This weeks Free Stuff Fridays is sponsored by Zondervan Reflective. They are giving away book bundles to three winners. Each winner will receive:
One (1) hardcover copy of Pilgrim Prayers by Tim Challies. Estimated retail value $26.99.
One (1) hardcover copy of Seasons of Sorrow by Tim Challies. Estimated retail value $26.99.
One (1) hardcover copy of 2084 by John Lennox. Estimated retail value $19.99.
One (1) softcover copy of What It Means to Be Protestantby Gavin Ortlund. Estimated retail value $22.99.

Tim Challies—author of Seasons of Sorrow—invites you into a treasure trove of devotional poetry from our spiritual forebearers.
This curated collection of 50 poems, which Challies has found over years of combing through volumes of poetry new and old, will offer you new language to express both joy and sorrow, praise and lament in any season of life.
Throughout Pilgrim Prayers, you’ll discover the poetic riches expressed through devotional prayers that celebrate the acts of God and marvel at his ways. This collection is designed for daily devotions and mediations and can be used for addressing specific topics in church gatherings or on special occasions.
Each entry has an introduction reflecting on the prayer by Challies, helpful explanations of any difficult phrases or words, related Scriptures for study, and a question for application and reflection.
These prayers, devotional gems of past generations, will bless a new generation of Christians as they seek to grow in love and obedience to the Lord.

An honest look at grief and fears, faith and hope. Combining personal narrative, sound theology, and beautiful writing, this is a book for anyone who has loved and lost.
On November 3, 2020, Tim and Aileen Challies received the shocking news that their son Nick had died. A twenty-year-old student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, he had been participating in a school activity with his fiancée, sister, and friends, when he fell unconscious and collapsed to the ground.
Neither students nor a passing doctor nor paramedics were able to revive him. His parents received the news at their home in Toronto and immediately departed for Louisville to be together as a family. While on the plane, Tim, an author and blogger, began to process his loss through writing.
In Seasons of Sorrow, Tim shares real-time reflections from the first year of grief—through the seasons from fall to summer—introducing readers to what he describes as the “ministry of sorrow.”
Seasons of Sorrow will benefit both those that are working through sorrow or those comforting others:

See how God is sovereign over loss and that he is good in loss
Discover how you can pass through times of grief while keeping your faith
Learn how biblical doctrine can work itself out even in life’s most difficult situations
Understand how it is possible to love God more after loss than you loved him before

Will technology change what it means to be human?
You don’t have to be a computer scientist to have discerning conversations about artificial intelligence and technology. We all wonder where we’re headed. Even now, technological innovations and machine learning have a daily impact on our lives, and many of us see good reasons to dread the future. Are we doomed to the surveillance society imagined in George Orwell’s 1984?
Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox believes that there are credible answers to the daunting questions that AI poses, and he shows that Christianity has some very serious, sensible, evidence-based responses about the nature of our quest for superintelligence.
2084 will introduce you to a kaleidoscope of ideas:

The key developments in technological enhancement, bioengineering, and, in particular, artificial intelligence.
The agreements and disagreements that scientists and experts have about the future of AI.
The key insights that Christianity and Scripture have about the nature of human beings, the soul, our moral sense, our future, and what separates us from machines.

In straight-forward language, you’ll get a better understanding of the current capacity of AI, its potential benefits and dangers, the facts and the fiction, as well as possible future implications.
The questions posed by AI are open to all of us, daunting as they might be. And they demand answers. 2084 is written to challenge and ignite the curiosity of all readers. No matter your worldview, Lennox provides clear information and credible answers that will bring you real hope for the future of humanity.

