The God of love and peace be with you today.

Logos users will want to grab the free book and at least consider the nearly-free ones.
(Yesterday on the blog: Don’t Waste the Days When You Feel Little Need for God)
The Mustard Seed Mum: Pressured to be perfect?
Ruth Clemence: “The start of being a good parent is realising that your performance is not being measured against anyone else. It’s not a competition, even if it feels like it.”
Is There Such Thing As Random?
“We don’t choose our moments of suffering, or the times we are pressed into service; they usually come on suddenly and without warning.” Cara reminds us that God orchestrates perfect timing.
What Is Transgenderism?
Here’s an article from Rosaria Butterfield on transgenderism. “Transgenderism emerged from this feminist political rejection of the creation ordinance that says God made human beings male and female, so their biological sex and not their internal feelings determines their maleness or femaleness. Transgenderism, instead, argues that our internal sense of self is what makes us men or women.”
Speechless
“Deathly pale in light of the vision. No strength. Alone and overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion, Daniel drops. Face to the ground. Powerless. Speechless. Unable to breathe. And the Lord responds to His servant. With tenderness and strength.”
Touch This Tree and You’ll Want to Die
Gene Veith writes about an actual tree that, if you touch, you’ll deeply regret it. He also draws a spiritual lesson from it.
I Remember
Andrea Sanborn reflects on the beauty and necessity of the Lord’s Supper.
Flashback: Why Should We Remember what God Forgets?
Why should we dwell upon the sins we have committed that God himself has forgotten? Why should we live in a shameful past that God has already put out of his faultless mind?

Whatever you lack, if God is yours, if you are God’s child, you have all. —Jeremiah Burroughs

Like it or not, we live in a world dominated by social media. While many older forms of media continue to exist and to exert their influence, all have in some way had to bow before the ascendancy of new media. It is pervasive, it is ubiquitous, it is addictive, and it is changing everything.

Yet because social media rose with lightning speed and so quickly became nearly omnipresent, we may already have lost sight of the influence it has over us. David Foster Wallace once famously told of two young fish who were swimmingly merrily along when they met an older one. That older fish nodded at them and asked, “How’s the water?” As they swam away, one turned to the other to ask “What’s water?” And in much the same way, social media has become so integral and essential a part of our lives that we may have stopped noticing it. Yet it is so dominant, so powerful, so manipulative, that we need to notice it and to ask how it is changing us, how it is forming us, how it may even be owning us.
Chris Martin’s new book Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media is meant to help us see that the proverbial water we swim in these days is toxic and that it has been made toxic by social media. The goal of the book “is to help you recognize that social media is changing the way you think, feel, and live. Like water to a fish, social media has come to pervade the lives of everyone.” Indeed, it has become very nearly inescapable and unavoidable. Thus his call is not to delete all of our accounts and to try to exist without them. Rather, “I simply want you to recognize that social media is changing how you think and feel about life and largely in negative ways.” Having come to such a recognition, you may wish to delete your accounts or you may wish to simply reorient your relationship with them. Either way, understanding the way social media works will lead to some kind of application in your life.
The book is divided into three parts. The first sets the context by tracing the history of social media (or “the social internet”—Martin’s preferred term), by explaining how it works, and by showing how it came to take so prominent a place in our lives. The second part offers five ways that the social internet shapes us: it causes us to believe that attention assigns value, it causes us to trade our privacy for expression, it causes us to pursue affirmation instead of truth, it causes us to demonize people we dislike, and it causes us to destroy people we demonize. The third part offers a way forward that includes disciplines that exist outside of our phones and computers: studying history, admiring creation, valuing silence, pursuing humility, establishing accountability, and building friendships. It’s a powerful combination that pulls back the curtain on the companies, apps, and algorithms that play so integral a role in our lives. It nicely balances information with calls to action so that we can apply what we’ve learned to live better lives.
I’ll close with the words of the brief endorsement I wrote after reading an early manuscript of this work: Chris Martin has established himself as one of the foremost Christian thinkers when it comes to digital technologies in general, and the social internet in particular. In this book, he demonstrates why it is so important for Christians to think well about these world-changing, heart-shaping, soul-forming technologies. I highly recommend Terms of Service to anyone who wants to better understand how we can take back what they’ve so eagerly taken from us.

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

There are, as usual, a few Kindle deals for those who are interested.
(Yesterday on the blog: Extending the Borders and Enlarging the Territory)
Cultivating a Gracious Climate in Your Church
“A message of grace may attract people, but a culture of grace will keep them. What our churches need, not in exchange for a gospel message but as a witness to it, is a gospeled climate. But how do you get that? How do you develop in your church community a safe space to confess, be broken, be ‘not okay’? What are some ways to cultivate a climate of grace in your church?” Jared Wilson explains.
Skeleton Keys (Video)
This new video from The John 10:10 Project is a wee bit unusual, but still informative.
The Hard Blessing of Conjoined Twins
“Dwight and Stephanie Castle’s twin babies don’t sleep at the same time. When one is resting, the other is moving around, kicking and wiggling and babbling. The problem is, the girls are attached—from chest to belly button. The awake baby is constantly bumping her sleeping sister.” Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra reports.
Commercialising Church
“I won’t speculate what their problems may be, but this is a terrible idea. So terrible it surely only needs to be laughed at. What we offer we offer for free. Yes, we ask for people’s money, that’s how all churches exist and continue to run, but these are generous offerings in response to what they received from God.” This article explains why Facebook’s proposed options for churches may be a terrible idea.
Peace. Be Still.
Susan Lafferty explains the importance of the time Jesus said these words.
The Search For Answers And Two Responses When You Find Them
“We look not only for lost or misplaced items, we’re also looking for answers. Truths to address our feelings of emptiness, dissatisfaction, and hurt; the reasons for our pain and suffering, or the next step to take when we face a fork in the road. Trying to fit the pieces of our puzzle together, we look desperately to the world around us for solutions and try different methods of escape or resolution.”
Flashback: 5 Bad Substitutes for Discipline
In her book Parenting Against the Tide, Ann Benton lists five poor substitutes for disciplining our children—five poor substitutes that fail to address the heart.

You are sanctified by remembering and believing afresh that you are justified by what Jesus did on the cross for you. —David Powlison