Loved with Everlasting Love
Here’s yesterday’s chapel address on Jeremiah 31:3: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.” If you want to scroll to the beginning of the sermon, it starts at 10:20.
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Blogs
4 Terrible Ways To Stop a Sermon
“Sermons need to start well and end even better. I am writing this post in an airplane that just landed so roughly that the lights flickered and my row-mate woke up. Bummer. I know of at least four components of a terrible, turbulent sermon landing.”
How to Make Your Non-Fiction Reading More Productive
Michael Hyatt’s method includes recording eight specific kinds of information in order to engrain key elements and to make them easy to access in the future.
Why Your Deflated Retirement Dream Might Be God’s Open Door
A new way of viewing retirement.
I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that permanent, vacation-style retirement has its appeal. But God did not create me to enjoy a decades-long vacation at the end of my life—rather he created me to love him, serve him, and live out a unique calling. What vocational vision, then, has God placed within my husband and me? Who are we to be at this life stage?
How to Read John Owen
Ryan McGraw on why and how to use Owen on Hebrews realistically and profitably.
Whistleblowers: Planned Parenthood Had Dead Baby Quotas
Planned Parenthood employees reveal they were incentivized to pressure women into getting abortions to meet monthly corporate quotas. In the video from Live Action, Sue Thayer, a former Planned Parenthood manager in Storm Lake, Iowa, explained that if her center met its quota for abortion referrals, employees would be rewarded with pizza parties, paid time off, and other rewards.
And here’s Thabiti on the aim to make abortion unthinkable. He does a great job of demonstrating the parallels between abortion and slavery.
Kindle Books
The Real Face of Atheism by Ravi Zacharias $1.99.
The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission by Christopher Wright $5.99.
Held in Honor: Wisdom for Your Marriage from Voices of the Past $2.99
Keller, Piper, and Carson on When Your Pastor Fails Morally
In this short video, Tim Keller, John Piper, and Don Carson answer a hard and sobering question: What would you say to a congregation that has lost its pastor due to moral failure?
Tim Keller
- Don’t get cynical. Don’t get disillusioned by institutions, ministers, or the church. Don’t say every pastor is a fraud.
- But also be careful about idolatry of Christian leaders.
Don Carson
- We should always be horrified by sin but never be surprised by it.
- Churches should discipline with outrage over the sin and tears over the fallen.
John Piper
- Remember Joseph who endured great calamity and corruption and yet God was bringing about good.
- Bethlehem Baptist lost 230 people over the moral failure of a member of staff and we did not grow for four years.
- It’s a time to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God and patiently endure God’s chastisement until he takes the church through it in his timing.
David Murray
No, I’m not on the video and it may look like arrogance to add my name to such exalted company, but this has to be added: tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. Tell the congregation the truth about the fall and its consequences.
The wife and children (and others in the know) already have to deal with the shock to their faith of the most important Christian leader in their life falling into sin. Imagine the double shock to their faith when they see other Christian leaders doing all in their power to cover it up, or to try and present the fallen pastor as a victim of circumstances. If these precious souls are ever to have their trust restored in Christian leaders, the leaders need to tell the truth.
Telling the truth also serves the purpose of “that others also may fear” (1 Tim. 5:20). I know of one instance where one man did all that he could to successfully cover up the sin of another minister and then fell into the exact same sins himself a number of years later.
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Blogs
Prince William has a powerful warning about the stigma surrounding mental health
It’s heartening to see such powerful and influential figures speaking about mental illness in such a compassionate way.
Prince William said that his interest in mental health began with his work as an Air Ambulance pilot. “It was suicide, a subject that is so often hidden. The suicide rate among young men in this country is an appalling stain on our society,” said the prince.
“Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 40 in this country. Not cancer, not knife crime, not road deaths – suicide,” he continued. The prince said if any one of the aforementioned issues caused so many deaths, there would be a “national outcry.” ”But there has only ever been silence. And this has to stop. This silence is killing good people,” the prince said. The prince said that in his work as in Search and Rescue and as an Air Ambulance pilot, he has been encouraged — along with his colleagues — to admit when they feel “overwhelmed or unable to cope”. “This should be the norm,” he said.
Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On?
Emotional intelligence comprises four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Nested within each domain are twelve EI competencies, learned and learnable capabilities that allow outstanding performance at work or as a leader (see the image below).
12 Trends That Shaped U.S. Religion Since the ’70s
“What are the most significant changes and megatrends that have occurred in the U.S. since the mid-1970s? …Together, they constitute a remarkable revolution in the most basic assumptions of life — of family and intimate relationships, of work and residence, of thinking and speaking, of getting and spending. Often, these changes have been so significant as to constitute a revolution — change so vast that it is almost impossible for later generations even to imagine what the preceding “normality” actually was like.”
The Headache and Hope of Multi-Ethnic Ministry
“Many of us sit happily in the pews of our churches surrounded by persons of our own cultural tribe, playing the music of our own preference, while wondering why those around us look just like us. We develop whole (bad) theologies ensconcing our musical and aesthetic preferences, effectively barring the door from those whose culture is too expressive, too loud, or too different. And we wonder why they don’t come. Here’s why: We don’t want the headache, and they know it.”
Book Review: ‘The Productivity Project’ | TGC
You’ve head of The Happiness Project, now here’s a productivity version.
“Imagine a guy who was so interested in productivity that he set aside an entire year of his life to explore ways to become more productive. It would take an interesting guy. Well, we don’t have to imagine because Chris Bailey has done it. In an interesting and somewhat entertaining book Bailey lets us in on his one year productivity project.”
Grace Covers Me: When You Feel Spread Too Thin Relationally
Being intentional with your time and relationships, paces you for a lifetime of ministry to others.
Kindle Books
For your non-Kindle book buying needs please consider using Reformation Heritage Books in the USA and Reformed Book Services in Canada. Good value prices and shipping.
The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters $1.99. Sometimes these deals feel almost criminally cheap.
A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God’s Sovereignty by Joni Earecksen $1.99.
Scripture Alone: Exploring the Bible’s Accuracy, Authority and Authenticity by James White $2.99.
What Came First? The Desire to Sin or the Opportunity?
When a Christian falls into gross immorality, the question arises: What came first: the desire to sin or the opportunity?
From what I’ve seen and heard of fallen pastors it’s almost always the desire to sin that comes first. It’s not that they were walking closely with the Lord, keeping their hearts and minds holy, mortifying their lusts, etc., and suddenly an opportunity for sex just came out of nowhere and they fell into it almost “accidentally.” In fact, I’ve never heard of such a scenario.
No, instead the man has allowed his imagination to stray, he’s begun to entertain fantasies about certain women, he’s comparing his wife unfavorably with then, and he’s maybe even started saying and doing certain things to attract them.
When that desire to sin is allowed to fester, it’s almost guaranteed that the devil will arrange for some opportunity to arise that the man is already primed for. The desire he has entertained has made him highly flammable and it only takes a small spark of opportunity for his whole life to go up in flames (and many others in his and her family with him).
The critical lesson is that if we crucify the desire, God will almost always shield us from the opportunity. And even if God may permit the devil to throw a spark of opportunity our way, there’s nothing in the heart that will easily catch fire.
However, if we entertain and enjoy the desire to sin, God may permit the opportunity to sin to coincide. Look around you, the church is full of the charred remains of such catastrophic infernos.