100 Recommended Reads
Colin Adams at Unashamed Workman has listed 100 books he recommends to his congregation in Northern Ireland –
“It does reflect the fact that I am Reformed, Baptist, cessationist and complementarian! – but hopefully it will still be helpful to an even wider audience.”
– See it here.
Smart Planting, Right Planting
“It wasn’t so much that anyone called us to prayer, but that the day reminded us all of the way that God is sovereignly growing his church, in all sorts of unexpected places and amongst the least likely of people. God’s word is powerful and his mighty Spirit is transforming lives. …”
– At The Sola Panel, Paul Grimmond reflects on last week’s church planting conference at Moore College.
Precious in the sight of the Lord
“When Baxter lay a dying, and his friends came to see him, almost the last word he said was in answer to the question, ‘Dear Mr. Baxter, how are you?’
‘Almost well,’ said he, and so it is. …”
– C H Spurgeon puts death in perspective for all who belong to Christ. At Pyromaniacs.
Why I don’t have a television and rarely go to movies
“But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshipping Christ. …”
– John Piper challenges Christians to consider the influence of what they watch – at Desiring God.
A Tortured Existence
“We want our celebrities to start strong and finish weak, to begin with a bang and then fizzle, pop and sputter, all for our enjoyment and entertainment… Jackson gave us so much to talk about, so much to enjoy. More than any other celebrity he embodied the ‘vanities’ of Ecclesiastes. …”
– Tim Challies reflects. (Image: Google News.)
ACNA is the elephant in the tent
“The formation of ACNA is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of The Episcopal Church (TEC). Four dioceses have left TEC: San Joaquin in California, Quincy in Illinois; Fort Worth in Texas and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. The new Province includes 11 Northern Virginia parishes, some of which pre-date the American War of Independence. It is no surprise then that TEC is litigating over millions of dollars worth of property. …”
– ACL Chairman Robert Tong writes at SydneyAnglicans.net
Nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified
“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”
– The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:1–5. (ESV)
Don’t take your iPod to church!
“Reading the Bible in electronic format makes it easy to chase down cross-references, to read notes related to the content, to find word definitions and so on. But all of this is at the cost of the natural, God-given flow of the text. As we use our iPods in place of our Bibles, we begin to understand Scripture as we do Wikipedia, a text suited more to browsing than deep study.…”
– Food for thought as Tim Challies reflects on how the medium affects how we read the message. Part 1, part 1.5, part 2.
The Anglican Church in North America – Hidden reefs ahead
“The launch of the Anglican Church in North America this week should be a cause of great thanksgiving to God for all who long to see the Anglican Communion united in the gospel, rather than a counterfeit unity engineered through endless ‘conversation’ and artful ambiguity.
However, we can be certain that this new stage of the global Anglican realignment will be opposed. …”
– Charles Raven writes at SPREAD.
Piper on Parker on Calvin
To mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, Desiring God have reprinted T.H.L. Parker’s classic 1954 biography.
Not only is it available to be purchased, but a free PDF download is also available – both via this link.
You can see John Piper speak about why they did it at Desiring God.
T.H.L. Parker –
“When I was asked to write a life of Calvin for the S.C.M. Religious Book Club, there were reasons why I was happy to agree. For one thing, it offered a pleasant relief from the arduous task of translating Karl Barth’s Kirkliche Dogmatik into English, which had taken up much of 1950 and 1951. More importantly, there had been no biography of Calvin for many years. Moreover, I saw this as an opportunity to correct some of the commonly held misunderstandings and prejudices clustered around his name. …
Now, what do I at the age of ninety-two make of this book that I wrote in 1952 and 1953 in my mid-thirties?”
– read it and come to your own conclusion.
A Trite Habit?
“It is a slowly growing pattern of life. So slow in its development that we do not even notice it happening to us. We make a thousand little decisions and finish with a way of living that we never planned or meant to happen. …”
– Phillip Jensen, Dean of St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, writes about the great danger of living in the Western world.
Money, Sex, Indaba: Corrupting the Anglican Communion Listening Process
“The Listening Process, also known as the ‘Continuing Indaba Project’, was announced last month at the Kingston, Jamaica meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council after a briefing by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Anglican Communion Office (ACO).
The staff of the ACO, under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, announced that a $1.5 million gift was given to fund this project-a gift 2-3 times the size of any previous gift received by the Anglican Communion Office for its work… The delegates to the Anglican Consultative Council were told that the money was coming from a grant through the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.
After subsequent questioning at press conferences, it turns out that the Satcher Institute is not the source of the $1.5 million dollars.
So where did the money come from?…”
– Ralinda B. Gregor, writing for The American Anglican Council asks some uncomfortable questions of the Anglican Communion Office.
It is God’s battle
“We are always looking inwards and pitying ourselves and being sorry for ourselves, and looking for something to help us. Get rid of that outlook, forget yourself for a moment; the battle is the Lord’s! Salvation is His. It is for the honour of His great and holy Name.
But go further and realise that because it is God’s battle this almighty power is being exercised on our behalf even when we do not realise it. Things are being done in this great campaign of which we are not aware. We may perhaps be half-asleep at our post, and we do not realise that the great Captain is planning something with respect to us. We are unconscious of it. We would all be lost were it not for that. He, I say, is exercising this power on our behalf.”
– Martin Lloyd-Jones, The Christian Solider (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1977), 30. With thanks to Of First Importance.
We need to be reminded: Don’t waste your life
A thought-provoking 3 minute video using preaching from John Piper – from Desiring God.
Christ’s atoning death
“Christ’s atoning death ratified the inauguration of the new covenant, in which access to God under all circumstances is guaranteed by Christ’s one sacrifice that covers all transgressions (Matt. 26:27-28; 1 Cor. 11:25; Heb. 9:15; 10:12-18). Those who through faith in Christ have ‘received reconciliation’ (Rom. 5:11) ‘in him . . . become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). In other words, they are justified and receive the status of adopted children in God’s family (Gal 4:5). Thereafter they live under the motivating constraint and control of the love of Christ for them as made known and measured by the cross (2 Cor. 5:14).”
– J. I. Packer, “Sacrifice: Jesus Christ Made Atonement for Sin” (with thanks to Of First Importance.)
What we believe
The message at the heart of Christianity is really quite simple…