Good morning. Grace and peace to you.
Today’s Kindle deals are headlined by Tim Chester’s A Meal with Jesus and Megan Hill’s A Place to Belong. Also, if you’ve never read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, it’s on sale now. It is a bit polarizing, but I really enjoyed it.
Book Brief When the Sea Came Alive by Garrett M. Graff is a riveting oral history of D-Day told from the perspective of those who were there. It’s very much in the vein of his equally riveting The Only Plane in the Sky which is an oral history of 9/11. Both are highly recommended.
(Yesterday on the blog: Your Best and Worst Days)
The Crow Bait Approach to Theology
“Crow bait. That’s how many people treat the search for truth. They pick and choose from the scraps of spiritual roadkill that has been leftover from the centuries.” I’ll have Clint explain that to you.
Incredible Babies, Embryos in Limbo, and the Idol of Choice
“The ultimately breaking of one part of God’s good intention for marriage. Every part of the marriage debate/debacle over the past few decades has been to destroy the God-givenness of it. Not to destroy God of course. But to become gods ourselves. And the more godlike we become the less like God we become.”
Making Every Issue “Your Thing” Is Impossible
Kevin DeYoung explains why it’s impossible to make every issue “your thing.” That’s very freeing! “Only God is able to handle 8 billion people making requests to him. Only God is able to comprehend and handle an entire globe of joys and catastrophes and needs. The human psyche isn’t meant to bear that.”
How to Identify a Great Deacon
Matt Smethurst offers some excellent guidance on identifying a great deacon—a crucial responsibility for every church. “So if eyeing future deacons, look for godly saints who see and meet needs discreetly (they don’t need or want credit), at their own expense (they sacrifice), and without being asked (they take the initiative to solve problems). Warning signs in a candidate, then, will include not merely a tendency to be quarrelsome but also a tendency to be disorganized or unreliable.”
UN Official Calls for the Abolition of the Porn Industry
“It is rare for anyone associated with the United Nations to take a stance against any aspect of the Sexual Revolution, and thus a recent report by Reem Alsalem, the U.N. special rapporteur on the causes and consequences of violence against girls stating that prostitution ‘reduces women and girls to mere commodities’ and ‘hinders their ability to achieve true equality’ is very encouraging.”
All Sunshine Makes a Desert
There’s an important principle behind the ancient proverb. “When life is going well, we can get complacent. People who get everything they want and have everything just the way they like it sometimes start to feel entitled. Though we know we need God’s grace and help in every circumstance, we feel our need of Him more during trials.”
Flashback: My Great Daily Challenge As a Christian
The great daily challenge is, on the face of it, so very simple: to think like a Christian, to speak like a Christian, to act like a Christian.
Joining a local church isn’t simply one aspect of your Christian life. The local church is the primary context where you live out your Christian discipleship.
—Sam Emadi
