Category Archives: Laudable Linkage

Laudable Linkage

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Links to good reading

I have a question for those of you who receive my blog posts via email. Have you had any problems receiving them lately? Of course, if you have, you might not be seeing this. 🙂 I ask because a long-time reader just told me this week she hasn’t received my blog posts via email for some time now. I am trying to discern whether this is a widespread problem. I see them both via email and Feedly so I can make sure they’re coming through, and I have not had any problem with either venue. WordPress handles the sending, so I can let them know about it. But it helps to have as much information as I can when I report a problem to them. How long has it been since the emails stopped coming? If you try to subscribe, do you get any error messages? If so, what do they say? Thanks so much for your help.

Now on to this week’s links. I hope you see something that sparks your interest.

Come, HT to Challies. “He came to the dead; the bleeding; the hopeless. To the ones on the side of life’s roads, passed over. To the grieving and the outcast. To the ones desperate to be seen; those hungry to belong.”

Do Not Grieve the Holy Spirit. “What does it mean to grieve the Holy Spirit? My initial reaction to the word grieve in reference to the Holy Spirit was a negative one: Surely the Spirit of God does not actually grieve, does he? Perhaps this is a poor translation. Isn’t sorrow a too-human reaction to ascribe to the holy God? Doesn’t it diminish the Spirit to suggest that my sin can make him feel genuine sorrow?”

How Were the Books of the Bible “Chosen,” HT to Challies. “The earliest Christians did not view themselves as choosing books, nor did they view themselves as having the right/power to do such a thing. Instead, they viewed themselves as receiving the books that had been handed down to them by the apostles.”

A Light to My Path, HT to Challies. “When the sun streams into my kitchen window, it cheers my soul. Everything literally seems brighter. Its brilliance however, illuminates more than just the room. Particles of dust flicker through its rays, grandchildren’s sticky handprints on the window pane bother me, and tiny bits of red dirt speckle the floor. When the light shines into my room, I see things otherwise hidden.”

Are You Satisfied with Your Prayer Life or Is Prayer Simply a Means to an End? “In the Pie Chart that is your life, how big is the slice devoted to prayer? “I don’t ask to induce guilt or to point the finger of condemnation. It’s actually a question I’m asking myself, and it’s been prompted by a statistic I just bumped into once again.”

When You Feel Powerless to Influence Your Children. “More important, they revealed the lie I had believed—that my children were safe as long as I was nearby. And that I had the ultimate power to protect them from harm, bad influences, and spiritual apostasy. Without intending to, I had usurped God’s role, at least in my mind, as their guardian and protector.”

Jesus can understand your prayer despite feebleness or poor language.

Laudable Linkage

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good links

Here are some of the latest links to helpful reads:

Be Careful When Defending or Opposing Christian Nationalism. Different people mean different things by the term.

Not Brave, HT to Challies. “I don’t know about you, but I am not brave. I dread criticism and judgment. I’d rather work behind the scenes than live in the spotlight and be open to the critique of others. The world is hostile and people can be harsh. Let someone who likes the attention rise up and be the focus. Have you ever uttered these sentiments? If so, you are not alone.”

Raising Little Image-Bearers, HT to the Story Warren. “I think my early parenting was often shaped by the unexamined thought, ‘Look at this small person I have made and will shape into my perfect-parenting-book-inspired image!’ . . . We long for the Bible to give us clear steps on how to produce wonderful children. But what if instead of looking for step-by-step instructions, we zoomed out to the bigger picture from Genesis 1:26-28 of what God has crafted.”

Use Your Comfort Zone to the Glory of God, HT to Challies. “‘Get out of your comfort zone.’ We hear it all the time, from friends, family, business leaders, church leaders, and actually, the whole rest of the world, it seems. But I’m going to encourage you here to do just the opposite: to find your comfort zone and stay in it.”

Should Our Joy Depend on Our Circumstances? HT to Challies. “Instead of saying, ‘My circumstances don’t matter; they’re not the source of my joy,’ we’d be better off saying: ‘God uses my best circumstances to encourage me, and He can use my worst circumstances to enrich me.'” Yes! I’ve often been frustrated by the dichotomy many see between happiness and joy. I usually see it in the saying, “God wants you to be holy, not happy”—as if we can’t be both.

