Here are three brief quotes quotes from Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift. I thought of this book recently as I was talking to my parents and heard them describe a person they know whose child apparently suffers from “Oppositional-Defiant Disorder.” That explains the third quote. The other two are just good to think about. If you’ve…
The first week of my summer vacation has come and gone. It was excellent. This week, week two of vacation, I am going to be a little busier with family stuff. Therefore I will not be much in the way of original content on the blog. I should have a book review or two along…
In his book Respectable Sins, Jerry Bridges writes about the important discipline of preaching the gospel to yourself every day. Realizing that many people have heard of this discipline but do not know how to practice it, he provides an overview of how he does so. I found it helpful and trust you will too.…
As George Whitefield sailed from his native England to Georgia where he was to be a missionary, he ministered to those on board the ship. Here is an excerpt from his journal where he discusses a ministry encounter with a particularly willful child: Had a good instance of the benefit of breaking children’s wills betimes.…
Today is the Lord’s Day and I thought I’d pass along some advice pertaining to the day. It comes courtesy of Donald Whitney. His book Simplify Your Spiritual Life offers a long series of short chapters, each offering wisdom on a specific part of the Christian’s walk with the Lord. And here he offers some…
Just a few weeks ago Keith and Kristin Getty released Awaken the Dawn, a new album of contemporary hymns. As I understand it, the album will be available on iTunes and other stores in a couple of weeks. For now you’ll need to buy it direct. Many of the hymns are written by Stuart Townend,…
While our church focuses its teaching on verse-by-verse exposition, through the summer we often break for short topical series. This summer Julian (the associate pastor (is that his job title? Something like that) at our church) is preaching a series on spiritual friendship, looking at friendship in the light of the church’s core values. At…
I often share Puritan prayers on Sundays. This week, though, it seemed appropriate to post a prayer for the Lord’s Day Eve–Saturday night. I often find myself telling young people that, if they wish to make Sunday a meaningful day of worship and fellowship, they need to plan ahead and not stay up until 3…
This morning, as most of the readers of this site head to church to worship the Lord, it seemed appropriate to post a few words on worship. These words come courtesy of D.A. Carson and his book Worship by the Book. Here Carson has just offered a definition of worship and he is now expanding…
In his book The Truth of the Cross, R.C. Sproul spends some time discussing the human condition and as he does so he uses three biblical concepts: debtors, enemies, and criminals. The Bible describes all of us in these terms. What Sproul does here, and this really helped it hit home for me, is show…
I thought you would enjoy this quote from Jim Andrew’s Polishing God’s Monuments (one of my favorite books from a couple of years ago). This book, which offers “pillars of hope for punishing times” tells Andrews’ story of faith and perseverance through almost unbelievable suffering. This man writes from hard experience and here he offers…
Here is another great Puritan prayer, this one beseeching God to allow the Christian to live a life filled with prayer, filled with grace, filled with the Spirit. What a perfect prayer to make your own on this Lord’s Day! Great God,in public and private, in sanctuary and home,may my life be steeped in prayer,filled…
The following quote is from the pen of Horatius Bonar (1808 – 1889), the great Scottish preacher, poet, author and hymn writer. It talks about the nature, the true nature, of unbelief. It’s worth reading and pondering. In all unbelief there are these two things–a good opinion of one’s self and a bad opinion of…
Here is a brief quote taken from John Newton’s A Review of Ecclesiastical History which was published in 1769. It strikes me that the words he wrote them are perfectly applicable today: Whenever and wherever the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith have prevailed in the Christian Church, and according to the degree…
I mentioned a week ago that last week had been a long and difficult struggle to find joy. W week later I feel that God has really brought me through a tough time, but a time that was not in any way useless or wasted. This morning, when I sat down with The Valley of…
Through the past couple of weeks I have been fighting for joy, fighting to find joy in the journey. It has been one of those times that I’ve been longing for God but have seemingly found so little of him. And so this morning, when I opened up The Valley of Vision, as I so…
A little while ago I was sorting through my files and found a document where I had jotted down quotes from four different books I had read at just about the same time. They are vastly different books so it was kind of interesting to me to see the juxtaposition between each of the quotes.…
Here is another selection from Arthur Bennett’s The Valley of Vision. This old prayer confesses to God a reliance on self, and as it does so, it teaches both the folly of such reliance and the joy of relying fully on God. “When thou art angry towards me for my wrongs I try to pacify…
Here is another prayer from Arthur Bennett’s The Valley of Vision. This is a prayer titled simply “Happiness.” As I read the prayer I was particularly drawn to these words: “How precious is time, and how painful to see it fly with little done to good purpose! I need thy help.” How much time I…
Last week I read a short biography of John and Betty Stam, missionary martyrs to China. Stay tuned for a review. In that book, written by Vance Christie, was a poem and the story that inspired it. I thought I’d share that today. The poem, entitled “Afraid?” was written by Presbyterian missionary E.H. Hamilton following…