My friends at Faithlife asked me to let you know about an upcoming webinar for church leaders who are preparing for fall ministry in light of COVID.
My gratitude goes to ONE Audiobooks for sponsoring the blog this week with their offer of a free audiobook every month.
Today’s Kindle deals include mostly classics.
(Yesterday on the blog: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife)
How Perfectionism Makes You a Spiritual Quitter
You may find encouragement here: “It has taken me 43 years to begin to learn that there is a happy, spiritually-nourishing medium between praying for an hour a day and not praying at all. Between reading five chapters in my Bible and not reading a single word. Spiritual disciplines don’t have to be feast or famine, and they shouldn’t be.”
C. S. Lewis and His Stepsons
Douglas Gresham is the last living person who knew C.S. Lewis very well, and in this article reveals some interesting information about his brother (Lewis’s stepson) David.
Peeking Past the Blindfold
Kyle Borg writes about the sin of partiality which the Bible warns about enough times that we must all be prone to it! As he says, “Again and again God commands his people to be impartial. Why? Because our hearts are inclined to partiality.”
Subject To A Better Offer?
“You are not saved by your church attendance. You are not saved by going to Bible study every week. You are only saved by grace in Jesus. However, this doesn’t mean that commitment and reliability don’t matter at all. In fact, your involvement in the local church can be a great indicator of how you are going in your faith.”
What Is God Accomplishing in My Suffering?
John Piper answers a question about what God may be accomplishing in our suffering. “I’m going to talk about why Christians suffer and how they can rise above it. But the same truth applies whether or not the suffering is coming from inside, from a disease, from a broken clutch — you name it. Whatever is tending to tempt you to be angry at people and God, that is (under God’s sovereignty) an opportunity of testing to prove and refine your faith, just as much as if you’ve been hit in the face by a person who hated you because you were a Christian. So the point is, while the text deals explicitly (most of it) with persecution, the principle — under God’s loving sovereignty over our lives and how we handle that — is the same as when the suffering comes from another source.”
Fallen from Beauty
There are some interesting thoughts on beauty here. “We live in a time where, much like the fruit, beauty is objectified. If someone or something is seen as desirable (beautiful), the response is to consume it. We see this in social media, we see this in the epidemic of pornography, and we see this in the way dating and marriage are often pursued. The physical attractiveness of someone is observed away and apart from the reality of their spiritual being.”
Flashback: 3 Types of Fool
In his book Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion, Os Guinness portrays three types of fools in the Bible: The Fool Proper, The Fool Bearer, and The Fool Maker. I found it a fascinating discussion.
The real measure of our wealth is how much we would be worth if we lost all our money.
—John Jowett