How Can I Lead a Quiet Life When My Job Requires Self-Promotion? HT to Challies. “First Thessalonians 4:11–12 talks about making it your ambition to lead a quiet life. As a commercial real estate broker, I’m told to advertise and promote myself to attract new clients. How should I reconcile these apparently opposing positions?”

Stop Calling Them Names, HT to Challies. “If you’re prone to use name-calling with theological opponents, consider three passages in Scripture and how they address our unhealthy culture in evangelicalism of pejorative labeling.”

The Goal of Scripture Memorization is not Recitation, HT to Challies. “As I’ve grown up in the faith and studied God’s Word, though, I’ve realized that the goal of Scripture memorization is never to recite it for the applause of men or to win a competition. Though the programs of my childhood smartly utilized games and competitions to encourage us to memorize, the goal was to store up God’s Word like a treasure so that when we needed to remember the gospel or God’s character or how to live as His people, the words of the Bible would already be buried deep within us. The point of Scripture memorization, I realized, was to remember.”

Help for Family Devotions, HT to Challies. “Many families attempt to practice family devotions but end up falling off the bandwagon for various reasons. If you’ve ever been discouraged about family devotions, here are five encouragements to help your family navigate the frustrations.”

Ten Reasons the Old Testament Matters for Christians, HT to Challies. “Should I as a believer in the twenty-first century claim Old Testament promises as mine? Does the Mosaic law still matter today for followers of Jesus? Is the Old Testament Christian Scripture, and if so, how should we approach it?”

12 Axioms for Young Missionaries, HT to Challies. Though aimed at missionaries, these “business proverbs” are useful when involved in any kind of ministry.

Introducing “Remembering Our Parents.” My friend Lois has created an Instagram community “for all of us with moms and dads who are gone but definitely not forgotten.” Readers can share a memory or story and photo of their parents. This post tells how it came about and suggests prompts for what to share.

God's self-exaltation is not because he's incomplete without praise, but because we're not complete without it. John Piper

Laudable Linkage

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Here are some good reads found this week:

He Gives to His Beloved Sleep, HT to Challies. “It was two o’clock in the morning and my newborn was asleep in the bassinet next to me. Most of the time, a newborn sleeping is cause for celebration and slumber but on this particular night, fears about my son’s life plagued my mind.”

The Character of Revival. “Apparently, the essential ingredients of revival are not sincerity, passion, zeal, emotion, organization, expense, unity, sacrifice, effort. Apparently, you can have all that, and yet not have revival.”

When Healing Hurts. “In my life, I’ve had to trust God to heal many things. It’s been painful as He’s had to break me and allow me to hurt to remove sins of pride and addiction from my life. Do I trust him still? Absolutely. In fact, because He has healed me from mental, physical, and spiritual needs, I trust Him more.”

Another Great Consequence. Dan Olinger has been working his way through the consequences of God’s work in us, and this week details why we can have joy in trials.

Humble Words, HT to Challies. “Articles, blogs, and books give us great encouragement, but we cheat ourselves out of so much encouragement when we expect the same kind of counsel from every saint around us. Most often the answers we seek can’t be summed up in key takeaways anyway. Our lives are so much more complicated than that.”

Hospitality Is an Everyday Endeavor. “When we think of hospitality as an event, we lose a lot of the meaning behind its purpose. Hospitality is about showing kindness to others, whether we know them well or not, without grumbling or complaining. (1 Peter 4:9) It’s more than an event. Practicing hospitality is cultivating a spirit that is generous, welcoming, and warm, and its purpose is to show what the love of Jesus is like.”

Angry and Holy: How Your Anger Can Be Righteous. “When I started therapy, however, I was taught that anger isn’t an enemy to squash. As I, in turn, searched Scripture, the Holy Spirit guided me to see that he’s not anti-anger either. All anger isn’t sin. Rather, anger is a good emotion when rightly used. As a professional emotion-stuffer, this has been a hard lesson to learn and one that God, in his good patience, is teaching me over and over again as I parent my children and re-teach myself.”

