Grace and peace to you this morning.
Westminster Books has a deal on some excellent little books meant to help Christians through hard times.
(Yesterday on the blog: Why Domestic Abuse Is So Very Evil)
Cultural Christianity Gave Us the Golden Age of CCM
This is an interesting one from Samuel James: “Cultural Christianity creates a tension. As an evangelical, I confess the need for conversion, regeneration, and a purified local church membership. But there are many things worth preserving in society that do not meet this criteria. Cultural Christianity is at its best when it creates and preserves imprints of the gospel in society, even if those imprints are themselves insufficient for total absorption by the church. CCM is an artifact of cultural Christianity.”
Are We The Baddies?
“France has been rocked by the news that over 300,000 children were abused by clergy and lay people in the Catholic Church over a 70 year period. While acknowledging the horror of this news, we might be tempted to comfort ourselves by saying that it doesn’t affect us because we are neither French nor Catholic. Sadly, however, that won’t wash.” Eddie Arthur explains why.
Lessons from Kabul
“Those images from Kabul will be seared into the American consciousness, much like the fall of Saigon over four decades earlier. And there are doubtless many political lessons to be learned. Nevertheless, today I want to ask the question, what missionary lessons might we learn from Kabul?”
Wisdom and Principles of Complementarianism
“What seems to be surprisingly absent in many recent discussions about complementarianism in the home is a treatment of what the roles between husbands and wives in the marital relationship should look like in a biblically principled fashion without personal applications of those principles.” This is important…
Three Things Bible School Didn’t Teach Me
My pal Chopo Mwanza lists three things Bible school didn’t teach him.
Bitter Roots
Sylvia Schroeder: “Each of our stories would be, could be, maybe even should be different had people or situations not altered our path. In society, in families, and as my husband’s father knew, even in ministry we might be richer, own more, have risen higher. We can choose to replay wrong and rewind hurt. But when I read God’s Word, I come back time and time again to this.”
The “Bad Math” of Derailing Spiritually
“C.S. Lewis famously said that when we read history, we find that those who did the most for the present world are also the ones who thought the most of the next. In other words, the more heavenly minded we are—the more our heads and hearts are fixed on Jesus, his kingdom, and his purposes—the more earthly good we will be. And the more happy and healthy and whole we will be as well.”
Flashback: The Servers and the Servicers in Every Church
Servers are people who tend to feel closest to God when they are serving others; servicers are people who tend to feel closest to God when they are in the worship service.
It is much easier to get a text of Scripture fastened in our memory than to get the lesson of the text wrought into our life!
—J.R. Miller