These days many evangelicals are exploring the more sacramental, liturgical, and historically-conscious church traditions, including Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. This hunger for historical rootedness is a welcome phenomenon–but unfortunately, many assume that this need can only be met outside of Protestant contexts.
In What it Means to Be Protestant, Gavin Ortlund draws from both his scholarly work in church history and his personal experience in ecumenical engagement to offer a powerful defense of the Protestant tradition. Retrieving classical Protestant texts and arguments, he exposes how many of the contemporary objections leveled against Protestants are rooted in caricature. Ultimately, he shows that historic Protestantism offers the best pathway to catholicity and historical rootedness for Christians today.
In his characteristically charitable and irenic style, Ortlund demonstrates that the 16th century Reformation represented a genuine renewal of the gospel. This does not entail that Protestantism is without faults. But because it is built upon the principle of semper reformanda (always reforming), Protestantism is capable of reforming itself according to Scripture as the ultimate authority. This scholarly and yet accessible book breaks new ground in ecumenical theology and will be a staple text in the field for many years to come.
Enter Here to Win A Zondervan Reflective Book Bundle!

May the God of love and peace be with you today.

(Yesterday on the blog: None of Us Will Ever Forget What You Did)
Important Contexts for Understanding Reformed Theology
Keith Mathison reminds us that context matters in history and theology as much as in Bible study. “Reformed theology was a fruit of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, and that Reformation took place in a particular historical and cultural context. The authors writing at the time wrote within a particular philosophical and theological context. Having a grasp of these various contexts is important for understanding Reformed theology. I want to briefly mention three such contexts: the historical, philosophical, and theological contexts.”
Sometimes Leaders Need to be Carried
Jared Wilson: “Leadership of all kinds is lonely and costly. It is tiring. For every person with a problem, he or she is essentially all that exists. Affliction has its way of self-centering. But all the problems that exist are the leader’s.”
Another Year Under the Sun
“People who ought to know keep saying that this year we will finally put the pandemic behind us. I’ve given up predicting myself, but I hope they’re right. If they are, I wonder how we’ll remember these last couple years.” Matt McCullough shows how Ecclesiastes may be particularly important at this time.
Should You Leave Your Church? (Video)
Todd Friel considers whether or not you should leave your church.
We Are Both Job and Job’s Friends
This is a helpful little reflection on the fact that we are sometimes Job and sometimes Job’s friends.
Carrying Each Others’ Burdens and Why It Can Be Hard
Carrying each other’s burdens can be hard, and this article tells why.
Flashback: I Feel I Think I Believe
…we as Christians must know what we believe and we must believe these things with strength and confidence. It is not wrong to feel, but it is not enough. Feelings will not sustain us when the world turns against us.

We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves. —David Platt

Identity is everywhere. We can hardly read an article in the news or watch a show on TV without encountering it. Identity defines our relationship to the world around us, to the other members of our society, and even to our own bodies. “This rapid rise in identity-thinking has caused a somewhat tense interaction with the Christian church,” says Matthew Roberts. “From the secular perspective, it has reinforced the assumption that Christians are just an irrelevance swept aside by the inrush of these new insights, featuring (if at all) as just one identity-group, and one for whom not much sympathy is spared. From Christians, it has been greeted with a combination of alarm at the outlandish new doctrines identity politics presents (gender fluidity in particular) and an assumption that there is a lot of new thinking for us to do to make sure that people of different identities are equally offered the gospel and (to a varying extent) included in the church.”

