May the Lord be with you and bless you today.
Westminster Books has a new book on sale for which I provided a foreword—a thoughtful and creative adaptation of the Heidelberg Catechism. It’s worth a look!
There are several new Kindle deals to look over today.

I enjoyed Murray Campbell’s reflections on the beginning and ending of the Olympics. “I enjoy the Olympics as much as any diehard sporting fan. And watching the Green and Gold outdo the Red, Blue and White is kinda ‘slay’. There was, however, a hubris weaving throughout the Games that tarnished the gold, silver, and bronze. The alkaline isn’t achievement and success, it’s Rousseau’s imagining that set the Olympic message from start to finish: secular humanism.”

Ryan Welsh considers whether it’s even possible for a man to feel like he’s a woman.

J.A. and Doug’s new book, The Soul-Winning Church, was written to advise Christians about how to create a culture of evangelism and outreach in the church. Get 25% off with code SOULWIN. (Sponsored)

Jonathan Noyes outlines three different kinds of doubt and offers help in navigating them.

Nicholas McDonald explains that when we are criticized we often have an ideal opportunity to clarify ourselves (rather than to defend ourselves). “I haven’t read [Megan] Basham’s book, so I’m not going to defend or refute her claims. What has been of particular interest to me … is the conversation folks have been having about how to respond to these kinds of things.”

Many churches end up going to the multi-service model for practical reasons, but is it really that practical? So much depends on what you believe church is meant to accomplish. “For most members, I’m convinced it’s because they just can’t see how it would be practical for their church to turn people away . . . since the church’s goal is to reach as many people as possible. And therein lies the problem. What if there is a better, clearer goal that should matter more to us than simply solving the ‘problem’ of a full building?”

I enjoy Esther’s original poems, and this one is no exception.

…this is not a time to fulfill a duty or cross something off my list. When I pray with my children, I am teaching my children to pray.

The real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us?
—C.S. Lewis

Somewhere out there in the great, wide world, someone is praying for you. He probably doesn’t know you and you probably don’t know him. You may not meet one another for many more years. But he’s praying for you nonetheless and has been for a very long time.

He is the father of a daughter. He is the proud father of a daughter who is very precious to him—more precious than anything he owns, more precious than anything he has ever done, ever made, ever accomplished, more precious than his very life. She is so precious that if he gained all the riches of this world but lost her heart along the way, he’d consider himself an abject failure.
This father knows that a time is coming when a young man will approach him and ask for permission to marry his daughter. He knows that a time is coming when a young man will insist that it is in his daughter’s best interests if she leaves her father and mother—leaves behind the ones who brought her into this world and who gave her such privileges and who raised her so well—and is joined to him instead (for such is the endearing conceit of young men). And, though it may be hard for this father to admit, he knows that this young man may just be right—that his daughter’s best life will be outside of his care and in another man’s, outside of his home and in one this new couple will build together.
From the day he welcomed his precious little daughter into the world, he knew that he would at some point entrust her to another man. And so he began to pray. From the day he laid eyes on his beautiful little girl, he knew he would some day lead her down a church aisle to place her hand in another man’s. And so he began to pray for him. From the day his heart became so deeply bound to hers, he knew hers would someday become bound to someone else’s. And so he began to pray all the more earnestly.
He prayed that this young man would come to saving faith—that he would repent of his sin and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. He prayed that this young man would grow in holiness—that he would conscientiously put sin to death and come alive to righteousness. He prayed that this young man would become a capable provider—that he would study hard and work diligently and make good on all the privileges afforded to him. He prayed that this young man would grow in godly character—becoming loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. Ultimately he prayed that this young man would prove worthy of his daughter—that he would know her to be as precious as she actually is and that he would treat her with all the love and dignity she deserves.
This is an interesting thought, isn’t it? It is an interesting thought, and an encouraging one, that since you were tiny, this man has been praying for you. He has been praying for you without knowing who you are, praying for you without knowing when you would meet, praying for you with longing that in the day that you emerged from the great crowd of humanity, he would see that God had heard his prayers and answered them.
This is an encouraging thought but also a challenging one, for it now falls to you, young man, to be worthy—as worthy as any man can be—to receive from his hand what he counts more precious than jewels, more valuable than his own heart, of greater worth than his own name and even his own life. It falls to you, young man, to honor his diligence in so faithfully interceding for his daughter. It falls to you, young man, to be God’s answer to a father’s prayers.

