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We who speak English are blessed with a multitude of competing translations of the Bible. With so many possibilities, which should you choose? Here is at least one answer to this common question. Transcript Recently a reader got in touch to ask me about Bible translations. What translation do I use, what translation do I recommend, what should we think about as we consider how to read God’s Word in English? Let’s run the intro and then I’ll talk about …
A couple of months ago I made the decision to remove the comment section on my blog. I did so largely because comments can only succeed where there is good moderation, and I was increasingly unable to provide that. The fault, then, was not in the commenters, but in me. In lieu of comments I have decided to accept (and encourage) letters to the editor. Today I share some of the letters to the editor that have come in this …
Series Introduction: I live in a small house. I work in a small office in a small church. For those reasons and others I will never have a huge library. When I add a book I almost always remove a book, a practice that allows me to focus on quality over quantity. Over the past couple of years I have focused on building a collection of commentaries that will include only the best volumes on each book of the Bible. …
Gospel-centeredness is all the rage today. We are told to live gospel-centered lives, to pray toward a gospel-centered faith, to have gospel-centered humility, to be gospel-centered parents, to form gospel-centered churches, to have gospel-centered marriages, to say goodbye at gospel-centered funerals. The gospel, we are told, must be central to all we are and all we do. This is good. God really does mean for the gospel to be central to the lives of his people and to be right …
I am in the unique and enjoyable position of receiving copies of most of the latest and greatest Christian books and I like to provide regular roundups of some of the best and brightest of the bunch. Here are some of the notable new books that I’ve received: Galatians for You by Tim Keller. This is the first release in the new God’s Word For You series. “Galatians For You walks you through the book of Galatians, showing how the …
I have never been the kind to enjoy an afternoon at the art gallery. It’s not that I don’t like art–I really do–but more that I don’t understand it very well. Of course the fact that I am red-green color blind probably doesn’t help my cause too much, but it seems that what excites artists, what stands out to them, does very little for me. One of those funny little memories of my childhood involves a day visiting the Art …
A couple of weeks ago I invested an hour and a half in watching Lakeland: The Movie, a documentary about Todd Bentley and the Lakeland “Revival.” You may remember that in April of 2008, a preacher and revivalist named Todd Bentley was invited to Ignited Church in Lakeland, Florida. The plan was to have Bentley there for five days of revival services. In the end he stayed for four months. What was meant to be a small, local event soon …
There are many, many resources available to us if we wish to teach our children their Bible stories so they can live moral and upright lives. We can teach them to be like Noah, that man of great faith who endured years of scorn before finally receiving vindication; we can teach them that David trusted God and marched into battle against the giant and that they, too, can face their own giants. The stories and morals are easy to find. …
You might have noticed when reading through the Gospels that, when it comes to Jesus predicting Peter’s denial, Mark records Jesus telling Peter that he will deny him three times “before the rooster crows twice” (Mark 14:30). Matthew, Luke and John, on the other hand, don’t mention a specific number of crows. They just record Jesus saying that Peter will deny him before the rooster crows, presumably at all (Matthew 26:34; Luke 22:34; John 13:38). But how did it actually …
Here is a list of books I have received over the past few weeks, but have been unable to read in full. Instead, I have given each of them at least 30 minutes and tried to get as much of a feel for the book as possible in that time. Note to Self by Joe Thorn – This is a book dedicated to modeling the discipline of preaching the gospel to yourself. Joe Thorn has written a series of notes …