A La Carte (March 11)

As is typical for Mondays, there’s a nice little group of Kindle deals to work through, most of which are from Crossway.

(Yesterday on the blog: A Pastoral Prayer)

Sin Is Cosmic Treason

You’ve probably heard R.C. Sproul’s description of sin as cosmic treason. Here’s an explanation. “‘The sinfulness of sin’ sounds like a vacuous redundancy that adds no information to the subject under discussion. However, the necessity of speaking of the sinfulness of sin has been thrust upon us by a culture and even a church that has diminished the significance of sin itself.”

All the Time Management in the World Won’t Make You God

“I don’t have good enough control over my time on an ordinary day. Take an hour away and I give way to an extraordinary bitterness that someone very far outside of my own sphere has the right and power to mess with something as basic and ubiquitous as the time.”

Canada Will Lose 9,000 Churches

We know the church is the people, not the building, but that doesn’t make this much less tragic (both for what it is and for what it represents). “A national charity that works to save old buildings estimates that 9,000 religious spaces in Canada will be lost in the next decade, roughly a third of all faith-owned buildings in the country.”

Failing less often may be the best we can hope for here. “In his new, thoughtful, helpful book, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction (IVP, 2019), Justin Whitmel Earley talks about five things he has started doing to retain some sanity when it comes to social media.”

What Is Biblical Marriage? 11 Essential Principles.

Have you ever tried to actually define marriage? Here’s an attempt. “What is marriage? It’s a question the Bible holds the keys to because God created marriage and revealed it in Scripture. Given the confusion in our culture and in our churches, agreeing upon the basic meaning of marriage is no longer a ‘given.’”

A Bird is Born (Video)

“Enter a fertilized egg to witness the development of a chicken embryo. Spectacular animation and live action footage document the extraordinary 21-day process of organization and growth from a few cells into a bird.”

Much of our lives is now experienced through algorithms, and here’s how some of them work. “We now live in a world where bite-sized chunks of mathematical data have become central to how we live our daily lives. When you search online, scroll through your social feeds or receive song recommendations from Spotify, you are being guided by an algorithm that understands your consumption habits perhaps more than you do.”

Flashback: An Intimidating Opportunity

How could I explain pastoring to people who have never been inside a church, who have never read a word of the Bible, and who know Jesus as only a swear word?