Blogs

We start with few articles for churches in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs. I predict that a church’s security policy is going to become a major factor in choosing where to attend church. First of all here’s the federal government’s most recent advice and resources page for protecting houses of worship.

7 Ways to Prepare Your Church Against Violence
“How then can we prepare for the range of potential violence we may encounter on Sunday mornings? While there are excellent resources and organizations that can help you develop formal and specific plans, here are seven general actions to prepare your church.”

How Your Church Should Prepare for an Active Shooter
Active shooters are a harsh reality of church life today. We can be prayerful. And we can be prepared.

Deranged, Depraved, or Dejected?
A Christian psychiatrist urges us not to add people with mental illness to the “victims” of mass shootings:

In the wake of yet another tragic mass shooting, this time affecting another church, we’re called to reflect again about how to process these events. Many writers have discussed how to grieve, heal, and avoid living in fear following heartbreaking tragedies. Today I want to advocate for a marginalized group often indirectly hurt by the public response to these events: those who struggle with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and other emotional difficulties.

Stressed to the Max: How Does God Want Us to Deal With Stress?
“It is possible to be supremely busy without the stress overwhelming us and without getting cranky and Irritable? Can we manage stress biblically? Are Christians even supposed to get stressed? Is it sinful? ”

Why Do You Have a Phone?
“Have you ever thought about giving your phone a mission statement?”

Kindle Books

A Cross-Shaped Gospel: Reconciling Heaven and Earth by Bryan Loritts $2.99.

Better Love Now: Making Your Marriage a Lifelong Love Affair by Tommy Nelson $0.99.

Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ by John F. MacArthur $2.99.

Denny Burk recently posted a link to Laura Perry’s incredible testimony. Laura was born a woman but lived as a transgender male for ten years before God brought her to himself. It’s one of the most amazing testimonies I’ve ever heard. The first half is an interview with Laura, with her godly parents joining her for the second half. What a Gospel we have! What a Savior we have!

Don’t make the mistake that I did of listening to this in the car—unless you’ve got some great windscreen wipers.

Blogs

God’s Ministry of Disappointment
“Our journey to one day having children has not been blissful, innocent, joyous, or as easy as I expected it to be. It has been a journey of loss, heartbreak, delay, doctor appointments, test results, delays, stress, frustration, more appointments, more delays. Hope seems to be a liability too expensive to carry in the face of so much disappointment.”

Hobbies of Highly Effective People
“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is one of the most relentlessly competitive leaders you’ll ever encounter. That doesn’t mean he’s burning the midnight oil (even if some of his employees are). “Eight hours of sleep makes a big difference for me, and I try hard to make that a priority. For me, that’s the needed amount to feel energized and excited,” he told Thrive Global.”

How a Genealogy Changed My Life
“Constantly worried about what people thought of me, and living a selfish life thinking I was the center of the universe. I loved myself so much and expected everyone else to love me as much as I loved myself, but, sadly, they were too busy loving themselves.”

3 Tips for Coping with Today’s Biggest Threat to Mental Health
“Research also shows that loneliness and social isolation are major contributors to addiction and other psychiatric disorders, recovery from which, we now know, largely entails supportive relationships of love and connection.”

Preaching the Psalms to Ourselves
“Preach the Psalms to yourself. As you do, your confidence in the Lord will soar. The result? Your knowledge of Him will grow and you will respond in worship and right living before the Lord. Open your Bible to the Psalms and begin today, preaching the Psalms to yourselves.”

Guns & the Future of Ministry
I own guns and have a CPL, but this is a thought-provoking reflection on the impact guns are having on ministry. Lots of questions but no easy answers.

“”Over the last 10 years,” he said, “the number of guns in our community has exploded. We’re a rural town. People have always had hunting rifles and shotguns, but now everyone has handguns and they carry them everywhere. Even to church.” He warned me before speaking that at least 80 percent of the congregation would be “packing” during my sermon.”

Why We Can Rejoice that Marriage Will End
I find this harder to imagine than my wife does.

“When marriage someday ends, we will agree that God has not subtracted anything, but only added. He has not divided, but united us in an even deeper way. Marriage is a wonderful gift and today we thank God for it. But in that day we will praise him for bringing it to an end so we can experience something even better, the very thing it has been pointing us toward all along. Until then, the joys of marriage direct our eyes to the joys to come.”

