My gratitude goes to Burke Care for sponsoring the blog this week. Burke Care, which is a Biblical Counseling Coalition partner, offers Biblically-informed, care-centric, and kingdom-accessible discipleship care, equipping, and resourcing.
Over at 10ofThose you’ll find 50% off all ESV Bibles. Then, as you scroll down this page, you’ll find quite a lot of deals on other products. Also, look for the banner where you can sign up for their mailing list and get a free e-book every week for a year.
There are, indeed, some new Kindle deals to close out the week and the month.
(Yesterday on the blog: Are We Living in the Last Days?)

This is an interesting reflection on modern technologies. “As fearful as the nuclear bombs of the 1940s which stamped a new physical threat on the psyche of a whole generation, Big Tech has split the atom of human identity and no one is truly prepared for the cognitive radiation which will destroy truth at a cellular level within our societies and our souls. The fact that such things can now be written without a hint of hyperbole provides a hint at how near to the brink of new and fearful things we truly are.”

Timothy Paul Jones wants to make sure people stop passing along a false statistic. “The nine-out-of-10 dropout number isn’t true. It was never true, yet many church leaders still believe it. Take a trip with me to the origins of this statistic and why it’s long past time to lay this lie to rest.”

Karen Harmening writes movingly about loss. “Each sharp pain or deep sorrow is another point in our mapping out the borders of the cavernous crater of our child’s absence. In the process, we are not simply marking out the edges of destruction, we are also painfully reconciling the devastation with what remains. And for followers of Christ, we are reconciling both the devastation and what remains with our faith.”

“The Sexular Age creeps forward, inch by inch, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. But always moving forward. Stages come and are cemented in place. And then the next stage begins.” Stephen maps out some of those stages and shows how they move steadily forward.

Michael Kruger considers a fact of the resurrection that a lot of people overlook. “It is an often overlooked fact that provides the necessary context for the discussion. That fact is simply this: the earliest Christians came to believe, against all odds and against all expectations, that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead.”

Is Catholicism a creedal faith? Leonardo De Chirico asks and answers the question.

Loving someone means showing concern for his well-being, even if you are unable to fix his particular troubles.
—Jeremy Pierre & Deepak Reju

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.

There’s an eclectic little collection of Kindle deals to browse through today.

(Yesterday on the blog: What Can a Heart Do?)
Is Your Gospel an Urban Legend?
Jared Wilson asks you to consider whether the gospel you profess is really just a kind of personal urban legend.
Planes Have Nothing on Birds
I hate all the evolutionary talk in this article, but I do appreciate the point it makes: Humanity’s best attempts at designing planes still fall far, far short of the most ordinary bird.
Life and limb
Andrée Seu Peterson considers how God oversees life and limb and everything else.
Olaudah Equiano: The Unsung Evangelist
“Olaudah Equiano is a name of lasting significance in secular historical discussions, English literary circles, and among students of evangelical church history. Yet, his legacy is not nearly as widely known to the Church at large, certainly not to the degree of figures such as Jonathan Edwards or John Newton. This is truly lamentable.”
When Downcast, Look to the Throne
Doug reminds us of an ancient and biblical form of encouragement.
What We Miss When We Skip the Book of Ezra
“I couldn’t find any data to justify this suspicion, but I would guess that Ezra is not commonly read or studied by modern Christians. I get it—among other barriers, there are long lists of names in chapters 2, 8, and 10. Yet, this little book has much to offer!” It does, indeed, as this article explains so well.
Flashback: Success Beyond What We Can Handle
When they gained the thing they had longed for, they lost the progress they had labored for. I have seen far more people ruined by success than by failure.

There is more in Christ to save you than there is in yourselves to condemn you. —Christopher Love