Good morning. May the Lord be with you and bless you today.
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include several good picks from Christian Focus. There have been lots of good deals this week, so it’s worth scrolling back a bit to see what else may grab your attention.
Recommended Reading
The Art of Dying a Slow Death Well. In this article, “Kevin McKay points pastors to the reality that suffering in pastoral ministry is often quiet and slow, taking place in small increments rather than in one dramatic act. A pastor’s role and responsibilities make him particularly vulnerable to being underappreciated or even opposed. After McKay identifies the kinds of trials pastors are likely to face, he then offers suggestions for persevering faithfully amid what he refers to as a ‘slow death.’ Ultimately, pastoral suffering is for God’s glory and the eternal good of the pastor and his people.”
Moral Plausibility Structures. Justin Poythress writes about moral plausibility structures—a helpful concept to understand. “Cultural mores are crowd-sourced. If you’ve lived over a generation, you’ve seen it. Words, behaviors, and opinions once confined to windowless bars have now become mainstream, while practicing traditional values places you in the circle of eccentric, at best.”
Who Should Be Admitted to the Lord’s Supper? 4 Views. Davy Ellison covers the four views of who should be allowed to participate in the Lord’s Supper and then advocates for one of them. I would generally share his view, for what that’s worth. “I want to help you think more deeply about who should be admitted to the supper. If communion is a precious and profound privilege, who participates is important.”
Should We Let Children Serve Before Belonging? Stephen Kneale answers a question that is at least tangentially related to the previous one. “The question of when, or even if, to permit children to serve in church is a perennial one. On paper, this is a uniquely Baptist problem. If children aren’t members of the church unless and until you baptise them, how far can we include them in the ordinary goings on of the church?”
IVF and the Fractured Right: How the Church Should Lead the Conversation. There is a new issue of CBMW’s Eikon journal available and one of its articles prompts Christians to take a leading role in the conversation about IVF. “There’s much the church can do within their arsenal to equip the saints for the work of ministry (Eph 4:12–16), to contend for the faith (Jude 3), and to engage the world with the Word. What we cannot do is be silent and outsource what is meant to be primarily the church’s duty to the pundits of Washington or the talking heads delivering our news.”
Headlines
A billion “Monsters.” I remember buying Skillet’s first album on the first day it released. That was a long time ago! The Christian Post reports that Skillet’s song “Monster” has now been streamed upwards of 4 billion times on Spotify. In fact, “the six-times platinum track is the only song by a Christian artist to surpass 1 billion streams on Spotify, making it one of the most-streamed rock songs of all time.”
The slippery slope. National Review reports on the horrific news that the Netherlands has euthanized a child. Euthanasia is inevitably a slippery slope and this news proves it once again. “Forget looking down a slippery slope. Legally, a doctor has ended the life of a child in the Netherlands. We don’t know the exact age, but we do know the child was twelve or under.”
Flashback
What We Cannot Escape. We cannot escape trials of every kind. We are too weak and this world is too broken to escape all difficulties. But with God’s help we can escape their futility, we can escape their power to defeat and destroy us.
Without eternity, what would God’s perfections be, but glorious yet withering flowers, a great but decaying beauty!
—Stephen Charnock
