You may have noticed that books tend to arrive in bunches. Once publishers identify that readers are interested in a particular theme, several will often commission authors to write on the subject. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen quite a number of books on friendship. Most of them address friendship in a digital…
Are you friends with your friends for the sake of your friends? Or are you friends with your friends for the sake of yourself? I suspect you don’t really know while you derive some clear benefit from the relationship. As long as the relationship is gain, not loss, as long as it enhances your reputation…
Last week my wife and I sat down and watched C.J. Mahaney’s keynote address from the Strengthening Your Marriage in Ministry event at Southern Seminary. His talk was titled “Marriage and Pastoral Ministry” and in it he shares with future pastors some of the lessons he has learned along the way and some of the…
I’ve been at this blogging thing for quite a long time now–a bit over 9 years. I’ve been at the daily blogging thing for almost as long. This means that I’ve got an extensive backlist of articles from years gone by. I thought it might be fun to pull out some of the articles I…
It must have been back in 10th or 11th grade, maybe even a little bit earlier, that my parents sensed a bit of purposelessness in my life. Where some kids hit their teens year and have an idea of what they’d like to do with their lives, I really had no idea at all. I…
Yesterday I began writing about How I Got Here in an article that somehow began to turn into a loose autobiography. I got as far as walking into my first day at a new high school and being confronted by a cute girl whose first words to me were “If you ever tell anyone, I’ll…
I want to remind you about rather a unique program I offer here at the blog (one that hundreds of you have already taken advantage of and seem to be enjoying). It is called Friends of the Blog. This is a program I established in order to give people an opportunity to support this blog…
I have returned from my week away–a week away from home and a week away from the day-to-day. On July 9th we bundled ourselves into the van and drove 1100 kilometers pretty much due south. That took us to a state park in Virginia–a state park far from civilization, one that is accessible only by…
Last week, amidst all the busyness of a three-day trip to Louisville and announcing a new podcast and a new publishing company, I also announced a new program called Friends of the Blog. Since so many readers of this site were enjoying Together for the Gospel at the time, far from their computers and RSS…
This is the first of three big announcements I’ll be sharing with you this week. Today’s keyword is Friends, tomorrow’s keyword is Cruciform and Wednesday’s keyword will be Connected. Stay tuned as you won’t want to miss any of them. By the end of this post I will have told you something, I will have…
So here I sit at 8:09 AM on a Thursday morning wondering what I am going to say today. There are times when I find writing this blog a great joy and there are times where I find it a heavy burden. Those tough times are blessedly few. Today I feel neither; I suppose I’m…
After a week’s absence (based on a week’s vacation) I am back today with the next chapter (Chapter 7) of Jeremiah Burroughs’ The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. The topic for this reading is “The Excellence of Contentment.” I do trust that many of you continue to read the book with me. Summary Every week…
Several months ago I received an email from a person who had happened by this blog. As you will see in the excerpt of that email, she had been searching for information about original sin and its application to babies who die in infancy (or who die because of abortion). Google led her here. This…
This is one of my favorites from The Valley of Vision as much for the concept of the prayer as its actual words. This is a prayer meant to follow prayer. Read it and I’m sure you’ll see, as I do, just how weak and listless my prayers actually are and how much even my…
I Hate That MusicBob Kauflin writes about why we should not be so fast to write off music we do not initially like. Of his ten points, I liked this one best: “Listening to music the masses have never heard of doesn’t make us better.” An Interview with Keith MathisonAlex Chediak has an interview with…
One Trillion DollarsYou’ve probably seen this already; I have too. But I just can’t get over it, so thought I’d post it so you can see it again. The Sin of Infant BaptismMark Dever has stepped up to defend his view that infant baptism is sinful. I’m not sure why this is controversial, but it…
Lucado and R.C. and Moore, Oh My! Here is your update on the latest reviews at Discerning Reader. We have uploaded six new reviews for you this week–reviews that come from the pens of four different reviewers and which examine books by some of the Christian world’s most popular authors. It’s a banner week! Leslie…
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…
When I take the time to do some edits to these live-blogged articles I often notice how often it is that speakers change from “me” to “you” to “us.” When I run through these articles I see this all the time and am tempted to change it, but generally choose to leave things just as…
As you may know, I am heading to sunny California next week in order to liveblog The Shepherd’s Conference. I am anticipating that it will be a time of great growth for me, as I learn from the teaching of such men as R.C. Sproul, Al Mohler, Ligon Duncan, Steven Lawson and Mark Dever. And…