Skip to content ↓

A La Carte (October 14)

A La Carte Collection cover image

Today’s Kindle deals include two books that were just released last year: Making Good Return and My Only Comfort. Both are worth a look, as is The Forgotten Fear. If you didn’t notice yesterday, both the Bible Speaks Today and Tyndale Commentary series are now on sale with some great deals available. You’ll find those deals right here.

If you’re looking for some hardcover commentaries, many volumes in the ZECOT, ZECNT, and Word Biblical Commentary series are on sale. You’ll find the list of the ones that have been most deeply discounted right here.

(Yesterday on the blog: On the Far Side of Obedience)

A Spirituality of Forgiveness

This is good news! “Like retroactively applied accident forgiveness, the forgiveness of your sins has been post-dated to 33 AD. All of your sins, even your future sins, ones you haven’t even thought about committing yet, are all forgiven, and the adjustments are in your account. Your forgiveness has been geotagged to that hill outside of Jerusalem. At that empty garden tomb where Jesus won your victory, your pardon, your life, it is done. Fact: You are forgiven.”

The Mother I Meant to Be

“I’ve had two goals over the last decade or so: lose weight and be a better mother. And every morning in the mirror I see that the weight is still there and I’m still not the mother I meant to become.” Staci writes compassionately for those who feel like failures.

A Brief Theology of Preaching

It does us good to refresh our understanding of what preaching is and why it matters so much. (That said, I’m not entirely convinced by the eight reasons that expository preaching is to be preferred about all other forms—depending, of course, on what those others forms are.)

The World Needs Evangelists With Cheerful Confidence

Trevin Wax: “We’re hesitant to share the gospel because we suffer not from a superiority complex but from a lingering feeling of inferiority. We may still believe the gospel is true, but we quietly wonder if it’s better than what the world offers.”

Resist the Machine

Darryl expresses some alarm about the rise of AI. “At some point, he says, you will probably cede control of your life to this digital assistant. You will let it manage your finances, write your messages, and even order products you didn’t know you needed. You would be happy about all of this because it would save you time and relieve you of work you no longer need to do. But where would you draw the line?”

How Do We Define the Church?

“What does God love most in the world? When He looks down at the snow-topped mountains that He has made, they are breathtaking and beautiful, seemingly reaching up to heaven itself. Likewise, when He looks down on the ocean that He has made, it is sometimes tranquil and sometimes tempestuous, yet always teeming with life, mirroring back to God His creative glory. Even man retains a peculiar privilege, in that man alone is said to bear the image of its Creator with knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion over the other creatures. But of all these things, it is the church that God loves the most in this world.”

Flashback: Great Gifts but Little Faithfulness

I am convinced eternity will show that some of the people who honored God most fully by making the best of their gifts were all the while entirely unnoticed by the likes of you and me.

The more bored you are with God, the more vulnerable you will be when temptation comes.

—Jared Wilson

  • Works & Wonders June 14

    Works & Wonders: Bowing the knee or shaking the fist, 39 years to translate the Bible, And Can It Be, How to understand a trillIon, Landsat images, and World Cup covers.

  • Weekend A La Carte (June 13)

    Egg freezing is a booming business / Talk to the A.I. me / Is aging becoming optional? / Feminism and the Fall / The lie of living your truth / Moving on from the Christian Nationalism moment / and more.

  • An Ideal Resource For Your Family Devotions

    An Ideal Resource For Your Family Devotions

    There is a lot I miss from the days when our children were young. High on the list is family devotions. Nick once described our family as having a “Spartan-like commitment” to them, though I remember as much failure as success and as many misses as hits. Still, there’s no doubt that over the 26…

  • A La Carte (June 12)

    The curious case of extra resurrections / Are kids too expensive? / Why hot takes are the enemy of conviction / Piper on preaching outrage / A daily rhythm of prayer / Forgetting and pursuing / A La Quiz / The funnies / and more.

  • A La Carte (June 11)

    We lost the baby / The Bible is cessationist (and wondrous!) / Thinking about Eastern Orthodoxy: a primer for evangelicals / Virtue signalling in the church / What is God’s providence? / Restlessness / Kindle deals / and more.

  • Conform

    You Can Conform to Christ Even if You Don’t Conform to Me

    One of the aspects of the Christian faith that I find particularly perplexing is the freedom God gives his people to obey him in different or even opposite ways, so that one person’s obedience is another person’s disobedience. Even as two people take the same action, one might be obeying him and the other disobeying…