I have friends
R C Sproul Jr. says the best accountability group is….our friends

Problem with procrastination?
Gretchen Rubin has the answer: Try doing nothing!

3 Types of Elder’s Meetings
“After much trial and error, exploring what other churches are doing, and studying the Biblical role of eldership, we’ve landed on three types of elder meetings that take place each month.”

How our mobiles became Frankenstein’s monster
“How can we stop our phones becoming Frankenstein-like extensions of ourselves?”

Spiritual gifts inform us of our neediness
Never thought about it this way before. But I like it.

Counseling stories
“Of all the stories in the Bible I find myself turning to in counseling, perhaps there is none that I go to more often than the story of Joseph. For think of all that Joseph suffered that can relate to those around us. Mistreatment by family members. Difficult providential circumstances. Sexual temptation. Long periods of insignificance and loneliness. Struggles with forgiveness. I have seen the Lord use in dramatic ways the telling of a portion of Joseph’s story.”

Facebook, Privacy & Marital Oneness
This is a must-read: “Maybe it’s me, but there seem to be an awful lot of couples posting things on their facebook accounts to each other about their relationship. From “you’re the best boyfriend ever” to “he said ______ when he proposed” to “I’m pregnant, Honey”.”

Top 10 priorities for every pastor revealed
Do you agree with Brian Croft’s top 10? I’d like to move #10 up the list but it’s difficult to see what it could displace.

Finally get to hold baby Martin again
No doubt many of you have been prayerfully following Steven and Jamie Lee’s trial, with their newborn Martin requiring heart-surgery within days of being born. If you want to put a smile on your face and tears in your eyes, look at the first photo on this post, and join with the Lees and all who love them in celebrating the grace and goodness of God to them. And here’s another set of great photos.

Spiritual Map Quest
Bob Kellemen asks: “Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?”

The Biblical Counseling Movement after Adams
Still on the subject of counseling, this is one of the best book reviews I’ve read in a long time. The book is extremely important for anyone in pastoral ministry.

How exercise fuels the brain
For me the most exciting frontier at the moment is brain research. It’s incredible how much God is now allowing scientists to discover about the most complex organ He created. I’m hoping and praying for many Christians to dedicate their lives to studying in this field and then interpreting the discoveries through the lens of Scripture for the glory of God and the good of souls.

The Spiritual Gift of Discouragement
James Faris helps us to lose this gift and develop its opposite.

Don’t Tase me bro’
Simply asking questions is not application. It’s more like being Tased.

When is indecision loveless and sinful?
John Piper challenges procrastinators everywhere with this lesson drawn from Bonhoeffer’s life.

The Quest for Comfort
Guy Waters reviews the latest children’s book from Bill Boekestein.

Meet the bloggers
John Brand, Principal of the Faith Mission Bible College in Edinburgh, interviewed me about blogging.

11 tools I never want to be without
I’d add Downcast App for podcasts, the Kindle App for iPad, and Diigo for bookmarking.

The best chess player in the world
This sounds boring, but believe me it’s absolutely incredible.

Theology and Exegesis
Kevin DeYoung teases out the relation between exegesis ans systematic theology.

Visual Theology
Tim Challies is producing some powerful teaching posters.

7 Signs of Burnout
There’s an epidemic of this among ministers these days (HT: Ben Terry)

Randy Alcorn speaks of Jim Elliot’s unknown brother

Abeka founders retiring
Many home-schoolers will be wishing Dr. Arlin and Rebekah Horton a happy and peaceful retirement.

The cult of Amazon Prime
“There are two types of people in the world: those with Amazon Prime and those without. How you think about consumption, commerce and your personal time is radically different depending on if you’ve join the cult — yet. And to be clear, Prime is a cult you will be joining.”

A Biblical Theology of Food and Drink
This is a bit niche, but Nick Batzig’s been digesting this for a year!

Anti-depressants and the placebo effect
Why do anti-depressants sometimes offer no better results than a placebo? This article does a great job of explaining why and should make Christians pause before they simply regurgitate the latest media cliches.

Logos on Youtube
One for my Hebrew Exegesis students.

Facebook, forgiveness, and reconciliation
I’m sure you never expected to see these three words in the one sentence.

Dan Phillips reviews “Spiritual Depression”
Good to see this balanced review, partly the result of painful personal experience.

