A La Carte (November 6)

Sales & Deals

Today’s Kindle deals are headlined by Joel Beeke’s A Radical, Comprehensive Call to Holiness. You may also be interested in a book about women who overcame a difficult past or a biography written for a younger audience.

Recommended Reading

Selfies Are Not the Self: Forming Embodied Youth in a Disembodied Age. This article from Harvest USA has some helpful insights about young people and their mobile devices. “Increasingly, research shows that teenagers know their technology is making them miserable. They don’t love their phones, but they hate missing out. They know the noise is making them sick, but they’re terrified of the silence. When teenagers are so thirsty for connection and validation that they’ll go to a well they know is poisoned just to get a drink, what an amazing opportunity we have as the church to offer something better, something truly beautiful. We don’t want our youth ministries to be known for what they lack. We want them to be known for their abundance.”

Can’t You Just Love Everyone? Jeremy Walker addresses churches that think their calling is to “just love everyone.” “Why not just love one another? Why build walls, make distinctions, establish boundaries, and draw lines? Why confront sins? Why not welcome all equally? Can’t you just love everyone?”

4 Applications for the Order of Love—From the Home to the Ends of the Earth. Speaking of love, Alex Kocman addresses the necessity of rightly ordering our love. “Augustine’s idea of ordo amoris—the ‘order of love’—reflects the Scriptural pattern of directing our affections to first love God, then to love our families, and then to extend that love outward to others. This theme of ordered love has wide-ranging implications—from the home to the ends of the earth. But just as preaching without application is lifeless, so too is a study of love without practical exhortation. Here are four admonitions…”

Effective Altruists and the Spreadsheet Gospel. Writing for TGC, Nathan Leamer addresses the effective altruism ideology that is so influential in Silicon Valley. “Over the past decade, an emergent secular philosophy has taken root in Silicon Valley. It now drives many conversations around politics and technology, particularly as its ideas shape how our society approaches artificial intelligence. Known as ‘effective altruism,’ this worldview is having a moment. The Economist recently called the philosophy ‘this century’s biggest idea’ and labeled the movement as ‘admirable, but dangerous.’”

Your Thoughts Are Shaping Your Life. “Your thoughts are shaping your life.” That might sound like the kind of thing Joel Osteen or a New Age practitioner would say, but there is truth to it. “Our thought life matters more than we often realize. The conversations we replay in our minds, the offenses we revisit, and the fears we entertain can shape how we see our circumstances and respond to the people around us. I know how easily my thoughts can become consumed by something that has happened or something I fear might happen. Before long, I find myself responding to the present through the lens of thoughts I have been rehearsing.”

Don’t Despise the Red Flags. Katie Laitkep writes to those who are dating, and to young women specifically, to warn them not to ignore or despise the red flags. “When we see signs marking a dangerous road, we respond immediately, knowing we need to find a different path. But when it comes to red flags in dating relationships, we don’t always view the warning signs as clearly.”

Reviews

I like to share the occasional reminder that it is tremendously helpful to authors if you post even brief reviews of their books at Amazon. On that note, it would mean a lot to me (if you’d read one of my books) if you would do that very thing. Perhaps it would be one of these:

• Seasons of Sorrow
• Devoted
• God’s Great Big Global Church
• From the Rising of the Sun
• Eric’s Greatest Race
• Do More Better

Flashback

What the Mightiest Man Could Never Do. Like a little child, we can take his hand and he will gladly be drawn down, he will joyfully stoop to hear us, to lovingly tend to us.