Good morning. Grace and peace to you.
Today’s Kindle deals include a collection of excellent devotional works.
The House Is Empty of All but Memories
“We are people of places. A placed people. We may move around for a time. But we all land somewhere. And one day we wake up and find that this place has become our home and that we aren’t ready to leave. That’s not bad. I think that’s how we were made. God made us a garden in the beginning. Being cast out wasn’t the design.”
When You Don’t Feel Like Going to Church
What should you do on those days you don’t feel like going to church? Darryl offers some pastoral counsel.
We Must Relearn How to Be Human
I appreciate the way Alan explains this. “Because of the dehumanizing forces of consumerism, bureaucracy, technology (A.I. in particular), addictions, secularism, and individualism, we have become alienated from the practices and habits of being human. This alienation is most commonly treated with more of the same poison that causes the alienation (e.g. A.I. chatbots to cure loneliness). To resist this decay of our humanity means (1) relearning the basics of life and (2) choosing not to do all that we can do.”
Not Every Sermon Is a Challenge
Stephen reminds us that not every sermon needs to challenge, much less rebuke, a church. “Every church has strengths and weaknesses. Every church is good at some stuff and perhaps less good at others. Reality is, if all we do is challenge our church and berate them to be better, we will necessarily be ignoring the stuff that we do reasonably well. Unless your church is uniquely bad at everything all the time, there must be some room for some encouragement somewhere. A failure to highlight it at all makes liars of us.”
The Cathedral of Church History
“It was about a year ago that I began to have, all of a sudden, a number of in-depth and challenging conversations with some close friends of mine who recently converted to the Orthodox church—a growing trend among young Evangelical Protestants in the West, to say the least.” Joshua responded well—he studied church history to reaffirm and deepen his Protestant convictions.
The Sorrow of Saying Goodbye
David Huffstutler reflects on the different ways we may say goodbye to those we love.
Flashback: A Deadly Foe of Spiritual Growth
…complacency is that all-too-familiar satisfaction with our own accomplishments. It is that feeling, that conviction even, that we have done enough, that we have done more than enough, that we can now relax our pursuit of God.
A praying life isn’t simply a morning prayer time; it is about slipping into prayer at odd hours of the day, not because we are disciplined but because we are in touch with our own poverty of spirit.
—Paul E. Miller
