This week’s Free Stuff Friday is sponsored by Reformed Free Publishing Association, who also sponsored the blog this week with their article “The Ten Commandments for Children.” They are offering a free copy of The Ten Commandments for Children to each of ten winners.

Jesus told his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).
The Ten Commandments for Children is a resource you can use with your family to teach your children how they can show their love for Jesus.
How to Use the Book
As Curriculum: If you are looking for a curriculum to teach your children ages six to nine about the Ten Commandments, author Ron Cammenga has given you a great tool with this book.
Each chapter includes the main heading, “Let’s Listen and Learn.” Here the author defines the commandment; provides examples of how characters from the Bible kept or broke the commandment; and teaches children how we keep the commandment, both positively and negatively. So for the sixth commandment, children are taught that they must not be selfish or prone to fight and argue with others; but instead be kind, peaceful, and loving, even to their enemies.
As a Devotional: the author also wrote this book to be used as a devotional. Here are four features found in each chapter that will help you bring your children closer to Jesus as your family gathers for daily devotions.

Let’s Read the Bible: a short Scripture passage to read with your children to introduce them to the commandment
Let’s Learn a Bible verse: a short Scripture children can memorize in order to recall the teaching of the commandment later, such as Psalm 122:1 for the fourth commandment, “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.”
Let’s Talk it Over: discussion questions that will encourage children to recall what they’ve learned and then apply the commandment to their own lives
Let’s Sing: a related psalm to sing as a family, such as Psalm 100 for the first commandment and Psalm 15 for the eighth commandment

If you have children or grandchildren, Ten Commandments is a great devotional you can use to close out summer evenings or start school days off right.

What Others Are Saying About the Book
“At first glance, I loved the beautiful and colorful illustrations…Often children’s Bible books take a significantly simplified and surface-level approach to scriptures in an effort to make sure children can understand the text. However, while this book does break things down into understandable terms, it goes very deep into the commandments and explains them in a way that brings children to a deeper understanding…Overall, I thought this was a well-written book that is an excellent tool for helping younger children come to a deeper understanding of the Ten Commandments. It is colorful and engaging while still being Biblically sound and instructional.” (Dawn Peluso, The Schoolin’ Swag Blog)
“It took our family about 10 minutes to go through a chapter for our devotions after dinner, including reading, discussion, singing and prayer. The text of each chapter is simple enough that my six- and eight-year-old were able to grasp the main idea and come up with answers to the discussion questions (if they were paying attention), yet complex enough that my husband and I found it to be edifying as well. Reading through this book guided us to discuss with our children why and how we are called to live as God’s people in a way that we have not before. If you have elementary aged children, I highly recommend purchasing this book to use in your family worship.” (Abby Van Solkema, The Left Fork)
“The foundations of living a good life are contained in the Ten Commandments. It’s the ultimate addition to the Bible itself in being Godly and an excellent beginning to ensuring our children are living the best that they can. My grandsons enjoyed the book and the questions. It was enjoyable to see my older grandson respond to the questions and listen to his thought processes. The illustrations reminded me of books when I was young.” (Judy Joyce, Embracing a Healthy Family)
Would you like a copy of Ten Commandments to share with your children and grandchildren for years to come? Enter our giveaway below for a chance to win one of ten free copies!
To Enter 
Giveaway Rules: You may enter one time. When you enter, you agree to be placed on Reformed Free Publishing Association’s email list. The winner will be notified by email. The giveaway closes on October 20, 2023, at midnight.
Don’t want to wait for the giveaway, or maybe you’d like more than one copy? You can purchase The Ten Commandments for Children here. Subscribe to the Reformed Free Publishing Association email list on their website homepage to be notified of sales, news, and upcoming children’s book releases.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Christians only ever got along? Wouldn’t it be grand if all the discord we see in the world around us was completely foreign to the church? Wouldn’t it be heavenly if believers ever only experienced peace? I suppose it would be heavenly and, therefore, more than we can realistically hope for in this life. That being the case, we need to learn to deal with conflict—conflict within both the local church and the wider church.

