Yesterday I finished Iain Murray’s biography of theologian John Murray (there is no relation between the two Murrays) and was struck by John Murray’s insistence on the importance of memorizing the catechisms. I was raised on a steady diet of the Heidelberg Catechism at church and the Shorter Catechism at home and can attest to…
How endless choice is making us endlessly miserable. A few weeks ago my cell phone went missing. For a few days we looked for it passively, keeping half an eye out for it as we went about our business in the house. It didn’t show up. So for one morning we tore the house apart,…
Making an impact on the world of social media. On Saturday I had 11,000 unexpected guests drop by. One of my stories got picked up by Reddit and StumbleUpon, two of the big social media sites, and it ended up on the front page of both sites concurrently. This caused about 11,000 people to drop…
Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast as Predators Ted Wallis, a doctor in Austin, Texas, recently came upon a lost child in tears in a mall. His first instinct was to help, but he feared people might consider him a predator. He walked away. ‘Being male,’ he explains, ‘I am guilty until proven…
Misusing the will of God. I dedicate this post to you, the person reading it. Before you were even born, God planned this very moment, the moment you would type the address of this site into your browser or the moment you would click a link from another site to arrive right here, right now.…
What do I do with the gift of discernment? What if I want it? What if I don’t have it? This is the third and final entry in this brief series dealing with the gift of spiritual discernment. The first part is available here: The Gift of Spiritual Discernment. In this first article we looked…
King for a Week is an honor I bestow on blogs that I feel are making a valuable contribution to my faith and the faith of other believers…or sometimes just because I really like them. It is a way of introducing my readers to blogs that they may also find interesting and edifying. Every two…
How can I know how the Holy Spirit has gifted me? This is the second part in what I anticipate will be a brief three-part series examining the spiritual gift of discernment. The first part is available here: The Gift of Spiritual Discernment. In this first article we looked at the question of “What is…
As you well know if you are a regular reader of this site, I’ve written a book called The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment and that book was the result of spending almost a year studying the topic of spiritual discernment. As I hunted down all the references I could to discernment and as I studied…
I thought it would be nice to have a guest blogger for the first time in a long while. Today I’m going to post a wonderful little article excerpted from one of George Whitefield’s sermons. In this sermon he exposited Luke 8:18 where Jesus said, “Therefore consider carefully how you listen.” These pearls of wisdom…
Every book needs a cover and, as luck would have it, my book now has one. Choosing a cover was far more difficult than I would have imagined. Some readers may have noticed a white cover on the Crossway site. It was there for a short time before being replaced. Though I didn’t mind the…
An interview with the editors of the Reformed Expository Commentary series. There have been a few times in the past few months that I’ve mentioned the Reformed Expository Commentary Series. This is a growing series of commentaries written from a distinctly Reformed perspective and targeted at both pastors and laypersons. Having used these commentaries for…
Teaming with Bob Kauflin to encourage you to dedicate yourself to reading. Yesterday Bob Kauflin wrote about reading (What – Me Read?) in response to a question sent to him by a reader. This young man asked: One facet of your site that is always of interest is your list of books you are currently…
Just helping a brother figure out Facebook. Josh Harris needs help with Facebook. In fact, he has resorted to begging for friends. It’s kind of sad, really. So I thought I would try to help a friend out with this Facebook Survey. Now Facebook is kind of a neat phenomenon. I’m not convinced it has…
The sovereignty of God in the storm. Thabiti Anyabwile, his family and his church are facing down a hurricane. A recent post at his blog is titled What Do You Think About God When Calamity Strikes? and in this post he makes reference to another recent tragedy and two different responses to it. When the…
Just thinking seriously about hell presses on my soul and presses upon my heart. I find it difficult to think about hell. Though I know that hell is real and that God means for us to know at least something about it, I find it hard to read about it and to ponder it. I’m…
Trusting our instruments rather than our sight or instincts. A few months ago I was watching a program called “Mayday,” which I believe is actually several other shows all rolled into one and branded for a Canadian audience. It is a show about disasters, and most notably, plane crashes. It sounds morbid, I admit, but…
Excerpted from Jim Andrew’s Polishing God’s Monuments. When the Lord’s ways do not neatly conform to our pat little paradigms of what seems (to our fallible minds) right and just, and good and faithful, it says something about human nature that usually the first thought that comes to mind is that something is wrong with…
Second Life and cheating in a virtual world. Friday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article about Second Life, a popular online digital world. It is inhabited by people like you and me, but people who take on a new identity–a second life. It is, by all accounts, an engaging experience. This is…
A couple of nights ago I received a new endorsement for The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment. As I mentioned the first time an endorsement came in, I will continue to share these because, in many ways, I feel that this book was a community effort as readers of the site prayed for me, encouraged me,…