Good morning from Budapest, Hungary. I made half the journey from Austria to Romania yesterday and will complete it today. I look forward to speaking at a youth event in Zalău tonight and throughout the weekend. If you are there, be sure to say hello!
Westminster Books has a deal on a new translation of Calvin’s excellent On the Christian Life. You will find there is a reason that it has stood the test of time.
Yes, there are indeed some new Kindle deals today. And some good ones, too.
Lose the Gospel, Return to Childishness
Carl Trueman: “Ours is a childish age. … That is not to say that the matters at stake in both church and world are not deeply serious. But the idioms for addressing them have become infantile, and the church must resist the temptation to follow the world in this. To seek relevance therefore requires not capitulation to, or emulation of, the infantile, but rather a recapturing of what it means to be an adult. The church must bear witness to a grown-up faith.”
The Kingdom Didn’t Come For Daughters Like Me
This is a beautiful piece of writing from Heidi Tai. “According to the Chinese Lunar Calendar, I was born in the year of the Dragon; a prized and auspicious coincidence. The only mythical creature of all twelve Zodiac signs, the Dragon is a symbol of imperial strength and power, which according to my superstitious folk, promised me a future of success and prosperity. This was good news for my kingdom forged by refugees—fleeing homelands with bruised hearts, empty stomachs, and pockets full of dreams.”
All Those Things We Never Did
Kristin reflects on three decades of marriage and like the title says, “all those things we never did.”
How to be an Anxiety Fighter
“One of my biggest beefs with sociology is that it tends to be heavy on problems, light on solutions. In its zeal to be labeled as science, it strives to appear objective. Sociology collects heaps of data in order to draw correlations or visualize cultural trajectories. But then, by its own constraints, it has nothing more to say. The problems pop off the page while the solutions are left up to…well, someone! The government, maybe?”
How do we transition children from Sunday School to service?
Stephen Kneale offers some common-sense tips on transitioning children from Sunday school to service. “For those of you who, for whatever reason, have concluded Sunday School is a helpful thing in your context, the question remains. If we’ve got one, how do we help our kids transition from Sunday School to main service? What I’m going to say here isn’t the way to do it, just a way that we have tended to find helpful.”
Terminological Appropriation
Matthew Hosier appropriates some contemporary terminology for gospel use.
Flashback: It Has To Be Dark Before We Can See
Just like the sun needed to set and the light needed to fade before Adam could see the glories of the heavens opened up before him, those who want to know spiritual light must first know spiritual darkness.
If you don’t love your congregation, you won’t sacrifice yourself for them. You’ll just use them. Or you’ll treat them as a problem to be fixed and not a people to be loved.
—Brad Wheeler
