May the Lord be with you and bless you today.
I continue to add Kindle deals day by day as they become available. That includes a few new ones today.
(Yesterday on the blog: Discerning in Doctrine But Not Discerning in Character)
Reflections on the Evangelical Fracturing, Ten Years In
Jake Meador offers some interesting reflections on the evangelical fracturing that has taken place over the past 10 years. “Not only has reformed evangelicalism lost the steady leadership provided for so long by Piper, Keller, and Don Carson, but it has lost much else besides. Due to the past ten years, reformed evangelicals have also lost the underlying modes of thought and the specific contexts that helped to shape those men in the first place while at the same time losing the men who were the most obvious successors to the Baby Boomer generation of YRR leaders.”
New Year, Old You: Do Liturgical Calendars Help?
Stephen McAlpine considers the fact that a growing number of Protestants are now following the liturgical calendar and asks, “Is a liturgical calendar the primary how the Scriptures teach us to think about the way we are to live our lives as Christians? Or more to the point, is it something that is offered to us as a means of leaving sin and leaning into righteousness over the course of a year? I mean it seems pretty clear from the New Testament that observing signs and seasons and days is low down the agenda when it comes to faith in Christ.”
The Danger of Self-Soothing Through Social Media
Trevin Wax warns against “our generation’s penchant for ‘self-soothing’ on social media by ‘crowdsourcing therapy.’ As people turn to their online ‘community’ for validation, they increasingly turn to ‘therapy-speak’ as a means of understanding and expressing themselves. This tendency is downstream from therapy influencers who may or may not be real practitioners but have gained an audience online.”
Poetry
Over the past couple of days, poetry has been a bit of a theme among the sites I read. Here are a few poems and articles: “After the Storm” by Esther Roth is a poem about God’s sovereignty in trials; “Another Chance” by Seth Lewis is a poem about autumn leaves (and winter leaves); “Progress” by Jacob Crouch is a poetical adaptation of some words by C.S. Lewis. Meanwhile, Jonathan Threlfall explains the poems he has committed to memorizing in the year ahead.
The T. B. Joshua Story Points to a Problem in Many Churches
Writing for TGC Africa, Oyewole Akande laments the terrible story of the late T.B. Joshua, a Nigerian pastor and televangelist who, in a recent BBC investigation, has been credibly accused of raping, torturing, and abusing his followers. Akande says that “one of the greatest tragedies from this saga is that countless similar scandals have happened before in the African church. More so, they’re almost certainly going to happen again.”
When Your Mentor Goes to Heaven
Jennifer Brogdon writes movingly about her mentor going to heaven. “I don’t think God will heal me—he said after we finished praying. My heart broke a bit then, but I didn’t rebuke him. I knew God doesn’t always heal us or others when we ask him to. And I didn’t assume his comment came from doubt but from contentment—a trait someone further along in the faith learns.”
Flashback: Rest Takes Work
I messed up over the Christmas holidays. I made a simple but silly mistake…It was a failure to plan, a failure to remember a simple truth about work and rest.
Was His head crowned with thorns, and do we think to be crowned with roses? It is good to be like Christ, though it be by sufferings.
—Thomas Watson
