high price of watching nudity

I’m still behind in my blog reading from when the family was here, but I found these good reads this week:

The Transformative Power of Love: A Story of Umbrellas and Grace. “Mama smoked constantly. Her TV blared at all hours of the night. My peaceful home would be turned upside down. So I bought a “No Smoking” sticker for the car. My feeble attempt to make things comfortable before stepping into my role as the hands and feet of Jesus. Mama needed to know God’s love. But my response to the situation revealed I also needed to experience God’s love on a deeper level.”

The Times When You Are Most Vulnerable. “Our minds don’t always work very well when they are under duress. Our emotions can overwhelm us and our instincts become unreliable. Just when we are most needy, we become most vulnerable—vulnerable to making poor decisions and acting in ways that are unwise or even unbiblical.”

Encouragement In a World of Opinions. “Unfortunately, we live in a world where our own opinions have grown to idol status. Social media has us sharing our opinions as if the world just really needs to know our every thought. We’ve come to believe that what’s on our mind is what this world needs, and it affects the way we interact with others. We’re quick to criticize. Quick to make judgments. To offer up ‘unpopular opinions,’ or to add our voice to a shouting throng of opinion spewers.”

We Were Made for Less, HT to the Story Warren. “A popular line in Christian contemporary songs is ‘You were made for more.’ The audience I conjure is the careworn mom with her hands in dishwater or a man aimlessly walking through a dreary urban landscape. But don’t we all suspect from time to time that God’s plan for us involves more glamor, appreciation, and gratification than we’re currently experiencing? Actually, we might do better to think in terms of ‘less.’”

The Gift of Grace Wrapped Up in a Simple Greeting. “Without literally using the words, what would ‘grace to you’ sound like in the paper towel aisle at Wal-Mart? In the hallways of a Sunday-morning church? I am pondering the notion that my greetings, though not inspired as Paul’s were, can truly mediate grace to my sisters in Christ.”

How Jesus Reached the Pharisees. “The Pharisees are, in many ways, the main bad guys of the gospel accounts. They were the ones who rejected Jesus because He called out their sin, and they were the ones leading the charge to have Him arrested and crucified. They were evil, and in some ways they were the worst kind of evil, because they were the kind of evil that genuinely thought they were good. The Pharisees are the foil for the true purity and holiness of Jesus. They seem to be almost without hope. But there is one little verse in Scripture that throws this nice, clean little paradigm on its head.”

Dealing With the Praise of Men, HT to Challies. “The popularity [Spurgeon] experienced meant that he had to be on constant guard against pride. This was a battle that he fought throughout his 40 years of pastoral ministry.”

The High Price of Watching Nudity, and twelve reasons not to. HT to Challies.

You Can’t Bubble Wrap Your Boy: And That’s a Good Thing. “Not all of our sons are this drawn to danger (thank you, Jesus!), but I pray that all of them realize that following Jesus is the grand adventure their hearts were made to crave. I believe that there is something inside every man, and therefore something inside every boy, that longs to push past self-centered living and give their lives to something bigger. One of the greatest challenges of being a boy mom is fighting the temptation to envelop my sons in perpetual Bubble Wrap and instead accept the hard-to-swallow truth that my boys were made for more than safe. “

Questions Every Pastor on Social Media Should Ask Themselves, HT to Challies. These questions are good for all of us.