how the books of the Bible were chosen

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.

Here are some good reads found this week:

How to Make the Case Against Abortion in Less Than a Minute, HT to Challies. With the Supreme Court ruling on abortion in the news, abortion discussions will multiply. This video helps pare pro-life position to key points.

Confess Your Sins to God When Applying Scripture. “It is good for us to think about the different spheres and directions for our Bible application. But confessing sin is often a necessary step in the process. It is not just that we need a different strategy for loving our neighbor or a new approach to handling gossip. Frequently, we must confess that what we have been doing (or not doing) is offensive to God and deserving of his anger.”

Dear Daughter: On Outrage and Its Remedy. “Outrage is when you get really upset about someone else’s decisions or actions — so upset that you want them to be punished or forced to change. Outrage insists on being heard. It always points a finger but never at itself. It assumes it is the supreme authority on a matter regardless of whether it has any actual knowledge of it. It creates caricatures of its opponents and refuses to acknowledge the complexities of their human souls.”

Teach Us to Number Our Days, HT to Challies. “Psalm 90:12 speaks of ‘numbering our days,’ but like these two toddlers, we often don’t get it right. While we know exactly how many candles should go on our birthday cake (even if we prefer that no one else knew), we still tend to get the math wrong.”

5 Reasons We Should Not Stop Using Male Pronouns for God, or to turn it around, because the title confused me at first: why we should use male pronouns for God. HT to Challies. “It is right to believe that God is transcendent: God is not a man. Even little children learn in the catechism that ‘God is a Spirit and has not a body like men.’ And certainly, in Scripture God’s character and actions are sometimes described using feminine imagery (cf. Isa 49:15). But none of that means we should abandon male pronouns for God.”

How Were the Books of the Bible Chosen? “Inspired Scripture was recognized, not chosen. Genuine works by prolific artists such as Monet and Degas hang in museums because art experts have recognized them to be authentic pieces, not forgeries. They didn’t choose any of the paintings to be a Monet or a Degas. They scrutinized them for the unique signs of the artist’s imprint and recognized them as genuine.”

Sky Painting, HT to Challies. “I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a boring sky. Even when the sky is an unending morass of steely grey cloud that stretches from horizon to horizon, I’ll give you that it’s technically dull, there’s a lack of sunlight, but it’s hardly boring.” I love the conclusion here.