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A La Carte (December 11)

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Good morning. Grace and peace to you.

Today’s Kindle deals include a new selection from Crossway. I’ve also created a list of all the best commentary deals that are part of Eerdmans’ month-long sale.

I am aware that subscribers to the daily newsletter may be having trouble opening links if they are using Avast antivirus. I have reported this to the newsletter service and expect they will fix it soon. As a workaround, you can simply visit my site to access the links without security warnings.

(Yesterday on the blog: Welcome to a Whole New Site)

The Desecration of Man

You’ll want to make time for this long, powerful essay by Carl Trueman. “There can be no greater transgression than that against the sacred. In killing God, we grant ourselves the privilege of becoming gods ourselves. There is surely no greater exhilaration than in being God. And there is no more dramatic way of being God than in waging a holy war against the God-given nature of embodied human personhood.”

Help! I Don’t Like Evangelizing

Daniel Hames offers some help to those who don’t like evangelizing (and perhaps feel pretty guilty about it).

Why the HR Mindset Can’t Condemn Genocide

“In a recent congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania were asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university’s code of conduct.” You’ve probably heard by now how they replied. Why they replied this way is the subject of Joe Carter’s article.

The Lord Will Keep You From All Evil

The Bible says “The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.” But it doesn’t always feel that way, does it?

When Your Heart Goes Dark: How to Seize Hope in Suffering

Greg Morse looks to Lamentations to teach us how to seize hope in times of suffering and sorrow.

Walking in God’s Strength

Meanwhile, Doug considers the way God has been known to strengthen people in their weakness. “One of the struggles his health gives him is shortness of breath, yet it has never stopped him from preaching. Several times, he has been sitting in the pew waiting to preach, trying to catch his breath, but the minute he stepped into the pulpit, he had all the strength he needed.”

Flashback: When God Doesn’t Zap Away Our Sin

God does not zap away our sin, but gives us a new hatred for it and a new desire to do the hard work of battling it. He does not sovereignly remove it in a moment, but extends grace so we can battle it for a lifetime.

I lay this down as a rule without any exception, that those people who have the most faults themselves are most merciless in their watching of others.

—De Witt Talmage

  • Are You Binding the Wound or Aggravating It

    Are You Binding the Wound or Aggravating It?

    One of the privileges we have as Christians is the privilege of caring for one another—of blessing one another in our difficulties and comforting one another in our sorrows. In such “one another” ministry we represent God and extend love and mercy on his behalf. This is a precious and sacred ministry that falls to…

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    A La Carte (March 26)

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    A La Carte (March 25)

    A La Carte: Gen Z’s spiritual anxiety / Would you sell out Jesus for $4.37 billion? / Men need friendship, not just accountability / Building healthy relationships with your teens / The pastor’s wife / Sales and deals / and more.

  • Crash and Burn

    When Christians Crash and Burn

    The pictures quickly made their way around the world—pictures of an aircraft lying upside down in the snow just beyond runway 23 at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. On February 17, Delta flight 4819 landed hard, shearing off the right wing and flipping over before finally sliding to a stop. Remarkably, despite the crash and subsequent…

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    A La Carte (March 24)

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  • Pastoral Prayer

    A Pastoral Prayer

    Every now and again I like to share an example of a pastoral prayer from Grace Fellowship Church. I do this because there are few examples of pastoral prayers online and I thought these may serve to inspire themes, passages, or ideas as other pastors and elders prepare to lead their churches in prayer. Please…