So what are Christians to do? How are we to think about modern notions of identity? That is the subject of Roberts’ new book Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self. “The conviction that underlies this book,” he explains, “is that, rather than being a new challenge to the Christian faith, the identity issue is, in fact, a very old one. Men have always identified themselves by their idols, and so the issue of identity is fundamentally one of idolatry.”
Key to understanding the book is his use of the word “Pride.” He does not use that word to communicate the opposite of humility, but as an umbrella term for the various identities more typically conveyed in the ever-changing acronym that begins with L and ends in +.
In the book’s first part, he explains that human beings are defined by worship—by what or who we worship. Created by God in the image of God to worship God, we fell into a state of sinfulness in which we will worship anything or everything in place of God. Yet our most basic and essential identity is defined by who we were made to worship. “Being images, our true identity is found in the God whose image we are, and whom we are made to love with all our heart and soul and strength. And so those who worship false gods, giving them the love due to the true God, cannot help but define themselves by those gods instead.” Not only that, but “individuals and peoples come to reflect the character of the (fictional) gods they worship. And integral to this is that individuals and peoples come to identify themselves by the gods they worship.”
This causes endless problems since “for all fallen human beings, there is a basic identity-conflict in play. We are one thing; we believe ourselves to be something else. We have a true identity, though we deny it and seek to suppress it; and we have a false identity, centred around our idols, which we cling to fiercely even though it diminishes our humanity.” The most basic issue with Pride is that it offers an identity created by humanity and, therefore, in direct opposition to the true identity assigned to us by the Creator God. “If we want to know who we are, we must worship the God who made us and, if we worship idols instead, we will believe ourselves to be what in fact we are not.”
The situation has gotten more serious in that many Christians have bought into the idea that Pride is an identity—that what are rightly behaviors are considered to be identities. This is an assumption that may flow naturally from a Pelagian understanding of humanity, but not an orthodox, biblical one. Turning to the deep riches of historic Protestant doctrine, Roberts shows that sinful desire is itself sinful. “While it is true that it is not sinful to be tempted externally, when temptation involves a struggle against our own desire to sin, it certainly is.” Hence, Christians cannot grant that sinful desires can lead to identity. We will certainly have sinful desires, but we must never say we are our sinful desires—to make them a point of identity.
Our desires are not basically good and harmless things which may be arranged equally well in any way we wish, like furniture in a living room. What we want to do with our bodies is not a matter of orientation, like deciding which wall of a room to hang a picture on. We are talking about powerful disorders of our nature which have taken what is good and ruined it, and thereby threaten to destroy us and others around us. Love and lust are not the same thing rotated slightly. We cannot speak of them as ‘orientations’ any more than we could say that kindness and cruelty, thankfulness and gluttony, humility and pride, or even righteousness and sin are just different ‘orientations’. They are diametric opposites. Neutral language is not appropriate to describe such things.
This leads to the book’s second part which addresses the ways in which God restores sinful human beings to be true worshippers. To do this he must free us from idolatry and restore us to our true identity. “Idolatry tells compelling lies about the nature of reality, about the significance of ourselves, about how we can find fulfilment, about what behaviour will lead to blessing and what will lead to curse, about what is good and what is evil. It first legitimizes sin, then normalises it, then demands it, promising blessings that it cannot deliver and threatening curses for non-compliance that it cannot carry out. And the human heart, with sinful desires unchecked by the grace of God, cannot escape from the power of such idols.”
God restores us to our true identity by giving us grace to stop creating an identity based on our desires. This will at first strike us as unfair or judgmental, for “it is of the nature of sin to deceive us with respect to this, and thus it is always the case that Jesus’ call for us to repent of sin is heard by sinners first of all as an attack on their identity and a threat to what they consider good.” And then God equips us to repent of that sin without considering it a great personal cost to do so, for “repentance is never in the Bible considered part of the cost of discipleship. Rather, it is one of its principal blessings, as we are freed from the clawing, clutching power of sin on our hearts and the destruction that it brings. The call to repentance sounds like bad news to the sinful heart, and it can be difficult and painful to walk away from sin. But it is never actually bad to do so. For sin is, in fact, bad, and it is a joy and a delight to be free from it.”
The fact is, “As creatures, our identity cannot come from inside of ourselves, for that is true of God alone, who unlike all His creatures is the ‘I am’, taking His being and His nature from Himself. Our nature is entirely contingent. That is why the identities of idolatry are always a shrunken version of what we really are, for we are seeking to be images of gods which do not really exist.” If we are to repent and follow Jesus, we need to be willing to leave behind any false identities we once claimed and receive the one the Lord has already given us.
There is much more in this book—far more than I can adequately summarize. Suffice it to say that I found it fascinating, compelling, and so very helpful. It has given me a great deal to think about as I consider society’s obsession with identity. It is, I’m convinced, an important contribution to discussions and debates among Christians. I highly recommend it and hope there will soon be some good critical interaction with it.
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