There is a variety of Kindle deals for you to browse today. Remember that I’ve got an X account dedicated to it: @challiesdeals.

(Yesterday on the blog: What Becomes Of All Our Dreams?)

Robb Brunansky: “Two responses often prevail when celebrities claim to have been converted to Christianity. On one end, we have people who excitedly embrace them, platform them, and treat them as de facto religious leaders. They see these celebrities as great spokespeople for Christ and the Christian faith. They believe that having such cultural influencers on the side of truth will result in massive societal impact, with perhaps millions of unbelievers suddenly coming to faith in Christ.”

I don’t follow basketball or care about it even a little bit but was still glad to have read Daniel’s analysis of a recent trade. He draws an important lesson from it. “If you are reading this and you are not a sports fan and have zero idea what I’m talking about, please bear with me. There is a lesson here for you. Let me explain…”

At a time when the church is often influenced by superficial thinking about the Christian faith, The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul compels readers to tremble at the majesty of the Lord and His wonderous gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. Request the 40th-anniversary edition of this celebrated book when you make a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. (Sponsored)

This is a good principle to ponder: the temple is the best place to hide an idol. “Idolatry is easy to hide in the temple. The simplest way to foster idolatry is to smuggle it into the place of worship.  The slyest manner in which to promote worldliness is to parasitically attach it to the worship of the one true God.”

“Dopamine media is the most powerful, pervasive, and engineered form of communication technology in human history, and it’s not shaping us to love Jesus most. It’s not shaping us to love our neighbor. It’s shaping us into pleasure-seeking addicts. Christians must recognize that, at its heart, this technological revolution has resulted in an institutional, relational, and formational crisis for the church.”

Chap offers some wisdom on overcoming blind spots in our parenting and leadership. And it’s certain we all have some!

This is written specifically for counselors but can be useful for all of us as we communicate with others. Sometimes it is best to let the silence linger.

One matter that constantly perplexes me is just how difficult it is for young Christians today to figure out dating and romantic relationships. What was quite straightforward in my day seems to have become much more complicated in these days.

Sometimes the most godly thing a mouth may do is keep silent.
—D.A. Carson

My dad loved to cook. This was a passion that began relatively late in his life after the kids had moved out. With an empty nest, my parents were able to live a slower-paced life and my dad began to dabble in cooking. He soon found that he loved it and that my mother was only too happy to pass the torch. He loved to freestyle and experiment, to forsake recipes to just see where his taste buds would lead him. It is one of the tragedies of his sudden and unexpected death that he had just treated himself to a new high-end range when he died. Never once did he get to cook upon it. Never once did he get to enjoy it. When I visited my parents’ home after he died, the range was resting in its place in the kitchen, but with the packaging still around it. He had never even opened it.

My son was in love. He had gotten engaged to a lovely young lady and together they had begun to plan their wedding. They had settled on a date and a guest list and begun to plan their ceremony and order their invitations. And then he, too, was taken every bit as suddenly and unexpectedly as my father. When I arrived at his college dorm room and opened his computer, I found his wedding planning documents open and active, the last tasks he had worked on before going to be with the Lord. He had died a fiancé but not a husband, his plans interrupted, never to be realized.

There is an element of tragedy in every death. Even the oldest among us has dreams and plans, ideas to try, and interests to explore. And if even the oldest, how much more the youngest? All of us leave something unfinished behind us, some dream interrupted or plan broken, some idea untried or interest unexplored. When we come to the end of our days we leave things begun but not ended, attempted but not accomplished, desired but not completed.

What becomes of all of this? What becomes of the passions we could not explore, the dreams we could not realize, the gifts we could not deploy for the good of others and the glory of God? Why would God give it only to take it away, bestow it only to have it go unused?

We would despair were it not for the promise of life that continues beyond the grave and extends into the world to come. We have no reason to believe that God will completely recreate us when he makes all things new. Rather, he will perfect us while leaving what makes us “us” intact. All those passions he conferred, gifts he bestowed, interests he assigned—surely they are not eradicated but simply carried over. There will be cooking in heaven, will there not—opportunities to express culinary creativity? There will be relationships in heaven, will there not—deep and abiding friendships, even if not marriage? The existence to come is within a new heaven and a new earth, but surely one that is very much like this one—or is, in fact, this one.

There is tragedy in every death, and it is not only the tragedy of bidding farewell to one we have loved. There is also the tragedy of so much that is left undone. But by faith we can believe that the things we have learned, loved, desired, and attempted will not be taken entirely away. The interests we have developed and passions we have explored will not prove to be wasted or eradicated. Rather, they will simply be carried over from here to there, from this place of interruption to that place where time will never end and death will never interrupt. As one pastor says, “One of the surprises of heaven will be our finding there the precious hopes, joys, and dreams which seemed to have perished on earth—not left behind—but all carried forward and ready to be given into our hands the moment we get home.” What a homecoming that will be!

