Good morning. Grace and peace to you. I hope and trust you had as enjoyable a weekend as I did. We had guests in town, so we did something we almost never do—leave suburbia to visit the city. It was a beautiful day to explore St. Lawrence Market and Kensington Market—something I hadn’t done since I was a child.
Sales & Deals
If all goes well, today’s Kindle deals will include some especially excellent books like Gentle and Lowly, Living Life Backward, and Habits of Grace. You can’t go wrong with any of them!
Recommended Reading
The Habits of Birds, the Weakness of Men, and the Spread of the Gospel. Jacob uses a vivid illustration to explain why we must never seek glory for ourselves when we share the gospel. “To say it plainly, men take a word that is not their own. They walk around. They take that word and deposit it all over. The word grows and sprouts in new places, all while men move on unaware. You know what should never happen? No one should look around and say, ‘Great job man! That took a lot of skill and planning. You’re the best!’ I say it shouldn’t happen, but unfortunately, it happens all too often.”
What Is Magnifica Humanitas All About? You, like me, have probably been seeing lots of headlines about Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. You, like me, probably don’t want to read it. Wyatt Graham did the work and offers a summary here.
The Distance We Keep. There are some insightful observations here about the way we read the Bible. “Much of what we call ambiguity is not discovered so much as constructed. It emerges, slowly, from the posture we bring with us. The same words, read with different desires, begin to shift. What once felt direct becomes negotiable. What once seemed near moves just out of reach. When obedience is costly, uncertainty becomes appealing. When surrender feels like loss, nuance becomes a refuge. The problem is not that scripture says nothing. It is that it says some things too plainly.”
“Praying in the Holy Spirit”: What Does Jude 20 Mean for Christians Today? Alistair Chalmers engages with a text that raises many questions. “For many Christians, the phrase ‘praying in the Holy Spirit’ raises immediate questions. Does Jude refer to a special kind of prayer? Is he speaking about emotional intensity? About mystical experiences? About speaking in tongues? Or is he describing something more ordinary, and yet more profound?”
Failure to Thrive: 6 Signs You Are Drifting From the Gospel. It’s important that every Christian ponders this from time to time. “Falling away from Christ may look abrupt. A person finally says, ‘I’m done with Christ and his church.’ But it never really is abrupt. That seemingly swift decision is merely the result of a slow drift over time: a shipwreck due to a light breeze and a little neglect.”
What to Wear. “What to Wear. Mine was the generation to break traditional church dress codes, following on the heels of the hippies before us. It felt daring. Rebellious, even. Like we were laying aside the trappings of formal religion to uncover the heart of what it meant to follow Jesus. It wasn’t until I gained some maturity and humility though, that I recognized that in many churches, dressing up was a form of showing respect for God, not just an antiquated tradition.”
Headlines
Christian Today (not to be confused with Christianity Today) shares the news that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ sequel got a release date. It’s funny to think that my blog got its start when the original film was released—my release day review became one of my first viral articles. Now, 23 years later, there will finally be a sequel. It will be interesting to see how the film is marketed to people like you and me. You can be sure some very smart people are trying to figure that out right now!
Christianity Today (not to be confused with Christian Today) tells how Christian groups could lose their property under India’s ‘dangerous’ new bill. The article explains how churches and ministries in India are likely to experience added difficulty in the days ahead due to government crackdowns on foreign funding.
Flashback
Don’t Leave Jesus Out of Your Marriage. A distinctly Christian wife is a wife who has professed faith in Jesus Christ and then allowed her mind and heart to dwell on the relationship of Christ to his church. She is a wife who has seen that her submission to her husband is not separate from, but part of, her submission to Jesus Christ.
Without eternity, what would God’s perfections be, but glorious yet withering flowers, a great but decaying beauty!
—Stephen Charnock