Going to Church Is Hard but Worth It, HT to Challies. “Sundays never fail to be tough. The plan is always to have the house clean and organized on Saturday, to do family devotionals, to set out and iron clothes for the morning, to go to bed early, and have a big happy breakfast together Sunday morning. Things never go according to plan.”

When You Don’t Like Your Wife, Love Your Wife. “The thing about love is that it is more likely to grow cold when you fail to give it than when you fail to receive it. The one sure way to fall out of love with your wife is to stop loving her—to stop doing deeds of love and speaking words of love and otherwise displaying a heart of love. Love is like a muscle that atrophies with disuse and that strengthens with exercise.” These things are true for wives with their husbands as well.

Is Manifestation a Worthwhile Pursuit? (Short answer: No.) I’ve seen manifestation pop up in conversations here and there. Lauren explains what it is, what’s wrong with it, and a better way to think.

Worship prepares us for crises.

Laudable Linkage

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Here are some of the thought-provoking blogs discovered this week:

If You Don’t Believe in Hell, HT to Challies. “Beliefs ripple. But we make a concerted effort to ignore that. Especially within the system of Christian faith, people can be tempted to pick and choose which doctrines they are “okay with” and which ones they leave behind. The problem lies in the ripples. Christians don’t always see how disbelief in one thing affects belief in another.”

Learning to Forgive Family, HT to Challies. First what forgiveness is and is not, and then why it is crucial.

The Glory of Godliness. “Frequently, I hear Christians talk about being more faithful, loving, or active in church. But I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say, ‘I want to be more godly.’ Why is there so little interest in godliness? Perhaps it’s because we don’t understand what it is.”

Don’t Fail to Capture the Train of Thought. “One of our greatest failures in Bible study is our tendency to treat the text atomistically. We look for inspirational words or sayings, while failing to grasp how the author used those words or sayings to persuade his audience of a message.”

I’ll Be More Faithful When I’m Older. “It’s folly to expect to wake up faithful twenty years from now if you’re not feeding your faithfulness today. If you desire to walk with Jesus more ten years from now, twenty years from now, or thirty years from now, you need to be feeding your faithfulness today.”

Slogging Blogging. This is an older post that Tim Challies recently linked back to, but it resonates with me. “I have little capacity to predict which articles will fall flat and which will make an impact on myself and others. I have trouble knowing in advance which are excellent and which are drab, which ones will somehow serve or challenge people and which will only irritate or confuse them. So all I can do is slog. All I can do is keep going and trust that the long effort will be rewarded with occasional success—the success of knowing that I’ve been able to bless or encourage or equip another person.”

Elisabeth Elliot quote

Laudable Linkage

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Here are some of the good reads found this week:

The Myth of a Balanced Life. “Are we looking for some perfect equilibrium—the precisely right amount of sleep, exercise, and time with family, work, and church? And if we found that perfect formula, is that then supposed to become the norm for every day of the week? What about when you have kids? What about when you’re traveling? What about the weekend?” I appreciate the better perspective presented here.

Is There a Danger of Worshiping the Bible Instead of God? HT to Challies. “I agree that there is a danger of having our faith in the wrong object. And there have been some people who seemingly hold the Bible in higher esteem than they do Jesus. But seen properly, the Bible is not a competitor with God; on the contrary, it is our God-given means of knowing Him through His revealed truth.“

A Pastor’s Journey with Anxiety, HT to Challies. A pastor shares his own experience, what he has learned, and shares how to walk alongside others who are struggling.

The Psalms: A Tool for Cultivating Godly Emotions, HT to Knowable Word. “The Psalms not only help us know what we can say in prayer (often one of our biggest struggles), they help us know what to feel. They . . . share all shades of human emotion from deepest despair to exuberant praise. We find saints processing the good and bad of life in a godly way. Reading and praying the Psalms takes us into their emotional world, how they wrestled with God and eventually found hope.”

