Blogs

Simple Secrets to Improve Your Eye Contact
These tips on how to produce more AND better eye-contact in public speaking apply also to preaching.

This might be the key to a happy marriage | USA Today
“After interviewing 468 married individuals on relationship satisfaction, covering everything from communication habits to finances, they found that the “most consistent significant predictor” of happy marriages was whether one’s spouse expressed gratitude. ”

10 Ways that Satan Loves to Watch Marriages Fall Apart | Biblical Counseling Coalition
“We don’t need Satan to ruin our marriage. We do plenty of unhelpful thingson our own to ruin our marriages. I’m sure Satan enjoys having a front row seat, watching our folly and foolishness.”

Particle Board Preaching | Nick Batzig
“Particle board preaching, like particle board furniture, looks attractive from the outside to many, seems affordable and convinces us that it will get the job done; however, we can be absolutely sure of one thing–nothing about it will last.”

5 Ways to Deepen Your Preaching | Gavin Ortlund
Much good direction here, for example: “It isn’t enough, then, to proclaim truth clearly. You must connect that truth to the struggles of real life—whatever issues are most entangling and hindering the people right in front of you. And to do so effectively you need not only courage and wisdom, but also deep enough relationships to know what those issues are.”

Delighting in Death? | Carl R. Trueman
Carl wrestles with what has frequently puzzled me: “What I cannot understand, however, is the way so many see abortion as a badge of honor and a source of pride and joy. To argue that abortion is a tragic but necessary evil is one thing; it is quite another to smile for the camera while wearing a tee-shirt which proudly boasts that you have had one.”

10 Convictions About Labor and Birth from a Christian Worldview | Gloria Furman
I was surprised by how much material there is in the Bible around this subject.

Kindle Books

The Betrayal: A Novel on John Calvin by Douglas Bond $0.99.

Sermons That Shaped America: Reformed Preaching from 1630 to 2001 $1.99.

Management Essentials for Christian Ministries $2.99. If you can’t pick up a few worthwhile tips from a book like this, you must be in heaven.

Salvation by Grace: The Case for Effectual Calling and Regeneration by Matthew Barrett $0.99.

Recommended New Book

Expository Apologetics: Answering Objections with the Power of the Word by Voddie Baucham

Video

Why Abortion is Unjust Discrimination

The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough. A 30-Day Plan to Reset Your Body by Matthew Edlund M.D. Special Kindle price for limited time of $1.99.

I’ve been benefitting from this book’s comprehensive view of rest. As the sub-title says, “Why sleep alone is not enough.” But it is an important foundation as Edlund outlines in chapter 1. Here’s a summary:

1. Sleep Is Necessary for Weight Control

From 2003 to 2009 multiple population studies around the world have shown that people who sleep fewer than seven hours, especially those getting fewer than six hours of sleep, gain appreciable weight. In the small-scale, short-term studies done in 2008, sleeping an extra thirty to sixty minutes a night decreased weight. Some people rapidly shed ten to fifteen pounds.

2. Sleep Is Required for Memory and Learning

The better you sleep, the more you learn.  The deeper the sleep the better our learning. But research at Harvard has shown that short periods of daytime sleep— even as short as a six-minute nap — can improve memory.

3. Sleep Is Needed to Prevent Major Clinical Depression

When people sleep enough, their mood quickly improves.  And getting enough sleep should also go a long way toward preventing major clinical depression, an illness whose rates have been doubling and tripling among Americans over the last thirty years.

4. Sleep Is Required to Grow New Brain Cells

This has only been discovered in the past few years, overthrowing years of scientific dogma.

5. Sleep Is Needed to Avoid Colds and Fight Off Infection

Rest is more than restoration. Rest is on the front lines of your infection defense system. It keeps your immune system going. Rest prevents infection. Rest well, stay well.

6. Enough Sleep Prevents Plaque from Forming in Your Arteries, Preventing Heart Attack and Stroke

Arterial plaque is the basis of the majority of heart attacks and strokes, and fortunately for us, good sleep can prevent its even getting started.

7. Proper Sleep Is Required to Maintain and Strengthen the Inner Clocks That Regulate Our Lives

It doesn’t really matter when you sleep; what does matter is the regularity of your pattern, when you wake and when you sleep. Your clocks are regular in their timing for a reason. Life is rhythmic. So is sleep. To know when to sleep, it pays to know a little about your own inner music.

The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough. A 30-Day Plan to Reset Your Body by Matthew Edlund M.D. $1.99.

Blogs

The Slow Death of the University | The Chronicle of Higher Education
Some of this is rather quaint but there are good points in it. “As professors are transformed into managers, so students are converted into consumers.”

Key Works by Abraham Kuyper Available in English for the First Time | LogosTalk
Just for Logos users, unfortunately.

Activism, Apathy, or Affliction? | Gentle Reformation
How should Christians respond to anti-Christian legislation? James Faris’s answer: “Those in leadership should give serious consideration to leading God’s people to the throne of grace in days of fasting and prayer.”

19 Turning Points in the History of Philosophy and Theology | TGC
Such a helpful teaching aid.

Pastoral PTSD | For The Church
“My church became a street-fight and I wasn’t ready. As if it weren’t bad enough that people left by the dozens and the church finances went cliff diving in shallow water, the personal attacks were jarring.”

Liberal Churches Most Discriminatory | Secular Right
“Mainline Protestant churches—who generally embrace liberal, egalitarian attitudes toward race relations—actually demonstrated the most discriminatory behavior.”

New Book

J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life by Leland Ryken. The subject and the author make a wonderful combination.

