My gratitude goes to Harvest House for sponsoring the blog this week. They wanted to let you know about The Quest for the Best, a book for young readers.
You may want to take a look at this deal from Westminster Books. They have discounted the excellent Lexham Geographic Commentary.
Today’s Kindle deals include several books from modern and not-so-modern writers.
(Yesterday on the blog: Noteworthy New Commentaries from 2025)
Hoping for Rightly Ordered Desires
“One of the most difficult truths to internalize in this life is that you are not promised all that you desire, even when your desires are rightly ordered.” But there is joy and benefit in internalizing it.
Delighting in the Ordinary Wonders of God’s Grace
“The human ability to tune out things like traffic noise is a blessing. In our spiritual lives, however, that blessing can become a curse. The steady roar of God’s faithful work and constant grace in our ordinary days becomes so familiar that we simply stop noticing it. As we treat His ongoing mercy as white noise, the extraordinary loses its luster, and our hearts grow dull to the beauty of His presence and power.”
God For My Good, Not My Comfort
This is so true and so important to grasp. “Imagine what could have been put at the end of this phrase. All things work together for fame. All things work together for happiness. All things for your pride, your bank account, your health. What about your comfort? But it doesn’t end that way. God is not working out all things for our comfort, but He is working all things together for good. This is good news.”
Make Room at Church for Special-Needs Families
“Of the 79.6 million households in the United States in 2019, 25.7 percent included at least one family member with a disability. To make that number more personal, I reached out to an administrator in my suburban school district, and she said that around 1 in 4 students in our district has some sort of accommodation plan. Many churches aren’t seeing this portion of the population represented. They’re an unreached people group in our midst.”
What Does It Mean to Have the Christmas Spirit?
Randy Alcorn looks to J.I. Packer for help in understanding what it really means to have the Christmas spirit.
Wisdom Rarely Makes You Famous
“The temptation to stray from God’s word continues through every generation. Wisdom is not crowd-sourcing. Wisdom is not trying to guess what the next big thing will be before everyone else. Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord and building our lives upon his words. Wisdom believes that God’s instructions are good and life-giving, even though wisdom rarely gets a trophy.”
Flashback: Talk About Jesus, Not Celebrities
We will be a blessing to the church if instead of spending our time discussing the failures of celebrities we spend it going deeper into those precious truths that undergird it.
To the unregenerate, God’s will is inevitably unpleasant, simply because it is his will and not their will.
—Sinclair Ferguson
