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A La Carte (August 4)

thursday

Grace and peace to you today, my friends.

There are not quite as many Kindle deals today as in the past couple of days, but there are still a few worth checking out.

(Yesterday on the blog: Once Again Honestly Assessing Our Decision to Public School Our Kids)

Seeking and Following God’s Guidance

Vance Christie: “Recently while seeking God’s direction about quite a significant ministry decision in my own life, I was encouraged by going back and reviewing some of the specific details of how the Lord led George Muller into his great orphan ministry.” That turned out to be a good idea.

Entrusting My Treasure

Jennifer McPhail explains how she came to entrust her treasure to the Lord and his purposes.

Honour & respect are culturally bound

“Honouring one another is most definitely a biblical concept.” But, as Stephen explains here, it’s also a concept that needs to be worked out according to context and culture. (I especially enjoyed his discussion of the difference between American and British/Canadian forms of giving honor.)

This Journal Fought Beside Me

I appreciate Grace sharing this account of throwing away a journal—a particularly significant journal.

Newsletters aren’t news anymore. But they’re not going away.

Here’s an interesting take on the rise (and perhaps settling) of the email newsletter. “The Substack frenzy seems like a thing of the past. But lots of publishers are still leaning into newsletters. ‘They’re a great minimally viable product.’”

The Filthy Will Still Be Filthy

“Sin is filth. It is soul pollution. It makes us vile in the eyes of God, and no matter how much pride we take in our sin now, we will one day even be offensive in our own eyes. As sinners, we may do everything we can to maintain our delusion that we are honorable, but every one of us has fallen short of God’s glory. We cannot roll in the mire without eventually being repulsed by our condition.”

Flashback: Who Gave You The Right?

The sanctified instinct of the Christian heart should not be to discourage but to encourage, not to further demoralize other people but to give them strength, to give them heart, to give them courage.


  • Petty Fight

    Petty Annoyances and Minor Insults

    I wonder if you are like me in that, as you look back on your life, you realize that most of the circumstances that have troubled you, most of the annoyances and disgruntlements, were produced by circumstances that were hardly worth noticing.

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (January 12)

    A La Carte: Happy 80th, John Piper / Practical principles for marriage / Benefits for daily Bible reading / Philip Yancey / Stingy-generous / From sermon to article / Kindle and Bible study deals / and more.

  • Table

    A Front Door and a Family Meal

    Baptism is a kind of front door to the local church, the God-ordained means through which a person identifies with Jesus Christ and formally comes to belong to Christ’s body, the church. Baptism is the church’s sign that this person is one of us, a brother or sister in the Lord, who has now been…

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    Weekend A La Carte (January 10)

    A La Carte: An elder’s authority / Don’t use AI to cheat in school / Against the algorithm / An age of outrage / What’s weird? / The good news about bad days / and more.

  • Free Stuff Fridays (TGBC)

    Enter to win a practical, gentle, and honest resource offering hope and help for parents of non-believing children.

  • Power

    Power Dynamics within Marriage

    Any well-taught Christian should be able to speak of God’s attributes and to distinguish between those that are communicable (shared with other beings) and those that are incommunicable (unique to God alone). Among God’s communicable attributes is power. God, who has ultimate power, distributes limited power among human beings. This power is given to us…