A La Carte (November 3)

Sales & Deals

Today’s Kindle deals are excellent! Concise Reformed Dogmatics is a great deal, since the list price is $40. Also consider Nancy Guthrie’s devotional resource to help you pray for your children. The Discipline of Grace is one of my all-time favorite books.

Over at Westminster Books, you can get the best pricing on Dissecting the Heart, a book that “brings some of David Powlison’s best insights to a new generation that is struggling to deal with its relationship to secular psychology and spiritual formation.”

Recommended Reading

May God Be Gracious to Us: A Prayer Before Election Day. As America heads to the polls, Christian voters may benefit from reminding themselves of the truths in this article and praying the prayer it provides. “On May 17, 1776, John Witherspoon stepped into the pulpit at Princeton on a day of fasting the Continental Congress had appointed for all the colonies. War had already begun and independence was less than two months away. Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and soon-to-be signer of the Declaration of Independence, called the occasion a ‘day of solemn humiliation.’ Before he said a word about the conflict, he turned his hearers’ eyes to the sovereign providence of God. He closed with a prayer: ‘God grant that in America true religion and civil liberty may be inseparable, and that the unjust attempts to destroy the one, may in the issue tend to the support and establishment of both.’”

Looksmaxxing: The Normalizing of Vanity. Jacob Crouch: “To say it plainly, Christians don’t looksmaxx. However much we may be into fitness or beauty, we reject looksmaxxing on three levels: our worth, our temporality, and our purpose. Our beauty is temporary; and all our beauty is for His glory. Our beauty does not determine our worth, because our value is fixed in Christ.”

A Wretch Like Me. This is a very well-written article about John Newton and the reason he chose to describe himself as a wretch. “When Newton wrote what would become one of the best-loved hymns of the Christian church, he was looking back on a life that had taken him to rock bottom – and into the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Reading ‘Amazing Grace’ is like witnessing a confession. You are invited into someone’s life, and its darkest parts are laid bare before you. But the hymn doesn’t only dwell on the wretchedness of sin; it celebrates the deep, satisfying transformation of its author. And what a transformation it was!”

The Belly Dancer Grandmas. This writer tells about the unfortunate experience of seeing belly-dancing grandmothers and relates it to his experiences on the frontiers of missions. “I remember once seeing a Facebook post from a Melanesian friend, commenting on an American pro-transgender news report. A direct translation of her comment would be, ‘Look at this – the whiteskins have lost their minds!’ Now, it wasn’t that long ago, perhaps even as recently as her great-grandparents’ generation, that her own society was a cannibalistic one, trapped in its own temporary insanity.” Thankfully, God so often interrupts that temporary insanity.

On the Naming of Death. Andrew Roycroft has a strong and moving article about the naming of death. “In this short piece, I want to reflect on our obsession and squeamishness about the grotesqueness of death and to suggest some ways our current season of the year might reveal our deeper cultural preoccupations. In a follow-up article, I want to think about the practice of naming the dead, and the importance of measured and authentic memorial.”

Reader Responses to ‘What We Know—and Cannot Know—About Elisabeth Elliot’s Sexuality’. Christianity Today ran several responses to the recent article about Elisabeth Elliot’s sexuality, including one by my friend Nick. “Let me be clear: I do not believe Elisabeth Elliot was beyond criticism, nor do I believe historical figures should be shielded from legitimate scholarly investigation. Christians, of all people, ought to be committed to the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. But surely that commitment demands an equally serious responsibility to distinguish established facts from conjecture.”

New Book Releases

New Christian books tend to release on Tuesdays. Here are just a few of the books that have become available today. For a more thorough list—and there are far more than I have listed here—visit This Week in Christian Books.

• Get to Work: Seeing Your Daily Grind as God’s Good Gift by Jonny Ardavanis. “Learn to avoid both passivity and burnout by discovering God’s glorious design for work—and how to labor, rest, and steward your time in ways that glorify God and maximize your joy.”
• Pilgrim’s Progress: The Graphic Novel by Jeremy Patenaude. “This graphic novel, saturated with bold and expressive artwork, visually tells Bunyan’s well-loved story to a brand-new generation of readers. Adapted with the utmost care, this condensed edition retains the same rich and timeless language consistent with the original work.”
• The Lord Is My Light by Trevin Wax. “The Lord Is My Light invites you to anchor every day in the steady rhythm of prayer and Bible reading. Each daily liturgy arranges passages of God’s Word to highlight the themes and connections within Scripture, and then surrounds them with confessions and prayers voiced by believers across the centuries.”
• Scroll Less, Live More: 10 Healthy Tech Habits for Teens by Samuel James. “Scroll Less, Live More offers teens and families 10 practical habits for navigating the world of technology from a Christian perspective.”

Flashback

Do You Have the Faith to be Faithful? Fill yourself with the Word. Be a man or woman of the Word. Devote yourself to Scripture. As you do this, your faith will grow, and as your faith grows, so too will your faithfulness.