Logos is having a Memorial Day sale and offering deals on some top-notch resources. (Also, don’t forget their monthly sale where you can get deals on books by Piper and others.)
“What Is God Up To?”: The Temptation to Overinterpret Suffering
I appreciated this one from Ed Welch as he warns about the temptation to overinterpret our suffering.
Queer Times
A couple of days ago I linked to a First Things article about queerness. Here Carl Trueman follows up with a few thoughts of his own. “The essay reminded me of the many years I spent trying to understand the various approaches to culture that fall under the umbrella term of Critical Theory. Queer Theory is one of the most significant of these approaches. Wading through the pretentiously written and interminably opaque prose always left me wondering: What exactly is the endgame here? What do these people want in terms of positive philosophical and political construction?”
The World is Not my Parish
You’re probably heard the expression “the world is my parish.” In this article from TGC Australia Matt Scheffer takes issue with the phrase. “Regardless of where it takes place, my job is to be faithful to the Lord Jesus in the place he has put me, with the gifts he has given me: to serve the people he’s given me to love. In that sense, the whole world is not my parish—my parish is my parish! It has a location, and a name, with real flesh and blood people. It has a squeaky organ, a postcode and not enough storage space. I have been placed to serve the Lord Jesus in this location and among these people.”
Why I’m Religious, Not Spiritual
“True religion is not simply something that happens within the person. A faithful life is not a life that’s spent contemplating the right things, having the correct feeling in one’s heart. That attitude of the heart must show itself in outward observance – in seeking to live a holy life, in serving others, in speaking in a way that comports with God’s demand for pure speech. And it must show itself even in the observance of (gasp!) ritual!”
Thread
Alan Jacobs makes a good, if slightly over-stated point here. “When you write a Twitter thread, what you are telling me is that you don’t care about your own ideas enough to articulate and display them in a proper venue. And if you don’t have respect for your own ideas, you certainly can’t expect me to.”
Remembering OneDay 2000 and Piper’s “Seashell” Sermon
It has been 20 years since John Piper preached his “seashell” sermon at OneDay 2000. Denny Burk provides some of his memories of the event.
3 Ways Baptism & the Lord’s Supper Ought to Shape our Monday through Saturday
Sam Emadi describes “three ways the Bible shows us how the ordinances should shape our relationships with one another, both on Sundays and throughout the week.”
Flashback: How R.C. Sproul Blessed the Church by Preaching the Curse
In this sermon, we see exactly what made Sproul’s teaching ministry so powerful for so many years. He reminded us of who we are. Even more importantly he reminded us of who God is. Let’s give it a closer look.
It’s going to be much harder to physically resist a sin that you’ve been mentally rehearsing.
—Sam Allberry