Counting sheep and pastoral insomnia
When the sheep are the cause of your insomnia…

From one family to another
Nathan Bingham leaves his home in Australia to work for Ligonier in America. Nathan is one of my “virtual” friends (he led the team that designed HeadHeartHand’s blog and website) and I’m so looking forward to meeting him for real next month in Florida.

Paul Edwards interviews Rick Santorum
Paul bounces back with a great interview.

The secret to memorable vacations
Keep ‘em short and sweet!

5 things infertile couples want you to know
Good to see this being talked about more in the church. By a man who knows what he’s talking about.

The Gospel and Homosexuality
Denny Burk with some resources to help us face the this difficult issue.

He is able to sympathize
Erik Raymond has compiled a hugely encouraging list of what Jesus went through.

Pray with your books closed
One for seminary students especially: “We shouldn’t open our books without praying, but we’d better pray without opened books.”

Spiritual Leadership: Sometimes Heartbreaking but Always Hopeful
I didn’t realize Moses had it quite so hard until I read this excellent post from Jon Bloom at Desiring God.

Dump-truck Counseling
Yep, done my fair share of that as well.

Two Timetables of an Affair
This is one part of a great series Brad Hambrick has been writing on True Betrayal: Overcoming the betrayal of your spouse’s sexual sin.

Seven tips for getting yourself to bed on time
Gretchen Rubiin: “Since I’ve started my Happiness Project, I’ve become more and more convinced that sleep is vital to happiness and energy.” I’d add that it’s also vital to preventing and overcoming temptation.

Is your sin bigger than Jesus?
Joe Thorn continues to plunder the Puritans for our benefit.

The Genius of the Psalms
Here’s a helpful presentation on the subjective dimension of the Psalms.

Should Homeschoolers be allowed on Public-school sports teams?
This sounds like a recipe for disaster.

What unbelieving pagans know about God and why they are responsible for it
Justin Taylor manages to pack a huge amount of hugely encouraging teaching into this post.

7 Lessons from the Community of Disability
Greg Lucas: “The tragedy of disability is not disability itself, but the isolation it often creates. This was one of the most important lessons our family had to learn. Sadly, we learned it the hard way. But hard lessons often lead to great insights and over the past few years we have had the wonderful opportunity to gain great wisdom from several families in many different communities.”

The need for discriminating preaching and the danger of its absence
Tom Ascol with a much-needed post.

Conrad Mbewe at Puritan Reformed Seminary
And if you want a superb example of discriminating preaching, here’s a sermon that we heard yesterday at PRTS.

Application in sermons
Mike Horton completes our triad of links on preaching.

The Cruelty of Inclusivism
Michael Reeves gives a UK perspective on pluralism and says: “More than no evangelism, it means no real evangel. Quite simply, that is because if ‘salvation’ is thought of as something other than being brought to know Christ, then that ‘salvation’ is something quite different to what Christ himself offers.”

The dangerous pursuit of pastoral fame
“Over the last few years, I’ve thought long and hard about “my platform” as a pastor, a writer, an occasional speaker. And as I’ve done so, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a danger to my soul in pursuing more exposure, more name recognition, more money to be made from thinking, writing, and speaking about ministry issues. Especially while I am still in full-time, paid ministry to a local community.”

Help my unbelief
Here’s a prayer we can all identify with at times.

The glory of God in the valley of disability
Greg Lucas, author of Wrestling with an Angel, speaking at the Near His Heart dinner for families of children with special needs.

30 Life Lessons
I liked a number of these modern proverbs from Ron Edmondson.

Ultimate list of Social Media policies for Churches and Ministries
If you haven’t had to draw up a Social Media policy yet, you will soon enough. Here’a great resource to get you started. (HT: Nathan Bingham)

Religion sidelined by militant secularization
“Europe must become more confident in it’s Christianity,” says Lady Warsi, Britain’s first female Muslim Cabinet minister!

Overeating may double memory loss
Do you struggle to memorize Scripture? Maybe you’re eating too much!

Email Infographic
Some fascinating stats. 147 messages a day. We spend an average of two and a half hours a day on email answering about 147 messages a day. We delete 71 of these in 5 mins and spend about 90 mins on 12 of the others…

Why physical books are better than digital books
I disagree but Eric Mckiddie makes a good case.