When the Sermon Fizzles Instead of Sizzles. It may or may not be the pastor’s fault. It may be ours.

Becoming Writers Who Write the Truth Beautifully, HT to Challies. “To be published doesn’t mean you’re a good writer. There are many books out there; some contain the most beautifully written heresies while others contain solid truths slapped together with cringe-worthy analogies and dense, dry paragraphs. As believers, we want to be not just published writers but good writers. Someone who brings truth and beauty together in the written word.”

Beautiful Hand-Painted Bookmarks, HT to the Story Warren. This touched my heart. A 100-year-old housebound woman has found a unique way to share God’s love with others.

Laudable Linkage

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Here are some good reads found this week:

The Day I Told God No, HT to Challies. “I was free to say it, and free to live it, but I was not free to control the consequences of that one little word. There in my room I was sitting at a crossroads. I could continue with the “no”, or I could continue with God. I could not continue with both. If I wanted God in my life, I could only have him one way: as my King. He would not accept a position as my consultant.”

What If I Don’t Know When I Believed in Christ? HT to Challies. “I spiraled into a season of doubting my salvation in Christ. This severe doubt led me to sit in my pastor’s office where I heard an analogy from Spurgeon that continues to comfort me. And if you struggle with doubt and assurance, I trust this will aid you as it did me.”

How Do You Plan on Fighting Sin? HT to Challies. Each of us has besetting sins that we deal with constantly. This article has some good steps to consider and implement in fighting sin.

The Problem Is Your Worship, HT to Challies. “Your life may have you feeling stressed and burdened. You are surprised by feeling anxious over the smallest disruption in your schedule. A dark cloud of depression seems to consume your days. You try every problem-solving solution you know to shake the feelings of overwhelm and despair—better planning, networking, self-improvement classes, changing your diet and exercise, staying busy. The gripping fear that nothing is working has you running scared.”

Motherhood Isn’t Martyrdom, HT to Challies. “Many of our taglines overemphasize the pain of motherhood to the exclusion of the delight. We stress how being a mom is so hard, overwhelming, frustrating, and painful. If we’re not careful, we can begin to sound like we’re equating motherhood with martyrdom. But the Bible speaks of motherhood as a gift, a crown, and a joy.”

Your Short-Term Mission Trip Should Be About You (and That’s not a Bad Thing), HT to Challies. “I’m still a fan of short-term missions. This is not an anti-missions-trip article. Those are out there. This is not one of them. So why do I still encourage these trips? Because I believe God can use them to transform lives. Not necessarily the lives of the people you are serving. But your life? Yes!”

If a Vacation Is Worth Planning and Anticipating, How Much More Should We Anticipate Life in Heaven? Randy Alcorn: “There’s a great deal I don’t know, but one thing I do know is what people think about Heaven. And frankly, I’m alarmed.”

Sin has been pardoned at such a price that we cannot henceforth trifle with it. Spurgeon

Laudable Linkage

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Here are some of the good reads found this week:

To the Older Woman in the Church: You Are NOT Obsolete. “Older women in the Body of Christ are not obsolete, and ‘so we do not lose heart.’ Though our outer self may be forgetful, less agile, and plumper than we’d like, our inner self is on duty, continuing in service to our God.”

Potential Dangers of “Applying Scripture to My Life,” HT to Knowable Word. “Imagine asking a friend how her day was and two minutes into her summary interjecting, ‘Wait, tell me how this applies to me?’ We’d never do this. And yet we do it to God. We exchange the feast of relational intimacy and holistic formation for the porridge of minor behavioral change and practical nuggets for our optimized life.”

What We Regard as Little, HT to Challies. “The lack of obedience in small things would always eventually lead Israel to idolatry, to drifting from the God who rescued them and made them His own people. We like the dramatic stories of walls falling and dry river crossings but deemphasize the daily obedience to God’s Word because that’s not as gripping or faith-growing.”

Obituary for a Quiet Life, HT to Susan. “When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.”

