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A La Carte (July 2)

friday

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Logos users will want to check out the great commentary sale they’ve got going on right now. (And, while you’re at it, maybe grab their free and nearly-free books.)

There are a couple of good Kindle deals today, including a relatively new title from Nancy Guthrie.

My Life as a Christian Under a Communist Regime

Zhang San reflects on living the Christian life under a communist regime. “It may surprise you, but from my perspective the main suffering for Chinese Christians is not physical persecution or lack of religious liberty but bad theology, though the reason behind bad theology is the lack of freedom.”

Critical Race Theory: Civil Rights Upside Down

Greg Koukl has a long article about CRT which is meant to be “not so much a critique of CRT as it is a clarification of its basic elements, a comparison between it and the ethics of the civil rights movement of the ’60s, and a caution regarding its totalitarian tendencies.”

IS YOUR WEBSITE SENDING THE RIGHT MESSAGE TO PEOPLE WHO VISIT?

Your website is most often the first impression people have of your church, ministry, or business. What are people seeing when they visit yours? Mere Agency knows how to build sites that make the right impression. They’ve done it for hundreds of organizations of all shapes and sizes and can do it for you. (Sponsored Link)

The Unbelief in My Belief

Glenna Marshall considers those little opportunities we get (and often fail to take) to share the gospel. “You are just a messenger of a good, good message. You can share it with hope instead of fear when you entrust every conversation to the Lord. His ways will not be thwarted by stammering or awkward silences.”

The Spleen, Once Regarded as Vestigial, Now Recognized as a Critically Important Organ

At AiG is a long and interesting article about the spleen, which was once regarded as vestigial and useless…until scientists looked a little closer. The article aptly shows the difference between looking at the body as evolved versus looking at it as designed.

Dust

T. M. Suffield: “There’s a feeling that comes with long difficult work that ends in forming something that you made. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but the nearest I can think of is transcendence. That incredible effort can be turned into something new, that speaks of you as its maker and bears your stamp on its every surface. That blood, sweat, and tears can be poured into a place until you have a form. As I write it is yet unfinished, but the shell is taking on warmth and life. Bricks are becoming a dwelling.”

Poena Cullei: The Worst Roman Punishment

I find articles like this one helpful in better understanding the context in which the Old Testament was written and the early church began.

Flashback: When Failure Saves and Success Destroys

Here’s something I’ve learned through 40 years of success and failure: God’s care for us may be better expressed in allowing us to fail than permitting us to succeed.

Though our innocency will not secure us from troubles, yet it will greatly support and comfort us under our troubles.

—Matthew Henry

  • Throw Out the Buoys

    Throw Out the Buoys!

    When I was young, my family owned a cottage on a lake. From a young age, I loved to head out in our little motorboat so I could explore that lake and the others that were connected to it. I could easily make a day out of slipping into little inlets to see where they…

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    A La Carte (January 29)

    A La Carte: Your phone habits / A guide for single women / JFK, conspiracy theories, and the Deep State / So what if you’re bored? / God’s a writer / Hard relationships / Kindle deals / and more.

  • Happy Lies

    Happy Lies

    I’m quite certain you have heard of the New Age movement. Though its popularity seems to have crested and begun to wane some time ago, it continues to wield a good bit of influence. But I wonder if you’ve heard of another similarly-named but quite different movement called New Thought.

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (January 28)

    A La Carte: Parenting is hard / The wildness of orthodoxy / Rubbing shoulders throughout eternity / Glorifying ourselves / The middle of somewhere / Is Roman Catholic baptism valid? / Excellent Kindle deals / and more.

  • Who Am I?

    It is not simply that we as a culture have lost our knowledge of God, but that in so doing we have also lost sight of ourselves. “Who am I?” is the question of the age.

  • Church cemetery

    If I Could Change Anything about the Modern Church

    I have often been asked what I consider the greatest weakness of today’s church or what I would change about today’s church if I could. Such questions make for good discussion at a conference Q&A session but they are also pretty much impossible to answer in a compelling way. It’s not like any of us…