When Christians Disagree

I suppose we are prone to think that the battles that rage in the church today are unusual or unique, but the sad fact is that Christians have disagreed with one another in every age of church history. The sadder fact is that they have often done so in ways that are concerning, shocking, or even downright horrific. This is sometimes true even of people we count as heroes of the faith, people who have influenced us in such meaningful ways.
In When Christians Disagree, historian Tim Cooper goes back in time to draw lessons from a sad episode from days past. He looks to the fractured relationship between two men we hold in high esteem: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Owen is, of course, the author of such enduring works as The Mortification of Sin and Communion with God. Baxter, meanwhile, wrote The Saint’s Everlasting Rest and The Reformed Pastor. Each of these books continues to bless, equip, and encourage God’s people hundreds of years later. Each of these men continues to influence the church for good. Yet each of them was hostile to the other and together they got locked into a long and ugly battle they never resolved.
The battle itself was over a relatively fine point of doctrine that I won’t get into in this review. There were important implications to it, of course, but it was not like one of the men was on the verge of utter apostasy and the other battling to protect the church from complete catastrophe. And, of course, it’s not like one of them showed the highest of godly character while the other behaved poorly. The reality is that both of them failed to display the kind of godliness we would have expected them to model on the basis of their books.
Cooper points out that “the fact that their story is an old one is to our advantage. We have nothing at stake in these two men, so we can observe them dispassionately and objectively. We can identify patterns and draw lessons in the hope that we can apply them to our circumstances.” And this is really the point of the book—to study their disagreement so we can better endure our own. At the end of each chapter, he pauses to carefully suggest what we might learn from them. These are helpful and nuanced observations and applications.
“The four hundred years of distance help separate us from the emotion of our own entanglements. Returning to our context, we might be able to see ourselves in a more detached fashion. Ordinarily, we are too close to our own conflict to easily understand the complex, unspoken, dimly recognized layers of what is actually taking place. Whether we are one of the protagonists or a disagreement is simply taking place around us, conflict is messy. It is difficult to see things clearly. But when we step back into the seventeenth century, we silence the emotional noise. In that relative stillness, it becomes possible to make observations and draw conclusions that serve us well as we return to the twenty-first century to negotiate our own context of conflict.” That is his hope for the book and he accomplishes it well.
“It is really quite remarkable,” he says, “that mature believers who are, in so many respects, magnificent examples of what it means to follow Jesus with faithfulness and sincerity can also be Christians with pronounced blind spots who demonstrate brittleness, selfishness, and ego in their relationships with others and who damage those around them. We are all human; we are each a mixed bag.” That being the case, may we all learn from these examples of godly but flawed men. May we learn to exemplify their strengths and flee from their weaknesses. When circumstances call us to disagree, may a book like this one teach us to disagree in a distinctly Christian way.

Earlier in the week I posted an article about being willing to suffer wrong in the face of those who wish to do us harm. After sharing it I came across a wonderful quote from F.B. Meyer that is at least parenthetically related. He counsels us on what to do when others attack our character and seek to harm our name. In short: wait on the Lord.

We are very anxious about our character, but if we live close to Christ, men will impute to us all manner of evil. They will impugn our motives, misrepresent our actions, and circulate malicious stories about us. The nearer we live to Christ the more certain it is it will be so, that if they called Him Beelzebub they will call us the same.
My belief is that we should be very careless about these things, and that the only time when we should defend our character should be when aspersions on it may injure the cause of Christ; that as far as we are concerned we should be content to lose our character and be counted the off-scouring of all things.
When these reports are circulating, and these stories being told, and these unkind words being hurled from lip to lip, we should immediately turn to our Master and tell Him we are content to suffer with and for Him. Ask Him to intercede for and to vindicate us, if it is His will we should be vindicated, and if not, to give us grace to suffer patiently and wait.
We are so eager to stand well; we are so sorry if the least thing is said against us; we are so irritated if we are misunderstood and misrepresented; we are so anxious to write the explanatory letter to the paper or the private individual. It is a profound mistake. We should be content to trust God with the aspersion, to leave to Him our vindication, and meanwhile to plod on, doing our work quietly day by day, as in His sight, only being more tender and thoughtful and careful of those who have done us wrong.
That is the true Christian spirit.