At the Center of All Things. “Christians are prone to take a relatively minor point of doctrine, one we might identify as second- or third-order, and set it like the earth at the pivot point of Ptolemy’s universe. Their love of this doctrine and their conviction that it is key to a right understanding and practice of the Christian faith means that soon everything begins to orbit around it. It becomes the center of their beliefs in such a way that any other point of doctrine is understood only in relation to it.” Tim shares a better way.

The Danger of Playing God. I caught part of this from Stephen Davey’s Wisdom for the Heart program on the radio then skimmed through the transcript online.The part that grabbed my attention was the difference between critical thinking and judgmentalism. “The Christian is actually told, and I quote, to judge all things (1 Corinthians 2:15) – the same root word for judge that James uses here when he obviously tells us not to judge. So is the Bible confused? Not if you understand the context of this prohibition. What James is forbidding here is judgmentalism – a critical spirit that judges everyone and everything and runs everyone down. / Hughes, p. 196. There is a difference between making a discerning judgment and having a judgmental spirit. There is a difference between judging and judgmentalism.  There is a difference between thinking critically and being critical.”

The Assignment I Wasn’t Expecting, HT to Challies. “I once was an eager college student flush with conviction, laying my life out for Jesus. His love had captured and transformed me, and I was driven by the wonder of it. I would go anywhere, do anything, I vowed. And I did. It was difficult and painful and exhilarating and beautiful, while it lasted. But somehow I didn’t expect it all to come down to this.”

Why We Should Read Poetry, although the piece talks about literature, not just poetry. HT to the Story Warren. “Reading literature offers us profound solidarity with an author and admits us to a broader human community but it also holds up a mirror that allows us to see aspects of ourselves more clearly than we could have before.”

Why Build a Personal Library? HT to Linda.”Writing in the Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett recently took aim at ‘everything that is smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership.’ She clarified, ‘I don’t mean reading. . . . No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one ‘know things.’ But, seriously: Who does that?” Joel J. Miller shares some good reasons *for* a personal library.

I enjoyed looking through several illustrations by Liz Fosslien, many about time management, HT to Redeeming Productivity. I especially liked this one about having a bad day and breaking the cycle.

It’s a good time for my occasional reminder that links do not mean 100% endorsement of everything on these sites.

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. C. S. Lewis

Laudable Linkage

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Some of the good reads found this week:

Don’t Be Taken In by the Tolerance Trick, HT to Challies. “Real tolerance, I explained, is about how we treat people, not ideas. Classic tolerance requires that every person be free to express his ideas without fear of abuse or reprisal, not that all views have equal validity, merit, or truth.”

Quarantine Is Not a Good Option for parenting styles, HT to Challies. “As tempting as it might be, don’t move your family to a plot of land without internet, electricity, and running water. I’m suggesting that instead of being overwhelmed, we intentionally inoculate our children. Let me explain.”

The Lord Opened a Door for Me . . . So I Shut It, HT to Challies. I’ve included this mainly because it’s a great example of how to respond when a Bible passage doesn’t seem to make sense or seems to go against another passage. “When I find something odd like this in the Bible—when I’m apparently not on the same wavelength as God and his apostle Paul—the correct starting point is to assume I am the one who needs to adjust his thinking. So what can I learn here that might turn the ‘huh?’ moment into an ‘aha!’ moment?”

The Inefficient Church. HT to Challies. “I’m all for certain kinds of efficiency. I just placed an online order to save a trip to the store. But I’m for the right kind of inefficiency: the inefficiency of caring enough to slow down and treat people like people, to know their names, and to actually care.”

The Best Use of Your Short Life, HT to Redeeming Productivity. “Joni’s husband is gone. Her firstborn has passed. Her sister lived to 108 but left us last December. Her joints ache. She grieves over the dramatic moral collapse of our society. She’s ready to go home. So the question returns: ‘Why am I still here?'”

What Can You Do to Help Your Husband be the Best Dad? “In those first few months of parenting, the reality of our differences becomes more obvious than ever before. And with that, the temptation to nag is nearly unbearable. Trust me … even for those who thought we would never nag!”

