A La Carte (7/25)

I don’t have any Kindle deals to tell you about today, but I do have a couple of other book sales I’d like to mention. Westminster Books is offering a great deal on some book packages. Click the link to read about them. Also, Vyrso has a bundle of Cruciform Press books that has been deeply discounted.

Seeing in the Dark – This is powerful: “How could there be beauty in a boy that would never whisper his love to me? How could there be beauty in still hands that would never reach with little dirty fingers and tug on my skirt and hide behind my legs? I begged God to end it quickly, to take my son to Himself before my heart broke. The unspeakable sorrow of watching a little boy, shared flesh and blood, with wide-eyes and chubby cheeks struggle for air and seize relentlessly sucked the desire for life clean away.”

The Royal Fetus – Owen Strachan asks, “When is a royal baby a royal fetus?” “Technically, right up until the moment he’s born. And yet we’ve called him a baby the whole time. What media coverage of the recent pregnancy and birth has to do with abortion politics.”

A Pastors’ Hours – Thom Rainer: “When I was a pastor in St. Petersburg, Florida, I gave a survey to the twelve deacons in the church. I listed several congregational responsibilities and asked them to share the minimum amount of time I should average in each area each week. I listed about twenty areas; but they were free to add other responsibilities to the blank lines.” The results are pretty well comical.

Is Your Child a Christian? – Brian Croft offers some sound counsel on a difficult topic.

Short Term Missions – This article is worth reading and thinking about. “In trying to raise financial support for our ministry we are running into what we call the ‘American [Short Term Missions] Caveat’ time and again. It seems like American churches, who like our vision and may even be keen to support us, want to come and experience first hand our ministry before they will ‘commit’.”

Here are two related articles I read yesterday: Are You Free NOT to Drink? reminds us that Christian freedom is expressed better in what we choose not to do than what we feel freedom to do. Flaunting Our Bacon warns us against flaunting our freedom because “truly free people don’t flaunt their freedom, they quietly enjoy it.”