A friend and I recently realized that we have not been spending as much time together as we would like. We agreed it is high time to do something about it. But what to do?

We put our heads together and determined that we will deliberately build time for one another into our schedules. But we also determined that we need to maximize those times together. To ensure this we will go through an evaluation process to consider whether they were as meaningful as they could possibly have been. Did we listen attentively to one another? Did we avoid speaking about the minutia of life and discuss only things that are of the highest consequence? Did each of us spend the appropriate portion of the time speaking and the appropriate portion listening? Days later, can we remember all that the other person said? Did we wring every possible bit of value out of each moment?
I’m just making this up, of course. To do any of that would make a friendship burdensome instead of free. Such intense evaluation and introspection would rob the friendship of warmth and life and instead leave it bound by rules and regret. In fact, it would be a great way to utterly ruin a perfectly good friendship.
Yet there are so many Christians who relate to the Lord in just this way. The Christian faith offers the ability to have a genuine relationship with God himself, a relationship in which we speak and God listens and in which God speaks and we listen. We speak to God through praise and prayer and God speaks to us through Scripture and Spirit. It’s a wondrous and beautiful privilege we enjoy.
At least, it’s a wondrous and beautiful privilege we are meant to enjoy. But so often we fail to enjoy it because we bind it up in rules. Instead of just appreciating a relationship, we constantly assess it. Instead of appreciating the moments we spent together, we lament that we did not make more of them. Soon enough we find that we associate the relationship more with sorrow than pleasure, more with guilt than enjoyment. We undermine and even ruin a perfectly good friendship.
But freedom comes when we simply free ourselves to enjoy the relationship. Freedom comes when we speak freely, when we speak openly, when we speak about any and everything rather than only what is of the greatest consequence. Freedom comes when we stop being morbidly introspective about the relationship and simply enjoy it as a good and wonderful gift of grace.

To my American friends and family, I hope you enjoy your Memorial Day today. I’ve been saying that for years now and still don’t know what a proper Memorial Day greeting is or if there even is one…

Crossway has got us covered with a nice little list of Kindle deals.
(Yesterday on the blog: Death and its Twin)
Help Your Neighbor, Heal the Nation
“Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX (and potential new owner of Twitter), set the Twitterverse ablaze recently by tweeting [a cartoon], which describes how he believes the U.S. political landscape has shifted.” This begins a discussion of how Christians can and should relate to our neighbors.
Morality over Doctrine?
“It’s fascinating how much you can learn about secular culture when it’s not trying to express its beliefs. This comes out in films, TV series, and popular fiction, among other places. I guess that’s another piece of support for the argument that we’re most ourselves when no one’s looking.”
Why You Should Read More Biographies
Here are some good reasons to read more biographies. “As a kid, I hated reading. I thought it was one of the most boring things a person can do. Then I became a Christian and discovered the rich and worshipful world of theology. I’ve been a voracious reader ever since.”
Is Christ present in the Lord’s Supper? If so, in what way is He present?
This is such an interesting and disputed question. I wish they had had a Baptist on the panel to provide his perspective as well.
A Reluctant Culture Warrior
This one may be especially interesting to non-Americans who are trying to sort out how to deal with culture wars that flow from the US into their churches.
Cords Have Memory
If you’ve ever coiled a cord wrong, you have probably come to learn that cords have memories (which is why the worship leader at your church really wants you to put them away properly). But that’s not really what this article is about.

The infidel hurls the chief force of his caricature and vulgarity at the first book of the Bible. He feels that if he can capture that gate he can iconoclast the whole temple. —De Witt Talmage

The sermon fizzles instead of sizzles. The text seems to become opaque rather than clear. The illustrations fall flat while the application somehow fails to strike the heart, the mind, or the hands. The pastor seems distracted and discouraged while the congregation seems uninterested and unmoved.

I expect we have all sat through a few sermons that, if not quite as bad as all that, were still strangely weak. I am certain we have all experienced sermons that seemed feeble and powerless, that ostensibly wielded the Word of God but did so with about as much strength as a plastic sword. I am sure we have all endured some sermons that struck us with all the power of a gentle gust of wind.
And when the sermon falls flat, I suppose we all tend to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the preacher. Maybe he lacks skill or education or maybe he failed to give his sermon adequate time or preparation. Maybe he failed to pray earnestly in his study or failed to structure his week properly. If he’s the one who preached feebly, the fault must be his, right?
But who’s to say that, in the mind of God, the power of the preaching is entirely in the hands of the preacher? Who’s to say that the pastor’s task is to prepare the sermon while the congregation’s task is merely to prepare their own hearts to hear it? What if preaching is powerless not because of the pastor’s lack of preparation but because of the church’s lack of prayer? What if poor preaching is not the consequence of any failure on the pastor’s part but on the congregation’s?
Certainly every preacher should spend a good bit of his preparation time on his knees. Anyone who has preached will attest that God responds to those prayers in which we confess our sin, profess that we are overwhelmed before the text, and plead for divine clarity and ability. None of us is adequate for the task of preaching the Word. None of us, whether through clever words or rare skill or sheer determination, can generate the unction and anointing of the Spirit that we long to experience in the pulpit. None of us can force the Spirit to so “possess” and overtake us that he divinely empowers our words as we preach. That can only be called down, pleaded down, prayed down.
That being the case, why wouldn’t the congregation make it their responsibility to pray for the sermon—to pray for it to be accurate, to be effective, to be powerful? Why wouldn’t the church make it their task to plead with God to bless the preacher in his study, in his writing, in his preparation, and in his delivery? Why wouldn’t the church make it their duty to pray not only that their ears would hear, their minds understand, and their hearts receive, but that the preacher would be empowered by the Spirit in such a way that the listeners can’t help but hear, can’t help but understand, and can’t help but receive?
And so, on behalf of all the pastors who long to serve their church Sunday by Sunday, I call on all of us to plead with God for power in the pulpit. I call on all of us to make it our responsibility to pray for the preacher and the preaching. I call on all of us to consider that weak and powerless preaching may have as much to do—or even more to do—with the congregation’s lack of prayer than the pastor’s lack of preparation. I call on all of us to get involved in the preaching of the Word through our earnest prayers to God.