Summer is here! Looking for some good books to dive into this summer? Here are some of my favorite books I’ve read over the first half of this year that I think you’ll love.
Christian Living, Church, Consumerism
“Don’t go to church, be the church,” urged an influential Christian leader whom I respect.
I understand his call to action. If you must choose between attending a weekly service or demonstrating Christ through service, you might want to opt for the latter. It’s better to joyfully steward our God-given gifts rather than sliding in and out of the back row every Sunday. Caring for the orphan, widow, and the jobless outweighs downing an (admittedly delicious) New Life Bible Fellowship donut and coffee.
But God doesn’t ask us to choose between going or being! In fact, making a choice to be the church without going to church robs us of the power Christ has offered us as he calls us outward to serve.
Family, Parenting
“I’ll sleep when I die,” a type-A friend of ours joked. They laughed. I pondered.
The joke squirreled its way into my heart. I was 21 and already had tasted the first fruits of my labor. It was sweet. My hard work had earned me esteem from my college professors. Their glowing comments were my drug. Late nights in the library were my payment.
“Who wants to play?” was the refrain of my school-teacher dad when I was a kid. My sister and I leaped when my dad arrived home from work and joined us for a football game with our neighborhood friends.
Recommendations, Christian Living, Parenting, Suffering
The better way of Christian parenting: Casey McCall argues that appeasement benefits neither the parent nor the child, “Rather than grant your child’s every desire, your job as a parent is to use your God-given authority to redirect those desires toward righteousness (love of God and neighbor) and to train your child to righteously handle the common human experience of coping with the disappointment of unfulfilled desires. In other words, the wise parent prepares the child for adulthood by training the child to be content in all circumstances.”
Church, Culture, Death, Fear, Politics, Theology, Wisdom
Last week, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The founder of Turning Point, USA, Kirk was an outspoken Christian conservative.
On Sunday, before our sermon, we prayed for our country in light of the assassination, the religiously motivated shooting in Minneapolis, the racially motivated murder in Charlotte, and the school shooting in Denver. We kept the rest of the service as planned. We preached on the planned text in 1 Corinthians 7 and shared the same announcements that had been planned.
On Sunday afternoon, I spent an hour and a half with a family member processing their upset that their church spent most of their Sunday service focused on Kirk’s murder.
Biblical Studies, Church, Education, History, Vocation, Theology
Monosyllabic.
Inflammable.
Abbreviation.
Phonetically.
Every one of these words are ironic. Monosyllabic means one syllable but contains five syllables. Inflammable means “easy to catch fire,” but looks like it means the opposite (not flammable). Abbreviation is not an abbreviation. And don’t phonetically should be spelled funetically, don’t you think?
Perspicuity means clarity or “ease of understanding” and yet isn’t very easy to understand. We’ll return to that later.
Roman Catholic theologians during the Middle Ages argued that the scripture was not perspicuous. Scripture was too veiled and obscure for the average person to understand, they contended.
