My thanks goes to The Master’s Academy International for sponsoring the blog this week. They’d love for you to join them from July 20–27 for a global week of prayer, lifting up pastors serving in places marked by war, persecution, and hardship.
Today’s Kindle deals include various books that may well be worth your time and a couple of your dollars.
(Yesterday on the blog: Thriving Marriage)
Where Art Thou Rob Bell?
This is an interesting look at the way one young man was influenced by Rob Bell, but then began to see the futility of his teaching. “Bell had sold me a vision of Jesus that was real, authentic, and closer to the genuine Jesus. He had led me to search for the divine, but by the end, he was telling me that true joy and the experience of the divine came from within, on the way to Trader Joe’s. It felt like the power of positive thinking, repackaged with a veneer of spirituality.”
The Case Against in Vitro Fertilization
Stiven Peter offers a thorough explanation of why he thinks Christians should oppose in vitro fertilization. “While I am by no means giving pastoral guidance on how to walk with a couple through infertility, these dystopian and looming technologies prompt the Church to consider their morality before leaving IVF to the conscience of the couple.”
Praying for and Weeping With Those Suffering in Texas
Randy Alcorn: “There’s such heartbreak—I’ve been trying to imagine if it were one of our daughters now, and even more so when they were children. Or how would any of us feel if one of these were our grandchild? May we better understand others through putting ourselves in their place, and pray accordingly. What a reminder that all of us live only by God’s mercy.” (See also In the Aftermath of the Texas Floods, Keep Watch with the Suffering.)
Greet Each Other With a Holy Hug
Alan Noble: “In thinking about the Scriptural calls to physical expressions of brotherly or sisterly love in Christ, the loneliness epidemic and the lack of male friendship, and our basic human need for affection, it seems to me that the Church (I.E. me) would do well to recover a practice of physical affection.”
The Example of Jimmy Swaggart
“Jimmy Swaggart is an example, but not of a godly preacher who fell, confessed and was restored. Instead, he will go down in history as an example of a Christianity which lost its way and became immersed in the unholy trinity of money, sex and power. Swaggart was good at denouncing everyone from Catholics to Calvinists, as sending people to Hell. Sadly, it is the hypocrisy of those who preach the Gospel, but do not live it, who do far more to pave the road to Hell.”
How A.I. Is Creating a Blizzard of Content
“There is an estimate that around 10% of all content already on the internet is A.I. generated. Experts predict that by 2026, the number could reach as high as 90%.” As Christians—people of the truth—we need to think deeply about the sources of information we come to rely on.
Flashback: What a Wonder Is a Human Being!
A mighty oak from the smallest acorn, the greatest mustard tree from the tiniest seed, and a great and noble life from the littlest child. So much potential bound up in so tiny a person, so many possibilities lying latent, so many opportunities to serve simply waiting for time, for growth, for maturity.
It is a reading age, a preaching age, a working age, but it is not a praying age.
—C.H. Spurgeon
