CHRISTIAN LIFE
Three ways bitterness may steer your heart away from the Lord (Paul Tautges): Bitter afflictions have the potential to distort our thinking and cloud our remembrance of the heavenly Father’s love, faithfulness, and good purposes. As it was for the bereft widow Naomi in the book of Ruth (see Ruth 1), profound loss can cast a shadow over the eyes of our heart and leave us vulnerable to the temptation to resent God because life turns out different from what we expected. Therefore, we must grasp an important principle: A bitter experience may produce a bitter spirit when we do not interpret suffering biblically or respond to it humbly.
MINISTRY
Widows: The untapped resource in your church (Keith Collier at 9Marks): Energy experts have been on a decades-long quest for clean, efficient alternatives to traditional fossil fuels. The relatively untapped natural resources of wind, solar, hydropower, and geothermal energy have companies scrambling to secure power above, on, and below the earth’s surface. What if I told you there’s a spiritual resource just below the surface in your church that, if tapped into, can produce great spiritual power? I’m talking about harnessing God’s gift of widows.
Mercilessness in the name of mercy (Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition): It goes without saying these days. The church should be a place of mercy and kindness in a world of constant judgment, a refuge of compassion in a world of cruelty, a source of clemency in a time of canceling. Yes to all this. It’s a mark of the church to embody a fierce commitment to welcoming sinners and exalting the Father who lavishes grace on the prodigal. But what form should mercy take? What does mercy look like? What does it require?
Church growth: The place of metrics in evaluating ministry (Graham Heslop at The Gospel Coalition Africa): We must remember that we may grow a large ministry only to have most of it ripped up and burnt. The warning for everyone here is to pursue genuine gospel growth, and if you read the other ‘kingdom parables’ in Matthew 13 you will learn that that is often slow.
A crucial reminder for ‘double listening’ (Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition): If the church is as trendy and excitable as the changing culture around it, the church will lose the ability to offer something truly distinctive—a stable steadfastness that comes from gazing at Jesus.
CHURCH
Christianity and functional liberalism (or how evangelicalism denies the faith) (Bryan Laughlin and Doug Ponder at Solo Ecclesia): The problem we face today is of a slightly different sort. If liberalism entailed an overt denial of core Christian doctrines, the essence of functional liberalism is consent to doctrinal confessions on paper while subverting them in practice—whether by downplaying their significance, reinterpreting their meaning, or rejecting the logical implications.
EVANGELISM
Why we share the good news (Scott Lothery at The Gospel Coalition): Whether believers or unbelievers, we all need a daily dose of good news that transcends all the bad and puts every bit of it in a hope-filled framework. We need a message that flips the script on our bad-news world. That’s precisely what the gospel of Jesus Christ does. His message is so good that no bad news can bring it down. Here are five reasons to share his good news today.
PREACHING
How to listen to a sermon: 15 practical tips for receiving the Word (Kevin Halloran at Anchored in Christ): On any given Sunday, there are countless distractions that can hinder a hearing and receiving of the Word: crying babies, a bad night’s sleep, thoughts from earlier in the day, or a short attention span. This is not to mention the spiritual war taking place as the Word is preached. That is why gospel proclamation is part of the armor of God (see Ephesians 6:15, 19). It advances the cause of God against the enemy. How can we best listen to a sermon so we will receive the Word of God?
CULTURE
An evening with Rosaria Butterfield: Five lies of our anti- Christian age (Kenwood Institute on YouTube): This is a 50-minute video that is well worth the time listening to and passing it on to others.
Critical grace theory by Carl R. Trueman (Carl Truman at First Things): Christianity is a religion of hope, and our hope has a definite shape and content: repentance, faith in Christ, and the consummation of all things in him. By contrast, secular critical theory is utopian in the literal sense of urging us to work to create a “nowhere,” a state of fulfillment lacking in content.