I wanted to remind you that Truth for Life is featuring Seasons of Sorrow this month. You can purchase it for just $7 or get it free with a donation of any amount. My thanks goes to BJU for sponsoring the blog this week to tell you about Killing Sin Habits. There are some more…
This sponsored posted was written by Matthew J. Hall the dean of Boyce College, the undergraduate school of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (and, as it happens, the college my son attends). Boyce is committed to providing a biblical worldview for every student in every degree program. They’re expanding their degree offerings and just announced a…
Today’s Kindle deals include at least a couple of books that may appeal. (Yesterday on the blog: Spirit and Sacrament: An Invitation to Eucharismatic Worship) Orphans, Adoption and the African Extended Family I found this fascinating and instructive: “In my travels and conversations in the Western world I have seen the excitement in a growing…
This sponsored post by Wayne Grudem is correlated with the release of his new book Christian Ethics: An Introduction to Biblical Moral Reasoning, in which Grudem distills over forty years of teaching experience into a single volume aimed at helping readers apply a biblical worldview to difficult ethical issues, including wealth and poverty, marriage and…
A couple of times I’ve run into people who are familiar with the kind of Reformed theology I hold to and are eager to challenge me. Along the way they’ve said something like this: “I don’t believe in predestination.” That brings about an easy response: “The question isn’t whether you believe in predestination, but what…
An ember left alone will soon grow cold, but embers set close together will continue to glow, to burn brightly, and even to set others ablaze. Christians resemble embers, for we, too, must be set close together to thrive. “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise” (Proverbs 13:20), which means that those who walk with…
There are certain words and ideas that, over time, fall out of favor. Once they have fallen out of favor, it is not long before they fall out of common parlance. Sometimes, when words are archaic or their ideas unbiblical, this is the church’s gain. At other times, though, this is the church’s loss, for…
The great goal of the Christian life is to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. The Christian longs to be influenced by Christ to such an extent that every thought is one Jesus would think, that every action is one he would take. Such conformity depends upon a renewed mind, for it is…
We are more than our thoughts and more than our desires, but we are certainly not less. What fills our minds and forms our dreams tells us who we really are, what we really long for, whom we really serve. Evil thoughts and evil desires reveal a deep captivity to sin and evil. This should…
I remember watching the commercial as a child. A man dressed for work sprints after a moving bus, trying desperately to flag it down before it drives off without him. In a flash, he is transported to a beach where he meets his future self, jogging under the morning sun. His future self looks over…
Romans 12:2 is consistently one of the most quoted verses in the Bible. In that little passage we are warned that there are forces competing for our attention and loyalty and that even Christians are at times torn between the two. “Do not be conformed to this world,” says the Apostle Paul, “but be transformed…
Of the many legacies of the Protestant Reformation, few have had greater and wider-reaching impact than the rediscovery of the biblical understanding of vocation. Before the Reformation, the only people with a vocation or calling were those who were engaged in full-time church work—monks, nuns, or priests. As Gene Veith writes in God at Work:…
I recently sat with a group of young adults, men and women in their late teens and early twenties, and we spoke about singleness, dating, and courtship. Eventually the conversation advanced to marriage and to both the joys and the difficulties of marriage. We realized together that as these young adults are considering relationships and…
A Gift from Logos – Logos users will want to click and grab the coupon code which gets you $20 credit. You’ll need to use it by December 31. Don’t Get Too Familiar with the Bible – Here’s a timely warning from Peter Krol: “Beware the deceptive wiles of familiarity — that sweet but double-edged…
Habits are tricky things. We are more than our habits, but certainly not less. We live so much of our lives according to our habits, but still remain responsible for what we do and what we do not do. Some habits emerge without any thought and through mindless, repetitive actions, while others are formed only…
Through the month of March, I am inviting you to 31 Days of Purity—thirty-one days of thinking about and praying for sexual purity. Each day features a short passage of Scripture, a reflection on that passage, and a brief prayer. Here is day twenty-nine: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by…
Rick Warren is one of the bestselling Christian authors of our time. While he has written too few books to compete with the likes of Max Lucado for the greatest number of books sold, the few books he has written have uniformly made their way to the bestseller lists. Where most successful Christian authors have…
Today we come to the fourth and final part of this short series on knowing and doing the will of God. In the first part of the series I laid a foundation of God’s complete sovereignty over the universe and in the second part I sought to show that God is speaking to us today…
There have been a couple of times in the past few years that I have written about spiritual gifts and spiritual gift inventories. These articles continue to be read (thanks, I suppose, to the efforts of search engines) and, since I have given a great deal more thought to this subject, I wanted to update…
This morning we had a “guest” pastor. I put guest in quotations because he was one of the founding pastors at our church, but recently moved to a neighboring town to help stabilize a floundering daughter church. So he was only a guest insofar as we have not seen him for a while. He preached…