Welcome to May. I cannot believe how fast the last few months have gone by… Anyway, here’s some good news for you: Freebies! Steven Lawson’s The Passionate Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones is Christian Audio’s free audiobook of the month, and Logos users can get Live in Liberty: The Spiritual Message of Galatians free as well.
Jesus And The Past Tense
Jeff Medders:
When we are writing and talking about Jesus of Nazareth, our gospel compels us to write in the right tense. Present.
Together, let’s avoid speaking of Jesus in the past tense as much as we can. I cringe when I read, “Jesus was kind.” Is he not kind today? He is alive, let’s speak of him as though he is still kind—because he is.
The Importance of Falling Fast
Eric Geiger:
The first of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses is: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” The whole Christian experience is to be one of repentance. One of falling fast.
3 Things NOT to Say When Your Child Fails
Michael Kelley:
What do you say when he strikes out? Or when she makes a bad grade? Or when they mess up the joke they’re trying to tell and everyone laughs at them instead of with them? It certainly must be different in every situation, so I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to be particularly formulaic in trying to come up with the right response. There are, however, some things that perhaps we should NOT say.
Grace and The Non-Instagrammable Church
Jared Wilson:
No, the actual church isn’t the church in the stock photos. (Not sure what those guys raising their hands out in the middle of wheat fields are doing but I’m fairly certain it does not resemble what takes place in your worship service.) The actual church is a motley crew of sinners who are more primed together to really experience grace than they would be if they were all apart.
The Too-Small Story of Home
Jen Pollock Michel:
Ours was not a Leave It to Beaver family. When my brother and I were young, my mother worked nights at the hospital to put my father through graduate school. After my father got his first professorship, she worked at the campus infirmary, where the school bus dropped us each afternoon. Until dinner, which we ate in the cramped infirmary kitchen, my brother and I roamed the campus like wild cats.
3 reasons I’m reading more fiction
A favorite from the archives:
All through high school and college, I read tons of fiction and dabbled in non-fiction as I got older (provided the topic was interesting enough). My reasonably eclectic (and sometimes pretentious) tastes always made for interesting late night reading on bus rides home from my college job at a bookstore here in London (Coles in White Oaks Mall, for those interested—it’s now a Bath and Body Works, I believe).
And then, for some reason, I just stopped reading fiction and began almost exclusively reading non-fiction. The genres were, again, pretty varied—business, social commentary, theology, biography—but for nearly a decade, I lived on a steady diet of non-fiction.
A couple of years ago, a co-worker of mine challenged me to change that. So, I did. I spent most of that summer reading fiction, including the Hunger Games series. And I’m really glad I did, because it reminded me how unbalanced my reading had become.
