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A La Carte (October 26)

friday

The streak of Kindle deals ran out today. We’ll hope for better things over the weekend and into next week.

(Yesterday on the blog: EPIC Ecuador: Not Just Any Dam)

Reagan’s Challenge to His Dying Atheist Father-In-Law

Isn’t this an interesting little bit of history… “From the letter it’s clear that Reagan has been doing some reading about God, sharing with his father-in-law arguments that probably came from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict.”

Your Church is Not a Restaurant

Trevin Wax: “In a consumer-oriented society, the default orientation for church attenders is to see their local congregation as a dispenser of religious goods and services. I say ‘default’ not because it’s inevitable that everyone who goes to church perceives their congregation this way, but because without serious and sustained effort to have a more biblical approach people will naturally gravitate toward a view of the church that is influenced by a consumerist imagination.”

How Christians Pursue Unity on Social Media

This is an important one for today. “It seems to me that the rise of social media has pushed people from a place of freedom of speech to duty of opinion. In other words, we’ve moved from the privilege of enjoying freedom of speech to being compelled to give our opinion on every matter, sometimes several times a day. The sheer volume of opinions and re-sharing of opinions has led to pain and divisiveness.”

Want a Whole New Body? Ask This Flatworm How (Video)

“Planarians are tiny googly-eyed flatworms with an uncanny ability: They can regrow their entire bodies, even a new head. So how do they do it?” How strange.

Cape Town’s Slave Ship Secret

Here’s an interesting article about a new discovery. “The project set out to find the São José based on archival documents of the Dutch East India Company (which governed the Cape Colony until 1795) found in the Western Cape Archives and Records Service. These documents told the story of a Portuguese slave ship with 512 Mozambican slaves destined for Brazil that sank on 27 December 1794 in Camps Bay on the Cape Peninsula. Boshoff and his team started diving the area in search of the wreck, but found nothing.”

This gallery contains some amazing photos of God’s creation.

What Is the Apocrypha? (Video)

Dr. Robert Plummer tells about the Apocrypha in this new episode of Honest Answers.

Flashback: Things Christians Just Don’t Get To Do

As a Christian you do not get to have a pet sin, a peccadillo, a sin you refuse to confront through the power of the Holy Spirit. Every sin, no matter how small or precious it seems, is to be confronted and destroyed.

Jesus does what legalism can never do: he gives us a new heart and a new spirit.

—Tim Chester

  • Free Stuff Fridays (Zondervan Reflective)

    This week the blog and this giveaway are sponsored by Zondervan Reflective. The chief reason we exist is to glorify and enjoy God. But for many, God remains a vague cloud of cosmic kindness, a super-sized projection of ourselves into the sky, or an impossible-to-please killjoy. Who is God, really? Who is this being we…

  • Bent Low

    Bowed Down By What Makes Them Beautiful

    There is no need to be concerned about snow in September” we were told as we began to pack and prepare for a trip to Austria. The travel sites said it wouldn’t come until later in the year, except perhaps on the highest peaks. Yet even as we drove from the Slovenian foothills into the…

  • A La Carte Friday 2

    A La Carte (September 20)

    A La Carte: Lose the gospel, return to childishness / The kingdom didn’t come for daughters like me / How to be an anxiety fighter / Terminological appropriation / All those things we never did / and more

  • A La Carte Thursday 1

    A La Carte (September 19)

    A La Carte: John Piper on brokenhearted boldness / Why didn’t Jesus defeat the Romans? / How do spiritually mature Christians handle suffering? / Is owning the libs a justification for lying? / Enjoying the beauty of prayer / and more.

  • I Am No Hero

    Lowest and Last of All

    The day will come when every man will stand before the Lord and be asked to give an account of his life. God makes clear the basis of this coming judgment: he “will render to each one according to his works.”

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (September 18)

    A La Carte: What if no one prayed for you? / How to pray when you feel like you can’t / Is that person male or female? / “If one member suffers…” / Ideas for better conversations / Huge Kindle sale / and more.