s a good review of Apple’s new mouse for anyone who is thinking of making the change. “I have yet to decide whether the Magic Mouse is much of an improvement over its predecessor. The multitouch capability and lack of a scroll ball to gum up are definite upgrades, but the loss of Exposé and Dashboard support about balance that out for me.”
Gore’s Dual Role
When it comes to something like global warming, it’s always wise to “follow the money.” When you follow the money you find that a whole lot of it is leading right back to Al Gore. It’s almost like the prosperity gospel…
When was the last time you read a book about reading? Maybe you have read Adler’s How to Read a Book or another like it. When was the last time you read a book about reading Scripture? Maybe you have read a book about how to do better personal devotions and have found there some ideas about reading Scripture in a more effective way. But when was the last time you read a book about the public reading of Scripture in the worship service? It’s a pretty safe bet that you never have read such a book; only a very few exist. I was excited, then, to see Max McLean’s Unleashing the Word: Rediscovering the Public Reading of Scripture. “I want to help you learn to present the Bible in such a way that your audience can engage the Word with their heart, mind, and soul as they hear it being read aloud,” he says in his introduction. “The goal is ultimately transformation—their lives will be touched and changed, just as the original hearers were.”
If I had read this book a few years ago, it would have rocked my world, I think. It is only since I began attending Grace Fellowship Church that I’ve come to see the value of the public reading of Scripture not as a simple means to an end—a way to get us from the music to the sermon—but as an end in itself. In this church I’ve come to see the reading of Scripture as a core part of the teaching ministry of the church. The Word preaches; the Word is the sermon before the sermon. And if this is true, then we ought to invest effort in reading it well. This can only be the case where the reading of Scripture is given prominence within the worship service and where the person reading is talented and passionate about what he is doing. And this is what I have seen with consistency at my church. So I have seen modeled what McLean is so passionate about and can attest to the great value in treating the reading of Scripture in this way.
McLean teaches what he does under several headings. He first shares a bit of biographical information, telling how he came to know the Lord and, from there, how he came to love to read Scripture. He has, after all, begun a Scripture-reading ministry within his church; he has recorded the whole Bible several times; he has done one-man dramatic presentations of some of the books of the Bible; he continues to do a daily radio show that is nothing but the reading of Scripture. The Bible—the simple reading of the Bible—has been the core of his whole ministry.
Having shared his story, McLean offers very practical guidance on how to begin a Bible-reading ministry within the local church. This is what he wants to see: talented individuals who make it their ministry in the church to participate in the worship service by reading Scripture. His tips range from how stand before a crowd and deliver an effective reading of Scripture to how to prepare a passage to how to breath when nervous to everything in between. He then provides some teaching on how to teach others to participate in this ministry before concluding with some more practical guidance on preparation, delivery and so on. It is in all ways a practical book. I love his vision here and would rejoice to see churches adopting it.
I was not without a couple of concerns when reading the book. The foremost has to do with gender roles within the church. McLean is clear that he considers the reading of Scripture part of the church’s core teaching ministry. At the same time, he considers this a task that can be performed equally by men and women. In fact, most of the examples he offers in the book are of women who participate in this ministry. It seems to me, though, that if this is a teaching ministry within the context of the worship service at a local church, then it would be most consistent with Scripture to have men being the ones who teach through reading. Without knowing McLean’s views on women in ministry, I do wonder if we can have this both ways. This is an issue individual churches would want to ponder before beginning such a ministry.
So much for concerns. Unleashing the Word is narrowly-focused and that is one of its strengths. The book is almost wholly concerned with reading Scripture in worship services. Yes, McLean does dedicate a bit of attention to other contexts (such as public marathon readings of the Bible) but really, his concern is to have Christians rediscover the public reading of Scripture in the worship service and to see it as a core part of the ministry of the local church. And in this I could not agree with him more. I would love to see Christians reading this book and allowing McLean to help them rediscover a most important practice. Buy this one and read it yourself. Then pass it to your pastor and ask him to read it too.
Seven years into blogging and six years into daily blogging, I’ve decided to try something, well, completely different. Today I want to introduce to you a new blog I’ve begun. It is called 10MillionWords.
First, though, let me say that, as far as I see it, not much is going to change here at challies.com. I intend to continue to blog daily in much the same way I have been doing for all these years. I love what I do here and don’t intend to change things up anytime soon. This blog is still my priority when it comes to writing and, I hope, will always be so.
Having said all of that, let me tell you about my new project.
A few months ago I found a site that provides archived lists of all the New York Times bestselling books from 1950 to the present. I began browsing through the list and was struck by the great diversity in the books that make their way onto the list. They really do run the gamut, touching on every genre, covering the spectrum from left to right, from Christian to atheist, from one extreme to the other. I found myself wishing that I had been able to read more of these books over the years. What a well-rounded, interesting view of culture and worldview they would give me. To read these books from any given period, whether the 50’s or 60’s or today would be to learn something about the culture. It would be a snapshot of the people, of what they are thinking about, of what they are learning, of whom they are learning it from.
From there I began to wonder if it would be possible to read all of the bestsellers over the course of a period of time. I began to run through the archives, trying to figure out how the list works, how many books are added, how long they remain there, and so on. When I had done the quantifying and qualifying I realized that I could probably read all of the bestsellers for a year and do so without completely neglecting all of my other responsibilities in life. When I did the math I found that all of the words in all of those books would probably come in at somewhere around 10 Million Words.
You can see where this is going. In 2010 I intend to read all of the New York Times bestsellers. I will qualify this by saying that I’ll be reading all of the hardcover, non-fiction bestsellers. Fiction has little appeal to me and does not offer as valuable a snapshot of the culture as does non-fiction; the softcovers have generally already been released as hardcovers. So it made sense for me to focus on just that one list. There are fifteen books on the list and it is updated once weekly. On average there are three or four books added each week. Some weeks there are as few as one new one added or as many as seven. In any case, I am going to attempt to read them all. My intention in all of this is to find in those books lessons on culture and worldview.
Through the rest of 2009 I will be reading as many of the bestsellers as I can and trying to “find my voice.” I will be trying to find the best way to seek out and communicate the lessons about worldview and culture that will be the heart of this project. I may also try to focus some attention on books dealing with reading better, reading faster, increasing retention, and so on.
So I am going to encourage you to visit the new site, 10MillionWords.com. There are already quite a few reviews over there of some books you may enjoy. The site is hosted at Gospel Coalition. I mentioned the site to them and, for various reasons, we felt it would be a good idea to “park” the site for the year. You may like to subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email. You might also like to follow 10MillionWords via Twitter or join the Facebook group. At the very least, visit the site, bookmark it, and drop by a few times. I think (and hope!) you will find it an interesting and valuable stop on your online travels in the months to come.
Logos 4
The best gets better with the release of Logos 4 which adds all kinds of great new features. Check out the link for a video introduction.
DG Free
This month’s free audio book from Christian Audio is just a minor book from a little-known pastor:
Desiring God by John Piper.
US Navy Ceremonial Guard
This is impressive by any measure.
Scenes from the Life of Christ
This week, for a donation of any amount, Ligonier Ministries will send you a copy of their new CD
Scenes from the Life of Christ. “This recording of original chamber orchestra pieces is a survey of musical landscapes through selected biblical accounts.”