20 common grammatical mistakes that almost everyone makes
Your High School English years summarized in one blog post.

What all of our ministries really need
“We’ve got a lot of ministries going on in my church. Preaching, worship team, children’s ministry, small group ministry, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, sound ministry, projection ministry, and, perhaps most importantly, the coffee ministry…”

20,000 Tweets
What’s the point of tweeting 20,000 times? Timmy Brister gives us five of them.

Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament
Christianity Today interviews Nancy Guthrie on her latest Old Testament Bible Study book.

Ligon Duncan on Lloyd-Jones
If this challenging and edifying summary doesn’t make you buy Preaching & Preachers, you probably shouldn’t be preaching.

The Window Seat
I’m with Greg here. I still ask for the window seat. I still look out the window. And I still get a worshipful thrill every time we take off. But as Greg goes on to say: “As amazing as sitting in a chair 35,000 feet in the sky with a peripheral view of the planet seems to be, there is something else that stuns me as I gaze out the window: God has used the story of a severely disabled, non-verbal, autistic boy to reach so many different people with the good news of His hope, that I have to fly on an airplane to go see all of them.”

Adulteress-proof your marriage
Want to know what an adulteress looks like? And how to stop her in her tracks?

Ask better questions
Tim Challies proposes some substitute questions for the all-too-common “How many go to your church?”

Transparency and the violation of privacy
Kim’s right. This is a bit of a rant. But it’s a really good one.

Four steps to better meetings
Involves robbing a bank.

A picture worth 66 books
One of the first books I read when I was converted was Human Nature in its Fourfold State. Not exactly Joel Osteen, but it was exactly what I needed.

The Heart of the Reformation Bible College
This is the only thing that makes me wish I was 18 again.

How to receive criticism
Dane Ortlund gives us two wrong ways and one right way

Equipping Counselors for your Church
You’ll find lots of helpful free resources here to use along with Bob Kellemen’s Equipping Counselors for your Church. They include: (1) A twenty-five page detailed teaching outline of the entire book; (2) Five PowerPoint presentations that develop and illustrate the teaching outline; (3) All 17 Appendix Documents as free PDF downloads; (4) A sample Class Syllabus (that can easily be re-worked for various settings).

How fun is your workplace? Home?
Gretchen Rubin argues that levity = productivity!

The Amish Project
A young man tries to reclaim his life by disconnecting from the digital universe. (Very appealing)

When Erik Qualman speaks or writes, I listen. He’s been at the cutting edge of digital thinking for a number of years now and I deeply respect how hard he works at explaining the significance and implications of digital technology in our personal and vocational lives.

In his first book, Socialnomics, he argued that companies, institutions, and even individuals who did not adapt to and harness the new world of social media would severely limit their usefulness and effectiveness.

In his latest book, Digital Leader, Erik calls leaders to face and harness the changes that digital technology has brought into their workplaces and businesses. If you’re familiar with leadership books, you’ll probably already be familiar with some of what Erik writes about. However, his unique emphasis on the technological challenges and opportunities of leading in the digital age make the book a valuable, even vital, read.

As you can find full reviews on Amazon, I thought I’d explain the value of the book by producing a Digital Dictionary (today) and a Digital Decalogue (tomorrow).

We start today with the Digital Dictionary for Leaders. I’ve gone through the book and picked out key phrases that challenge us to understand and harness the new world we live and work in:

• Digital footprints: the information we post about ourselves online
• Digital shadows: what others post about us online
• Digital legacy: what people will find online when they search for you 100 years from now
• Digital celebrities: people who become famous for what they are and do online
• Digital realm: the merged public and private world that means we can no longer have both a private and public life—they have become one and the same
• Digital profile: 81% of children under the age of two have images of them posted online. 25% have an online presence before they are even born!
• Digital tools: whatever technology simplifies life rather than complicates it
• Digital native: grew up with technology as part of their world (opposite of digital immigrant)
• Digital mining: collecting of all online information about someone
• Digital bouquets: the passing on of encouragement using technology
• Digital therapy: counseling given online or over the phone rather than face-to-face
• Digital peer pressure: works the same way as the flesh version
• Digital deputies: using Facebook and Youtube videos to catch looters and rioters (I remember a Scottish policeman telling me how many criminals he caught using Facebook!)
• Digital oysters: the multiple online wealth-making opportunities
• Digital log: posting online of daily goals to increase accountability and motivation
• Digital currency: connections (the more friends, followers, etc., you have, the richer you are)
• Digital drain: the amount of time a company devotes to responding to negative online publicity
• Digital hugs: responding to customers and connections that post positive feedback and comments
• Digital voice/tone: What your online communications say about you

If you had no idea what most of these phrases meant before reading this post, and you want to influence and lead in the church and elsewhere, you should probably buy Erik’s book with your next click!

