This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Recommendations
  1. Don’t Let the Culture War Steal Your Joy: Trevin Wax reflects, “The worrisome quality I find in much of today’s cultural commentary is the absence of joy. It’s as if our souls have shriveled until all that remains is a sense of hopelessness, a quiet resignation that assumes the church cannot thrive in this strange new world.”

  2. Holiness is Transgressive: Brett McCracken’s post sizzles. I love this, “’Transgression’ in contemporary pop culture has become ubiquitous to the point of banality…it’s all so pervasive by now that it’s tiresome, as “transgressive” as the khaki section of Old Navy.”

  3. Church Attendance Drops Among Young, Liberals, and Singles: Christianity Today reports, “Before the pandemic, 75 percent of Americans reported attending religious services at least monthly. By spring 2022, that figure dropped to 68 percent attending at least monthly.”

  4. I Want Him Back (But Not the Old Me Back): Tim Challies on sanctification and the death of his son, “I want Nick back. But I don’t want my old self back. I so badly wish that my son could be part of my life again. But I would so badly hate to lose all the precious ways in which God has been real to me and true to me and present with me in my sorrows.”

  5. Travel Photographer of the Year: If you enjoy photography, make sure you scroll through all of these. The elephant and the lion looking through the buffalo pics are particularly stunning.

In Praise of To-Do Lists

In Praise of To-Do Lists

One of the most important verses about our purpose is found in Ephesians 2. There, Paul says that we are God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” What are the good works that God has prepared beforehand for you? Do you know? Do you have an inkling of what they are? How are you going to do those good works? Do you have a plan to walk into the calling for good works God has placed on your life? That involves meta-planning, to be sure (one, three, five year goals, for instance). But it also involves the daily routines and habits of your life. How is your life structured to accomplish the good works that God has called you to?

Good News, Ladies! You’re Sons!

Good News, Ladies! You’re Sons!

Here is an oddity: women are never referred to as “daughters of God” in the Bible. Kind of strange, especially given how often people use that phrase. “Daughter of God” nets over 1,000 books on Amazon. In the Bible, however, the seemingly clumsy term “sons of God” is used for men and women alike.

This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Recommendations
  1. On the Changing of the Dictionaries: Tim Challies begins, “There is something morbidly fascinating about watching dictionaries slowly but surely change their definitions of common words. It raises some questions, not the least of which strike to the very purpose of a dictionary.”

  2. I Can’t Put Them Down Yet: Brianna Lambert with a sweet reflection on mothering. She concludes, “So I’m going to keep picking up my six-year-old. Together we’ll continue to sing songs to the faithful God who will never put us down.”

  3. Reconstructing Faith: Christianity in a New World: Tim Keller is nuanced as always in this piece on deconstruction, “For many the Christian faith they grew up with or held for many years no longer feels credible to them. They are rethinking the whole thing.”

  4. Deepening Your Friendship in Marriage: Sheryl Jacob with a helpful piece on the ways our focus in marriage can be easily shifted off course, “Many relationships start by knowing each other well enough to agree they can tolerate each other’s quirks and odd mannerisms. But somewhere along the line, the demands of daily life take over.”

  5. Against Autonomy: TM Suffield with strong words for the choice we often make, “We want the benefits of a marriage without the covenant. In essence we’ve swapped the grandest story ever told—the truly breath-takingly epic love story that is patterned in the atoms of the world—and swapped it for a tawdry little tale about a string of destructive and demeaning one-night stands. By replacing Jesus’ position as rightful ruler of the cosmos with ourselves as the rightful ruler of our tiny worlds—and make no mistake, friends, that’s what we’ve done—we’ve removed what made those goods good. We’ve marred what made the beauty we had beautiful. We’ve made the truth into a lie.”

  6. “Well Done,” Says God to Man Who Spent Life Arguing in YouTube Comments Section: Babylon Bee skewers the culture warrior with a wink.

How To Get A Back Stage Pass

How To Get A Back Stage Pass

Popstar Taylor Swift is coming to Arizona in March. She’ll be playing at the home of the Arizona Cardinals, with over 60,000 in attendance. As I write this, the cheapest tickets (before fees) I can find are just under $400. You’ll need to bring binoculars to make out the tiny form of Swift on stage and your Kleenex to dab the blood from your nose. To sit near the front row, it will set you back $5,775 a ticket. I couldn’t find meet and greet or backstage tour tickets, although I know they are offered. I can’t imagine what these tickets cost. $8,000? $10,000?

