Weekly Recommendations #1
Weekly Recommendations is a collection of articles/blogs/sermons/songs I recommend to feed your faith.
These are worth your time to read. We never graduate from learning:
“Reading together counters our individualistic tendencies and fosters humility and gratitude. By reading and discussing Scripture in community, we acknowledge our inability to fully grasp God’s truth on our own, and we learn to appreciate the insights of others. Gifts are shared, weaknesses offset, and personal interpretations exposed to inquiry. When we receive God’s revelation together and interact with one another, our personal biases are exposed, and other opinions are conveyed and considered. This teaches us to listen attentively, think carefully, question kindly, and respond humbly. Our souls are formed when we read together.”
“Saying yes to Christ as Lord requires self-denial. It demands that we deny our sovereignty and independence. John Calvin said self-denial is the sum of the Christian life. We no longer live for ourselves, because we are not our own. We belong to Christ, who commands, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). So we renounce the sinful excesses of selfishness that plague us: self-importance, self-promotion, self-indulgence, self-absorption, self-advocacy, self-centeredness, self-conceit, self-interest, self-pitying, self-promotion, and other forms of self-seeking and self-serving. In their place we seek unselfishness: self-denial, self-abasement, self-abnegation, self-abandonment, and self-sacrifice.”
“Wars are exhausting — especially long ones. That’s why you are often tired. Many soldiers, who experience the fierceness of combat, want to get out of it. That’s why you’re tempted to escape. That’s why you’re tempted to give up.
Don’t give up when your reputation is damaged because you are trying to be faithful to Jesus. “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matthew 5:11)
Don’t give up when waiting on God seems endless.Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:30–31)
Don’t give up when you have failed in sin. Don’t wallow. Repent (again), get your eyes off yourself (again), and fix your eyes on Jesus (again). Get up and get back in the fight. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9); if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:13)”
“In the writings of John Owen, I was shown how and why the promises of sexual fulfillment on my own terms were the antithesis of what I had once fervently believed. Instead of liberty, my sexual sin was enslavement. This seventeenth-century Puritan revealed to me how my lesbian desires and sensibilities were dead-end joy killers.
Today, I now stand in a long line of godly women — the Mary Magdalene line. The gospel came with grace, but demanded irreconcilable war. Somewhere on this bloody battlefield, God gave me an uncanny desire to become a godly woman, covered by God, hedged in by his word and his will. This desire bled into another one: to become, if the Lord willed, the godly wife of a godly husband.”
Always Learning,
Josh.