Kindle Books

Unpacking Forgiveness: Biblical Answers for Complex Questions and Deep Wounds by Chris Brauns $3.99. First class book that may change your life.

The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization by Vishal Mangalwadi $2.99.

Bringing the Gospel Home: Witnessing to Family Members, Close Friends, and Others Who Know You Well by Randy Newman $3.99.

Blogs

Something to Hate
“While hate is a strong word, it is a necessary word. It is necessary to speak the truth about what is evil. We need to use it to think about, talk about, and act against sin. In doing so, it will help us see sin for what it is: an affront against a holy, perfect, and righteous God. Hating sin helps us take it seriously. It helps us put it in its proper place. When we hate sin, it moves us fight against it, to be alert for its work in our lives, and to put it to death. The opposite of hate is love and if we don’t hate sin and treat it as evil, we will grow to love it.”

The Research Proves The No. 1 Social Justice Imperative Is Marriage
“A consistent and irrefutable mountain of research has shown, reaching back to the 1970s and beyond, that marriage strongly boosts every important measure of well-being for children, women, and men. Pick any measure you can imagine: overall physical and mental health, income, savings, employment, educational success, general life contentment and happiness, sexual satisfaction, even recovery from serious disease, healthy diet and exercise. Married people rate markedly and consistently better in each of these, and so many more, compared to their single, divorced, and cohabiting peers. Thus, marriage is an essential active ingredient in improving one’s overall life prospects, regardless of class, race, or educational status.”

Let Me Show You What Postpartum Depression Really Feels Like
“Being a mom not suffering from postpartum depression (PPD) has been an illuminating experience. After suffering from it with my first two children, I am sure I technically have PPD with my third child, but I am on medication that controls my symptoms so well that I function as a healthy neurotypical person.”

Elijah’s Tree Ministry for Discouraged Ministers
“Elijah’s Tree exists to provide God-centered, Christ-magnifying, Scripture-saturated, confidential, and accessible shepherding and spiritual refreshment for discouraged, burned out, wounded and hurting pastors, pastoral couples, chaplains, and missionaries.”

Emotional Intelligence, a Critical Trait of a Church Replanter
The four characteristics of emotional intelligence that we cover in this episode are:

1. Self-awareness: The ability to know yourself and your emotions, not as you wish they were, but as they really are.
2. Self-regulation: The wisdom and ability to understand the impact you have when you take action or refrain from action.
3. Social awareness: The ability to read other people and understand their emotions.
4. Relationship management: The ability to incorporate the other 3 skills to navigate and build positive relationships with all types of people.

Columns from Tabletalk Magazine, November 2017
“The November issue of Tabletalk considers the biblical teaching on leadership. Our nature as human beings is to seek out leaders to set a course for us and direct us in accomplishing things, and as Christians we are designed to seek leaders who will motivate us to do excellently for the sake of the kingdom of God. Yet in the workplace, the church, and the home, good leaders are often scarce. Further, we see leaders fail, and we often resist following our appointed leaders. These problems indicate that while we know we need leaders and that many of us should become leaders, we have a deficient understanding of what godly leadership actually is. This issue examines the biblical concept of leadership so as to help equip believers to be better leaders and followers in the various spheres of life.”

Whatever Is Lovely: How to Overcome Demanding Thoughts
“When we are struggling with distracting, demanding thoughts and emotions, God wants us to know that we are not victims who must simply endure the miserable ride on the train of our thoughts. He wants us to seize the controls he’s given us, switch tracks, and head in a faithful, joyful direction.”

Conversations through 95 Theses – Reflections on a Facebook Live Q&A
I’ve rarely seen such a sustained, charitable, and reasonable critique.

Kindle Books

Pursuing Peace: A Christian Guide to Handling Our Conflicts by Robert D. Jones $3.99.

Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing by Andy Crouch $2.99.

The Life of God in the Soul of the Church: The Root and Fruit of Spiritual Fellowship by Thabiti Anyabwile $2.99.