Leader or Influencer?
Barnabas Piper pleads for less leading and more influencing

4 Myths People Want to Believe about Social Media
I used to believe them all until Michael Dewalt changed my life! (HT: Nathan Bingham)

Christians get depressed too
My friend Paul Tautges has been interacting with my book and rounds up with some gentle iron-sharpening.

Listening to Prozac…and to the Scriptures
This piece by Dr Mike Emlet is possibly the best article I’ve ever read from CCEF.

How to pull out of the burnout spiral
“Pastor, you are prone to burnout for good reason: the demands of ministry are endless and urgent and you lack the natural ability to self-regulate. Right now you need to stop and seek those in authority over you and a few trusted friends to tell you how they see your life out of balance. For me, that means asking questions about everything from physical exercise to sleep to prayer and relationships with my wife and children. Restoring a good work/life balance will help stem the tide of burnout, but if we’re being truthful, it will only get you to zero.”

How to read the Bible through the Jesus Lens and The Broken Hearted Evangelist are two new books I’d highly recommend.

An Interview with Al Martin on Preaching in the Holy Spirit
Remember to click on the link at the end of this excerpt for the full transcript.

To Cade and the 8%
Due to pre-natal screening only 8% of Down Syndrome children see the light of day. Gabe Lyons pens some lovely words to his son Cade and the 8%: “Cade’s life, and those like his, offers an alternative view of the good life.

• These individuals alter career paths and require families to work together.
• They invite each of us to engage, instead of simply walking by.
• They love unconditionally, asking little in return beyond a simple acknowledgement.
• They celebrate the little things in life, and displace the stress that bogs most of us down.
• They seem to understand what true life is about, more than many of us.
• They offer us the opportunity to truly value all people as created equal.

Happy Birthday Cade! I’m so grateful that God let us be your parents. You’ve changed us in ways we would have never changed ourselves. You’ve given us permission to measure loving kindness over productivity. You’ve offered us a glimpse of God’s grace while shattering our preconceived ideas of what is most important. We love you!”

Small Group Videos Galore
Zondervan makes available 60 full Bible study videos for free!

Is post-partum depression non-existent in other cultures?
“About 10-15% of women in industrialized countries, and between 20-40 % of women in developing countries experience depression during pregnancy or after childbirth. Perinatal depression is one of the most prevalent and severe complications of pregnancy and childbirth.”

Organize your iPhone using Verbs
This screenshot and article might revolutionize the way you organize your Apps

10 things our kids will never experience
Some I’m glad about, some I’m sad about. (via Chris Larson)

A Christian in Silicon Valley
Nathan Bingham interviews the inventor of the laser printer.

How Jesus confronted and corrected others
Nick Batzig: “In a day when the “cult of nicenesss” has permeated the church, and politeness and tolerance has taken a front seat to truth and the fear of God, we need to be reminded that the Savior of the world often corrected the errors of his enemies in a less than winsome manner. Many times He also corrected His disciples in shocking and uncomfortable ways.”

Sex and the mystery of marriage
Tim Challies finds some sacramental parallels.

Eight GetReligion comments after eight years
I’ve been enjoying this blog’s commentary on how the media covers religious issues. Here’s a summary of their experience over the last eight years.

The one on the other side of the screen
Charitable and challenging counsel.

11 brilliant writing commandments from Henry Miller
The ones I need to obey more are numbers 1-11.

How bad is the job market for PhD’s [infographic]
Try this for starters: New doctoral degrees = 100,000; new professorships = 16,000

New drugs for depression
I don’t suggest you go out and try these, but the research is fascinating.

Ligonier’s Theological Stewardship and Ministry Momentum
I so enjoyed this! Very exciting.

Ligonier’s Theological Stewardship and Ministry Momentum from Ligonier on Vimeo.