10 Ways to Help a Musically-Challenged, Older Believer Worship Through Song. “I’m that person. I love to sing God’s praises, but I know nothing about music. I’m also old enough that I’m offered the senior discount at restaurants. Here’s how you might help people like me worship better.”

Laudable Linkage

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Some good reads found this week:

Does Maturity Still Matter? HT to Challies. “The spectacle of businesses, journalistic organizations, and even ministries catering to their ‘most emotionally immature’ members is familiar. Even more important is the dynamic Sayers describes, whereby those hyperactive members become ‘de facto leaders,’ because their actual leaders—and, by extension, their peers—come to see avoiding controversy as job number one.”

Forgiving Ourselves, HT to Challies. “If God’s forgiveness of us is to be the paradigm for our forgiveness of others, is it, therefore, also to be the paradigm for our forgiveness of ourselves? And could this then be a solution to all the problems we face in regard to our own failures and sins?”

Mama Bear, HT to the Story Warren. “As moms, our job is to raise these little people who have been entrusted to us and teach them to be capable, productive adults who chase after God. Perhaps the largest part of that is teaching them how to deal with when things in life don’t go the way they want,” whether due to their own shortcomings or someone else’s perceived unfairness. We need balance here–it’s possible to go too far one way or the other.

Beyond Safe: 6 Prayers for the Mom of the Graduate. This is good for moms in general. Our tendency is to pray and work for our kids to remain “safe.” But God may call them to take risks.

To Surprise Us at the Last Day. A lovely reminder that sometimes God’s work is hidden. Lesley touches on a similar theme with Whether Quickly or Not.

Beware the Leech’s Daughters. Insight on a puzzling verse in Proverbs and what it might mean.

Laudable Linkage

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Here are some of the latest good reads discovered this week:

God Is Eager to Forgive You. “God promises to show favor at the faintest whisper of a cry. He promises to answer ‘as soon as He hears.’ No probation. Just the ear of God, listening to the cry of a penitent sinner’s heart. He doesn’t see you as ‘damaged goods,’ a ‘second-class citizen,’ or a blight on His church. The sinner who has turned to Christ in forgiveness has the righteousness of the Savior credited to his account. It’s this righteousness, not the black mark of sin, that the forgiving Father sees.”

Emphasizing What The Bible Emphasizes. “When our issue of the moment begins to dominate our thoughts and conversations—to the exclusion of other healthy, worthy topics—what is missing is balance and proportion.”

Are You Casual with the Holiness of God? HT to Challies. “Imagine that, after suffering a loss on the battlefield, an American army general decided to galvanize his troops by taking the Declaration of Independence into battle. Sounds a little farfetched, I know. What kind of general would play so fast and loose with one of the most precious artifacts in the nation’s history? Though it may not seem likely to happen with American soldiers, this scenario actually did play out in Israel as the era of judges came to a close.”

To Rejoice with Those Who Rejoice, HT to the Story Warren. “As we pondered what we’d both seen, we concluded that often the people of God are better at mourning than rejoicing. Leaning into support, lifting up in prayer, and bringing a meal are actually easier than being a champion for, celebrating, and truly finding joy in someone else’s experience of blessing.”

The Ministry of the Pew: Sunday Morning for Normal Christians. “May I introduce you to what others have called the ministry of the pew? Ministry that you — normal Christian — perform every Lord’s day. Such is the ministry of the Not-Up-Fronts, the army sitting facing the pulpit.”

Anything Worth Doing, Is Worth Doing Badly, HT to Challies. “As Christians we should be those who work most excellently, because we are serving a better, more worthy, Master. And yet, I’m afraid this ideal of excellence often causes well meaning Christians to stop ‘doing’ altogether. They turn the adage into, ‘If it can’t be done well, don’t do it at all.’ And that is unbiblical.”

Willing Spirit, Weak Flesh: The Real Meaning of Matthew 26:41, HT to Knowable Word. “If willingness alone can’t overcome the weakness of our flesh, what will?”

Tagless, HT to Challies. A modern day parable with a good lesson.