I’ve been told a number of times now that if I really want to promote a more biblical, historical, and confessional understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture that I have to prove my bona fides by critiquing secular models of psychology. So, at the risk of writing the least-read blog posts in history, in the coming weeks I plan to analyze the delights of Freudianism, behaviorism, Rogerian therapy, existential therapy, gestalt therapy, and so on. If anyone reads the whole series, let me know, and I’ll send you a voucher for the therapy of your choice. My students usually sleep through my lectures on this subject. Sometimes, I do too. Regular readers and normal people, don’t worry, I’ll only be doing this once a week.

Armed to the Teeth
Before we look at these secular systems, I want to explain my approach to this exercise. I’m assuming that no one is approaching any of these systems of counseling uncritically and unarmed. There is much in them that is hostile to the Christian faith and, therefore, if we enter this arena, we must do so armed with the Word of God and never put it down.

Search and Destroy
So, armed with full confidence in the Word of God and a critical mind towards secular thought, we want to do two things. First of all, we want to search and destroy. We want to cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:5). Anything contrary to God’s Word must be grounded and pounded with the hammer of God’s Word. Although that’s where many people stop, we must then move on to phase two.

Find and Construct
We want to find and construct. We want to search through the rubble and find any truth that has survived. We shine the light of God’s Word into the wreckage and ask, is there anything in there worth salvaging? Is there anything that would help us understand God’s Word better? Is there anything that would correct our understanding of Scripture? Can we find anything that would supplement our understanding of Scripture while remaining consistent with Scripture (see the inclusion of the wisdom of Amenemope in Proverbs 22-24)? Anything that would help us understand people better and counsel people better? Anything that we could run through the filter of Scripture in order to bring us closer to God’s perfectly comprehensive knowledge of people?

Five Critical Areas
The five areas that we will be examining in each secular system are the five most critical areas in any counseling system:

• Philosophy: What are the system’s basic philosophical presuppositions about truth, reality, etc?
• Personality: What is the system’s theory of human personality, identity, motivation, etc?
• Problem: What is wrong with people and the world and how did it come about?
• Purpose: What is the ideal that we are aiming at? What does wellness or wholeness look like?
• Prescription: How are we going to get from problem to purpose? What is the method of change?

Thank you for your warm and encouraging response to Shona’s article yesterday in which she began to share her terrible experience with depression. Here’s the second part of her story.

During this dark season I would sleep with exhaustion, but then awaken in an instant several minutes later, unable to stop the rage of mental torment. I concluded that the Lord had given me over to the Devil, that I could not be a Christian, and all that remained was for me to fall into hell. Long before my alarm clock went off each morning, I awoke suddenly like a startled bird. While the rest of the house slept, I had to get up, to get away from this pain. Waves of tormenting thoughts crashed on the shores of my heart: “What’s going to happen to my children on the way to eternity? Who will bring them up? What a tragedy of immeasurable consequences; a mother who lost her mind and her soul. They will have to live with that. What about David, my poor husband, who sees that something is terribly wrong with me but can’t fathom it? What will happen to the baby I am carrying, for whom I feel no emotional connection?”

Reality versus Unreality
I tried to focus on verses of comfort from my Bible, with a ferocious intensity, but in so doing I became more and more obsessional. I turned all the Bible’s encouragements against myself and applied all its condemnations to myself. Adding to my mental exhaustion, I scoured books that I thought might rescue me from these dark depths: books such as Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan; The Christian in Complete Armour by William Gurnall; and Spiritual Depression by Martin Lloyd- Jones. I gleaned some truth from these books that kept some hope alive, but it was all too intense and exhausting.

There were glimpses of reality but only occasionally and momentarily. Surely the Lord said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). He stilled the storm for the disciples. He would never cast away any who truly seek him. What were the last twenty-five years of my Christian life all about? He never saves and then lets go. That was my daily debate. Yet just as soon as I grabbed reality, delusional thoughts, subjective feelings, and deceitful unreality would crush all hope.

The beautiful sunshine and the singing of the spring birds were an agony. The beauty of the night sky and the array of stars, which testified of a faithful Creator, only served to break my heart yet further. I thought back to my childhood, when I would often sit outside my home in the Scottish Highlands looking heavenward and singing the words of Psalm 8:3–4. But now, instead of that free and happy childhood, life was over. I had lost the Lord—if I ever had him. He was gone forever. All hope was gone.