Jeff Goins on writing:
Whether you’re starting to tackle writing for the first time or a life-long veteran, rest assured. There is better work you’ve yet to create. If you will make one important choice: Stop writing for accolades, and start writing for passion.
Once I stopped trying to please people, I found an even larger audience. I fell back in love with writing. And it made all the difference.
Every time I read Ray Ortlund, I’m always pushed towards godliness.
True preaching is more than preaching truth. It is also deeply personal. It rises from within a man. He is fully aware and engaged and intelligent. But he is forced to speak, compelled not by the expectations of others around but by the power of God within.
A man can preach the word, but still the word is not in him. It has not yet become interior to him, experientialized to him, a part of him. Such preaching is mere wind. True preaching is brewed within, as the gospel enters into a man, floods his awareness, rearranges his own interiority, and surges out of him as something divine and yet still his own.
Justin Taylor’s post on the five distinguishing marks of evangelicalism, drawn from Garth Rosell’s book The Surprising Work of God:
At the center is the cross…
Around the cross, and flowing out from the historical teachings associated with it, are four additional convictions that more any others have characterized the evangelical movement throughout its history:
(1) a shared authority (the Bible);
(2) a shared experience (conversion);
(3) a shared mission (worldwide evangelization); and
(4) a shared vision (the spiritual renewal of church and society). Continue reading Five Distinguishing Marks of Evangelicalism
Sorrow looks back, worry looks around, faith looks up. *
Enough looking behind your shoulders. There’s no use looking back at something you can’t change. The past gives no hope, only lessons to help you make godly choices in the future.
Stop looking around trying to gauge whether or not people approve everything you do. It is an exhausting way to live and you will never please everyone anyway. Live for the audience of One instead, seeking only what is honorable to Jesus. In the end, his opinion is the only opinion that matters. You will be surprised that unlike our parents, peers, and bosses, Jesus is way, way more gracious.
So look up, Christian, look up. Look to Christ who loves you without stopping, not to the past that haunts without mercy or the people around you that you couldn’t please anyway.
*HT: Sammy Lopez
[The problem with] twentieth-century Old Testament theology was its inability to come to terms with history as it had been understood in nineteenth-centry criticism and as it continued to operate rather uncritically in the twentieth century. We have already seen how, since Gabler in 1787, Old Testament study was generally understood as a historical study. The emergence of history as a primary co-discipline of Scripture study at the end of the eighteenth century signaled the determination of Bible scholars to break free of church interpretation that had longed regarded philosophy as its proper co-discipline. Continue reading The Shifting of the Ground
Banter is a gift, but it can also be a defense mechanism, giving the impression of likability without leaving anything of substance.
Jojo Agot 