The Drama of Marriage

The Drama of Marriage

In pre-marital counseling, you can almost see couples wince when I bring up Paul’s admonition to wives in Ephesians 5. Paul’s instructions to married couples begin with those fated words, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Denominations have divided over that verse and been misunderstood by many more.

This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Recommendations
  1. An Encouragement to Young Husbands: AW Workman shares the importance of growing in gentleness as a husband, “In this season I began to visualize a beautiful, though small, flowering plant. The wrong kind of focused messing with the plant would eventually kill it. Instead, it needed stability, dependable sunlight, regular watering, and it would blossom. My nit-picking and projecting on the future were preventing the kind of relational safety that would actually lead to growth. The gospel logic of “accepted, therefore free to grow” was beginning to work its way into how I sought to shepherd my wife.”

  2. Any Unchecked Sin is Ruinous: Justin Huffman warns, “We, every one of us, have the potential to destroy our marriage, or to be consumed with bitterness, or to be blinded by self-righteousness, or succumb to peer pressure, or to give in to hopeless depression, or to give way to sexual temptation.”

  3. Does Sexual Self-Gratification Glorify God? Trent Rogers and John Tarwater consider the difficult subject of masturbation: “Christians experience constant pressure from prevailing cultural narratives that argue all sexual expression, so long as it doesn’t harm another, is inherently good and that sexual expression is the foundation of one’s personhood.”

  4. Hedgerows and Big Yellow Trucks: Andrea Seaborn with a wonderful reflection on why God obscures our view.

  5. Stooping to Filthy Feet: John Orchard brings fresh perspective to a well-known passage, “God has become a real human being and he hasn’t just served humanity in general, but actual blokes with body-hair and odour, annoying habits and treacherous hearts. No, Jesus does this not in spite of his divinity but because of it.”

Rhino Skin

Rhino Skin

“I guess I just need to develop rhino skin.” My friend was weary of being battered by gossip and slander. I empathized. I have similar struggles. “Isn’t there a less painful way to develop thick skin?” I asked. God has given humans skin that is a scant 2 millimeters thick. That is thinner than most cardstock. Meanwhile, our rhinoceros friends have skin that is over two inches thick. Wow!

What is Good (and Bad) about Transparency

What is Good (and Bad) about Transparency

The rise of reality TV and then social media has radically increased transparency. Team Transparency has rallied around #nofilter selfies and sharing even the frustrating and discouraging parts of life. Team Self-Respect has rallied around calls for decency and the need for some last bastion of privacy. Team Transparency has attacked Team Self-Respect for their filtered and prettied-up lives, for mushy posts about significant others, and for bragging about their kids. Team Self-Respect has attacked Team Transparency for their self-importance and oversharing about bad bosses and relationships, and shaming their spouses and children.

So, which team is right? Should we be transparent?

This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Recommendations
  1. Nietzsche was Right: In a similar vein as my post on Tuesday, Tim Keller reviews Tom Holland’s (not the actor) book on how Christianity revolution changed the world. Keller concludes, “In no way does [Holland] let the church off the hook for its innumerable failures. Nor will he let secular people live with the illusion that their values are just self-evident, the result of reason and scientific investigation.”

  2. What Has Been Most Helpful in Your Marriage? Ed Welch answers this question with wisdom.

  3. Beware of Pride: A Cautionary Tale: Lee Hutchings tells the story of how pride led William Henry Harrison to have the shortest tenure of any US President. He explains, “Such a tragic and ironic ending to an otherwise tenacious life is compounded by the fact that Harrison died, in all likelihood, of his own vanity and pride.”

  4. Love is a Skill: Seth Lewis comments, “It’s interesting that Jesus never mentioned how the Good Samaritan felt about the man on the road. He only tells us what he did for him. Evidently, Jesus does not consider love to be primarily about how we feel, but more importantly about what we do.”

  5. Can Cancer be God’s Servant? Randy Alcorn considers hard truths in the face of his wife’s recent death. “When our ministry posted Nanci’s words, “My cancer is God’s servant,” someone responded, “WHAT? God does NOT give people cancer. Jesus bore our sicknesses and carried our pains on the cross.”