Kindle Books

Theology of the Reformers by Timothy George $2.99

The Five Points of Calvinism: A Study Guide by Edwin Palmer $0.99

Love the Home You Have by Melissa Michaels $2.99. “This is your invitation to fall in love with the home you have and embrace the gifts of life, people, and blessings right where you are”

And one for the men

The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost – From Ancient Greece to Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson $1.99

And here’s a classic.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield $1.99 (almost 2,000 reviews on Amazon)

Video

From Guillain Barry Syndrome to Happy Ever After

What an incredibly inspiring story. The music is a bit intrusive but you can turn it down and still get the story. I noticed there’s a book version of the story too: Happily Ever After: My Journey with Guillain-Barré Syndrome and How I Got My Life Back.

At the age of 26, less than 3 weeks after giving birth to her first child, Holly was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder, called Guillain-Barre syndrome. It started with a pain in her neck and a weakness in her legs, and within 12 hours, she could no longer walk anymore. Within 72 hours, she was completely paralyzed and could no longer breathe on her own anymore. But watch this for the happiest of endings.

Blogs

Secularization Falsified | First Things

20 Quotes from Albert Mohler’s New Book on the Sexual Revolution

Debunking 4 Myths About Religious Freedom | Russell Moore

Bedeviled by My Wife’s Dementia | Christianity Today

A man trying to make sense of miscarriage | Premier

Defending Calvinism: A Q&A with Marilynne Robinson | OnFaith

How to Read the Bible Devotionally in the Original Languages | B&H Academic

Bacon Causes Cancer? Sort of. Not Really. Ish. | WIRED

Kindle Books

Family Worship by Joel Beeke $0.99

Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children by Joel Beeke $0.99

The Man of Sin : Uncovering the Truth about the Antichrist by Kim Riddlebarger $1.99. I use this in my eschatology class.

New Book

Why Everything Matters: The Gospel in Ecclesiastes by Phil Ryken.

Video

Promotional Video for Alex Chediak’s forthcoming book, Beating the College Debt Trap: Getting a Degree without Going Broke. If you pre-order you can get a free child-parent discussion guide.

“Dad, what’s the point of studying the Bible in Hebrew?”

Probably many of my Hebrew exegesis students have thought it. Only my son had the nerve to ask it.

Basically he’s asking, “Dad, what’s the point of your life?”

Years and years of pouring over jots and tittles, patachs and shureqs, and my epitaph is: “What was the point of it all?”

I could have hit him with my lecture, “Ten Reasons for Studying Hebrew,” but most of them are a bit technical.

I could have sent him the links you’ll find at the bottom of this page, but I reckoned Facebook might have just slightly more appeal.

Instead I simply replied, “It makes you slow down.”

That to me is the single biggest reason for studying the Bible in the original languages. It slows you down and forces you think about every single word and their relation to each other in a way that English cannot do. Understanding English is just too instantaneous, too automatic, too routine.

Just as riding a bike along a familiar road lets you see things you never see in a car, so the plodding pace of studying the Bible in the Hebrew language gives you insights that English translations rarely do.

As Mark Ward wrote in The Power of Slowing Down Your Bible Study: “When you read slowly, details pop out at you, revealing insights you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Slow reading is a skill worth cultivating.”

Mark is highlighting an amazing new tool in Logos called Old Testament Propositional Outlines, which helps even English readers to slow down and really think about the way words relate to one another. It looks quite a bit more complex than the kind of outlines which I teach my students. However, the basic idea is the same, so I agree with Mark when he says:

You simply can’t know what insights will occur from being forced to slow down—until you slow down. That’s a major point of the tool. It’s not that you learn and adopt the technical terminology, much less that you use it in your Bible teaching to sound impressive.

Slowing down study is sufficient reason for me to persevere in teaching Hebrew exegesis. But if you want a few more reasons, click away!

Do You Really Need to Know Hebrew? | LogosTalk

You Don’t Think Learning the Biblical Languages is Worth It? Think Again | Canon Fodder

Thomas Schreiner on preachers using biblical languages | Credo Magazine

Hebrew and You | Koinonia 

My Advice to Students — Van Pelt Shares Solid Languages Advice He Got and Wished He Got | Koinonia

Panel on “Rediscovering the Importance of Biblical Languages for Faithful Ministry” 

Is Learning Greek and Hebrew Really Worth It? |Western Seminary

What Helps Me Most As I Prepare to Preach | For His Renown

The Profit Of Employing The Biblical Languages Scriptural And Historic | Themelios

Sage Advice on Learning Hebrew | For His Renown

The Best Part about Knowing the Biblical Languages | Andy Naselli

Why Study Biblical Languages? | First Things

Why It Is Beneficial to Learn Greek and Hebrew Even if You Lose It | Ad Fontes

Blogs

Choosing the Right Seminary | Kevin DeYoung
Seven questions to ask before choosing a seminary.

Am I a Pastor or Am I a Scholar? | TGC
Jeff Robinson sheds light from his own journey.

A Christian Classic on Sanctification by Keith Mathison | Ligonier Ministries Blog
It just never gets old.

What Is the Most Meaningful Job in America?
Orthopedic surgeon, Police chief, and youth pastor!

Who Trains the Elders and Deacons in your Church – Anyone! | Clare DeGraaf
I like the idea of 3 months of attending meetings to learn the ropes before required to vote

Dazzling photos from a Pacific marine sanctuary larger than California
This is heavenly.

Steward your…poverty? | En Route
Stewarding wealth is one thing. What about stewarding your poverty?

The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing | The Atlantic
“Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don’t think about the average person, and they don’t even think about their students when they write…Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.”

Recommended New Book

We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong by Al Mohler.

Kindle Books

Here’s an amazing deal: Grudem’s Systematic Theology and Allison’s Historical Theology for $12 total!

Systematic Theology/Historical Theology Bundle $11.99.

Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life by Louis Zamperini $1.99.

Video

Planned Parenthood doctor admits to felony | Denny Burk