May the Lord be with you and bless you today.
If you missed out on buying John Piper’s book Ask Pastor John, it is now back in stock at Westminster Books. It’s heavily discounted too!
Today’s Kindle deals include several books that may be of interest: A Small Book about a Big Problem, Chasing Love, and Empowered and Equipped, among others.
An Ancient Answer to a Present Problem
Daniel Darling has a thought-provoking piece about the ancient answer to a present problem. Here’s just a taste: “We should not delude ourselves into thinking that the left has a monopoly on perverse ideas. The world system that is at enmity with God can also inhabit the right. Perverse ideologies can worm their way into conservative circles. Satan is bipartisan in his seduction. He is just as thrilled to use right-wing framing to warp minds as he is to use left-wing framing. This is where many of our communities are vulnerable.”
Here We Are Now … (Entertain Us)
This article helpfully lays out one of our modern-day temptations when it comes to listening to sermons. “This blog post isn’t really a plug for Nirvana, although they were the anthem of my youth. But it does capture an instinct that some of us can have when we approach sermons. At our worst, and more often than we would like to admit, we can be people who seek after novelty, stylistic excellence, and ear-tickling preaching. We passively consume sermons and worship services with little effort. Here we are now, entertain us, indeed.”
The Other Book That Shaped America
We know that the Bible shaped America, but what book would be the second most formative in American history? Obbie Tyler Todd answers here.
Marriage (Really) Matters
Dani Treweek considers a viral clip about marriage. “The wonderfully ironic thing about all my years spent exploring a robust and distinctively Christian theology of singleness has been the growth in my appreciation for an understanding of and commitment to a robust and distinctively Christian theology of marriage. How we Christians think and speak and teach and do marriage really, really matters. And that’s why this clip … caught my attention.”
Automatically Anticipating God’s Help
Vance Christie says, “One thing that has always impressed me about great men and women of faith is: their reflex response to various types of adversity or need is to trust that God is going to care and provide for them. From long exercise of their faith in God’s character and the promises of His Word, they automatically anticipate that His help and provision will definitely come to them.” He provides some examples of this faith in action.
The Population Bomber
Hopefully you still have one of your monthly allotment of free WORLD articles available so you can read Al Mohler’s reflections on the life of Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb. His book was dead wrong but still had a massively negative impact on the world. “Ehrlich, who died last week at age 93, was the most consequential false prophet of the population control movement, one of the darkest chapters in modern history. Thankfully, his stark warning of unavoidable death of hundreds of millions of people by mass starvation didn’t come to pass—not even close. But the population control ideology remains one of the central ideologies of the culture of death.”
Flashback: Always Look for the Light
For a time the world around us may look dark and foreboding, like the Valley of the Shadow of Death is closing in around us and threatening to swallow us up. Yet our duty in such times is to look for the light and to turn toward it.
Repentance begins in the love of God, and ends in the hatred of sin.
—Thomas Watson
