Good morning. Grace and peace to you. I trust you enjoyed your weekend as much as I did. Saturday was moving day for Nate and Abby and, rather than have me lift heavy things, they assigned me babysitting duty, a task I was more than happy to take on.
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include several volumes in the excellent Preaching the Word commentary series which is ideal for personal study or sermon preparation. Christopher Ash’s Job is especially good.
Recommended Reading
I Thought I Knew How to Parent. Cody Watson explains one of the great challenges of parenting. “Robert Murray M’Cheyne wrote, ‘The greatest need of my people is my personal holiness.’ This is true of ministers, and it is true of fathers as well. What my children need more than my discipline, or even the hugs and kisses at the end of the day, is that I would pursue my own personal holiness and relationship with my heavenly Father. They need to see me wrestle with my sins. They need to see me grow in patience and love, both toward them and their mother. They need to see and hear me wrestle with anxiety and pain and ultimately turn it over to the Lord.”
Looksmaxxing Is a Crisis of Modern Masculinity. I’m not sure how widespread looksmaxxing is, but I’m glad CJ Fant has written about it here. “Young men, who often lack robust discipleship relationships with older brothers and fathers in the faith, are vulnerable to looksmaxxing messages. They’re looking for answers—about romance, sex, work, wellness, and the meaning of life—in YouTube videos and podcasts. But what they really need is apprenticeship and fellowship with God-fearing men who will guide them with wisdom, discernment, and truth.”
Never Quit Because It Is Hard. There are often good reasons to quit something, but Joel Ellis wants you to know that quitting because something is hard is never a good idea (though I might modify it to “rarely”). “No one should ever quit anything simply because it is hard. The fact that it is hard usually means it is good for you. We get better at whatever we do repeatedly. Practice does not make perfect; it makes permanent. If you practice being a quitter, you get very good at quitting hard things. If you practice persevering, you increase your ability to do so when things get hard.”
God Will Use Your Most Painful Suffering for Good. Randy Alcorn: “Sometimes our focus is only on ‘remove this suffering or hardship’ instead of ‘use this.’ While suffering is not good, God can use it to accomplish immeasurable good. This knowledge should give us great confidence that even when we don’t see any redemptive meaning in our suffering, God can see it—and one day we will too. Therefore, we need not run from suffering or lose hope if God doesn’t remove it or do so as quickly as we’d like. We can trust that God has a purpose for whatever He permits.”
Advice to Our Younger Selves on Our Wedding Day. Larry McCall offers marriage advice to himself and his wife 50 years after the fact. “Let me assure you that your marriage will be filled with deep joy—joy that will remind you of God’s generous, undeserved kindness. But I also need to tell you that your marriage will include real challenges. Some will be small and ordinary—misunderstandings, disappointments, fatigue, monotony. Others will be deeper, requiring an extra measure of patience, humility, forgiveness, and endurance.”
For Those Who Lost So Much. I appreciated Marie Garreau’s account of some of the graces she and others experienced through Hurricane Helene. “There are some things you can never be prepared for, even if you know it’s coming. And who, being held in the soft blue arms of the Appalachian Mountains, prepares for…a hurricane? Yet Helene came at last to a rural mountainous spot of Western North Carolina and there, for reasons we can’t explain, she stopped—emptying herself of all she had left.”
Your Recommendations
Once a week, I like to ask what you enjoy and recommend. What books, products, videos, sites, or other experiences do you recommend to others who read this blog/newsletter? Let me know, and I’ll share a collection on Saturday. (If you’re reading this via email, you’ll need to visit my site to fill out the form. Go here to read last week’s recommendations.)
Flashback
Our Understanding of Earth and Our Assumptions of Heaven. Our responsibility is to exercise the gifts and embrace the duties God has given us, no matter what they are, no matter how public, no matter how visible.
The great secret of growth in true Christian character is to look far less at ourselves and far more at Christ as we depend less on ourselves and more on his Spirit.
—Alistair Begg