We’ve all heard that marriage was designed to make us holy more than to make us happy. And though it’s a bit of a trite phrase that threatens to force a false dichotomy between holiness and happiness, there is a measure of truth to it. At its best, marriage does, indeed, help us grow in holiness. It helps us in our lifelong quest to put sin to death and come alive to righteousness. Aileen and I knew this was true when we got married all those years ago, but as time has passed we’ve been surprised to learn how it’s true.

It had been our assumption that marriage would make us holy because we would essentially be enlisting another person to our cause—a person who would assist us in identifying sin and in helping us put it to death. “This is the will of God: your sanctification,” says Paul, and each of us would be involving ourselves in embracing God’s will for the other.
Certainly there have been times when each of us has helpfully and even formally pointed out where the other has developed patterns of sin and selfishness. There have been times when we have each helped the other fight a particular sin or a general sinfulness. Yet as we look back on the past twenty-three years, we see that this has been relatively rare. It’s not that we don’t see plenty of sin in one another and not that we are firmly opposed to pointing it out. No, it’s more that there is another way that marriage has helped us grow in sanctification—a way in which our efforts are directed at addressing ourselves more than fixing each other.
Each of us has our sins, our imperfections, and our shortcomings. Each of us is pretty well established in who we are and how we behave and each of us is, at 45, pretty unlikely to experience dramatic transformations in this. That’s not to say that we have given up or declared ourselves as holy as we can ever be. Far from it! But at this point we are assuming that the sins that dog us today will probably continue to dog us to the end—though hopefully with diminishing strength. And this means that the sin we have each had to tolerate in the other is sin we will likely need to tolerate for however many more years the Lord gives us. So while Aileen may grow in holiness by having me confront her in her sins, she seems to grow more in holiness by patiently tolerating my sinfulness—by loving me despite my sin and loving me as the Lord helps me progressively put that sin to death.
Then, while each of us has our sins, each of us also has our quirks, our preferences, our idiosyncrasies, our annoyances. And just like we assume that the sins that have dogged each of us through the first twenty-three will dog us for the next twenty-three, we assume that the things that just plain annoy us about one another today are likely to persist as well. And let’s be honest—it is often harder to tolerate a bad habit than a bad sin. It is often harder to tolerate the way your spouse chews his food or leaves her clothes on the ground than the way he sins against you or the way she remains unsanctified. And again, while Aileen might grow in her sanctification by having me formally point out a way in which she is sinful, she seems to grow more in sanctification by learning to accept and perhaps even embrace some of those non-moral but oh-so-annoying things I do—those eccentricities and matters of preference.
So perhaps the foremost way that marriage has helped make us holy is not so much in calling each of us to serve as the other’s second conscience, a junior assistant to the Holy Spirit in bringing conviction of sin. It is not in calling each of us to be a kind of moral sandpaper to actively scour off each other’s rough edges. Rather, marriage has helped make us holy by calling each of us to extend a kind of divine mercy toward the other—to simply live lovingly with someone who is prone to be sinful and irritating.
In marriage, God allows us to see one another as we really are, then to accept one another as we really are—as holistic human beings who are a mixture of holy and depraved, grownup and immature, wonderful and almost unbelievably annoying. Marriage makes us holy not just in compelling us to identify and confront sin in the other, but also in calling us to bear patiently with another person’s sin, preferences, and bad habits. In other words, marriage makes us holy in the way it calls us to be like God in overlooking offenses, in imparting mercy, in extending forgiveness, in displaying compassion, in refusing to be petty. Thus, the great sanctifying challenge of marriage is not so much to fix one another, as to imitate Christ.