Good morning. Grace and peace to you.
If you didn’t read yesterday’s Works & Wonders, I’d invite you to do so. I thought it was an especially strong collection.
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals should include several good books from Crossway, like Megan Hill’s Joyfully Spreading the Word and A.S. Ibrahim’s Reaching Your Muslim Neighbor.
Recommended Reading
Collective Awe and What We Were Made For. Glenna Marshall writes about those rare but significant experiences of collective awe. “Collective awe is an interesting sociological concept to me, but I know in my bones it’s what we were all made for when the subject of the awe is the creator of heaven and earth. Our experiences of it in this life are silvery shadows of what awaits us when Christ returns.”
Is Sunday a Sabbath, a Secular Day, or Something Else? This article simply lays out the different Christian perspectives on Sunday—whether it’s the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, or essentially My Day. “Many Christians grew up with a clear vision of what Sunday was all about. Morning and evening worship services bracketed a day that was often defined by what you couldn’t do. … Today, people are quick to criticize the legalistic vision of the past but have often failed to replace it with anything else. How should a Christian understand Sunday, and what, if anything, makes it different from every other day?”
More Than Wrinkles: 11 Blessings of Growing Older. Denise recently saw a post by a Christian woman who showed what age was doing to her, but did not share any of the positives. She responds by laying out 11 blessings she has experienced in growing older.
Ordering the Church for Ordinary Growth. Jake Wright: “Believers don’t complete worship and move on to discipleship, or finish discipleship before beginning service. From the beginning of the Christian life, believers are called to practice all the ordinary means of grace—imperfectly but persistently—within the life of the local church. Elders best serve the flock when they frame growing in Christ as a sustainable rhythm of faithfulness, not a sequence of milestones.”
Why It Might Be Good That Your Church Isn’t Growing. I’d say that this article nicely complements the last one. Caleb Davis “encourages pastors to consider God’s good purposes in not growing their church rather than being discontent with their church’s size.” He says, “though it’s good and reasonable to desire growth, I have learned to rejoice in the fact that God has chosen not to grow my church at the speed I once envisioned.”
Searching for a Sign. “‘God, please give me a sign’, I said quietly, as I stepped outside.” Seth had one of those moments and explains how the Lord responded to his request for specific guidance.
Stupid Human Tricks
Do you remember Dave Letterman’s old feature “Stupid Human Tricks”? He often featured people who had rare, strange, or outright bizarre abilities. I suppose we probably all have one or two skills that would be meaningful to nobody’s life but our own. On that note, here is mine: I can identify any of the major Christian publishers simply by glancing at the packaging they ship their books in. I get so many books from so many publishers and each of them packages them up in slightly different ways. I have learned to identify them all on that basis, and that’s my stupid human trick.
Book Brief
The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson. This is the second volume in Atkinson’s magisterial Liberation Trilogy that follows the American army across the European front of the Second World War. This one covers the war in Sicily and Italy. It is every bit as well-written as the first volume and every bit as informative. The Liberation Trilogy has quickly become one of my favorite series on the war. I managed to wait patiently and buy the volumes as they went on sale in their Kindle editions, so eventually the whole series cost me less than $12! (Amazon)
Flashback
The Right Response to the Old Testament Law. If they do what the law commands, other nations will exclaim, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”
When we get safely home, we will not think we have done and suffered too much on the way.
—John Newton
