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CCEF Conference on Marriage
My friend and I were just talking about the 2010 CCEF Conference: Marriage—One for Better and Worse. Her husband will be a speaker there and boy! I sure do wish we had the funds to attend. If there is any chance you can make it, I strongly urge you to start saving now and GO. 🙂 Here is a little conference preview video to further tempt you:
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Apparently My Daughters Being Able to Sleep is an Idol for Me. Crud.
Well … apparently I have an inappropriately strong (idolatrous) desire that my family NOT be woken up at 6AM by taxi drivers. I know this because Fred and I tried something new this morning … we gave the ol’ Billings “taxicab” service (and I use those quotation marks intentionally!) a try so that the entire family wouldn’t have to wake up at 5:45AM to take me to the airport. (We were particularly concerned about sweet Ellie because she was cookin’ with a fever around 101 or 102 after her six-month old shots, poor love.) Of course, in my (careful? organized? controlling? OCD?) way, I even called the taxi company last…
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Ethics and E-Discovery / Social Media
If you are an attorney and/or a Certified Christian Conciliator, you might be interested in this continuing legal education program: The Ethics of E-Discovery and Social Media I read some fascinating articles on this topic when I caught up on my law journals on today’s flights.
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Congratulations to Jerram Barrs
Thanks, TakeYourVitaminZ, for letting us know that Outreach Magazine recently named Jerram Barrs’ Learning Evangelism from Jesus the book of the year in the evangelism category. From Crossway Blog: “The Outreach Resources of the Year is a celebration of the best books, DVDs and curricula produced to help the Church and Christians reach out in areas such as evangelism, compassionate service and cross-cultural ministries. Congratulations to Dr. Barrs! Barrs studied Jesus’ conversations with diverse people in his day and drew lessons and principles for attractively communicating the gospel to unbelievers in ours. While our culture may tempt God’s people to conform, retreat, or be silenced, Jesus exemplified how to…
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Inordinate Desires
Between Two Worlds linked to a great David Powlison article and I encourage you to check it out: Desire 101: Putting First Things First Just listen to a few of the questions that are asked (and answered): – How can you tell if a desire is inordinate rather than natural? – Doesn’t the word lusts properly apply only to bodily appetites: the pleasures and comforts of sex, food, drink, rest, exercise, health? – Can desires be habitual? – What about fears? They seem as important in human motivation as cravings. – In counseling, do you just confront a person with his sinful cravings? – Can you change what you…
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Just tell ’em I’m a nobody tryin’ to tell everybody about Somebody who can save anybody.
I was given this book at my January event in South Carolina and I was thinking about taking it to Georgia this week as airplane reading fodder: Same Kind of Different As Me After reading this blog entry from John Piper? I’m REALLY thinking I might take it with me. I’d love to lose myself in a good book … (Oh, and the title of this blog post is a quote from the book.)
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Rooted and Grounded in Love
‘For many women, even Christian women, the longing for a place where they belong causes restlessness and insecurity. But the redeemed woman, who has been strengthened in her inner being to know that God has made a place for her in His heart will sing with the psalmist, ‘Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations’ (Psalm 90:1) … She knows that her ‘adoption through Jesus Christ’ (Ephesians 1:5) makes her part of God’s family. She has been rooted and grounded in love; so she rejoices in her historical and global connection to God’s children, and she understands that she lives out that connection locally in the church…
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Leading in the Midst of Trials
Recently, Bob Kauflin learned that his two year-old grandson had cancer—and then he had to lead worship just a few days later. He wrote an article about his experience here: Leading in the Midst of Trials This is just a tiny excerpt: “I guess I could have struggled with the apparent dichotomy between my circumstances and the songs we were singing. Or ignored what my family was going through altogether and pretended that nothing was wrong. Or complained about how hard life is sometimes. By God’s grace, I actually drew great comfort from God through the truths we sang. So after the first song, which is based on Psalm…
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Illusion or Community
Thanks, TakeYourVitaminZ, for this Bonhoeffer quote: “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.” No more illusions. Real life. Real community. Amen. May it be so.
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Truth Truth Truth
From Jerry Bridges: “Whatever Scriptures we use to assure us of God’s forgiveness, we must realize that whether the passage explicitly states it or not, the only basis for God’s forgiveness is the blood of Christ shed on the cross for us. As the writer of Hebrews said, ‘without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22), and the context makes it clear that it is Christ’s blood that provides the objective basis on which God forgives our sins.” And from God Himself: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12) “Blessed are those whose…