I’ve got a few different deals to make you aware of today:

Logos users, the NICOT and NICNT series of commentaries are on sale. These volumes are the backbone of a good commentary collection. Be sure to also grab a free commentary.

My book Pilgrim Prayers is on sale at 10ofThose with coupon code timpodcast. (Also, I was featured on their podcast which you can listen to via any of the apps.)

Westminster Books has a great deal on a new book about the future of Reformed apologetics.

Today’s Kindle deals include several helpful books about children, worship, and more.

J.A. Medders: “A pastor asked me what I would say to a 25-year-old devouring John Mark Comer’s books. And he also wanted to know my general take on JMC.” He offers some good thoughts.

Nadya Williams writes about something we both fear and resent: inconvenience. “We are desperately afraid of inconveniencing others—and at the same time, we are no less desperately annoyed when others inconvenience us. The two are connected. But you know who will rarely inconvenience you? Inanimate objects that operate the way they ought.”

Through robust study content and high-quality materials, The Church History Handbook is a valuable resource for studying every major period of church history and is designed to last a lifetime. Pre-order through Lifeway.com and receive 40% off your order when you enter the promo code CHALLIES40. (Sponsored)

“While a biblical worldview may be accused of reinforcing gender stereotypes and putting women into a straightjacket of patriarchal oppression, when applied rightly, it actually provides beautiful freedom in gender expression (how you express your maleness or femaleness) while leaving no ambiguity regarding gender identity (whether a person is male or female).”

Brad Littlejohn writes about AI and his concern that “the risk of AI isn’t the extinction of humanity, it’s the abolition of man.”

Stephen writes about the Lord’s Supper and the elements we use to celebrate it. Specifically, he writes about gluten-free bread and non-alcoholic wine.

Here is one pastor’s take on why he thinks it might be wise to bring a printed Bible to church instead of relying on a smartphone.

Parenting teens has been a pleasure and a privilege. It has been an honor and blessing. So for those who have been warned only of the trials to come, let me recount some of the joys.

God’s grace is more clearly seen and more deeply savored in our weaknesses than in our strengths.
—Jon Bloom

The God of love and peace be with you.

Today’s Kindle deals include a few picks for pastors and a few for others. As usual, there’s lots to choose from.

(Yesterday on the blog: Dumb Will Do)

If you are living in secret sin, please read what Esther Liu has written here. “From the title, you may assume I will tell you to bring your secret sin into the light, which is true. Yet, I know this invitation may sound trite and unappealing. If it were that easy, you would have done so already—but chances are it is more complicated for you.”

Olivia’s article is long but rewarding. She offers a biographical story of coming to a deeper understanding of God’s love and concern for those who are suffering. “I imagined my tears evaporating up to heaven. I wondered how many trucks full of tear bottles God had to reserve for me. Maybe he had to special order an extra large size or a whole fleet of those massive semis. ‘WIDE LOAD,’ they would say in a bright yellow banner while they drove down the heavenly highway.”

This is another excellent biographical article. Vanessa Doughty tells how the Lord brought her back when she began to stray. “Satan will use anything to entice us away from our devotion to Christ. He can use even good things like family, friends, a career, an education, entertainment, and prosperity as tools to draw us farther from Jesus. For me, he used my desire for knowledge to lure me farther from Christ.”

“Over and over, God commands his people to remember how hard, dark, sad, and ugly things were. And then, to celebrate the incredible contrast of his love, goodness, and might that rescued them from adversity of all kinds. The remembrance we’re called to isn’t a ‘focus on the positive’ outlook that skims past the hard and onto the happy ending. In order to truly understand the depths from which we have been saved, we have to admit how deep those depths were.”

Daniel considers what appears to be a rise in people instituting a no-contact rule in response to difficult relationships.

Those who are experiencing relational conflict (or attempting to help others through it) will benefit from this one by Brad Hambrick.

…what if your limits are not a bug but a feature of your humanity? What if these limitations are God’s gift and, therefore, good and worthy of embrace? 

The church is not only where disciples go once a week; it’s where disciples are made.
—Michael Horton

There is one memory of my earlier years as a Christian that I’ve never been able to shake. It’s a formative memory that I actually don’t think the Lord means for me to shake, for it has often reminded me that, when it comes to the local church’s worship, the stakes are sky high.

One Sunday we were worshipping at a church that was connected to a serious tradition but now dabbling in what some have labeled the attractional model. The leaders of that church had become convinced that to interest prospective attenders and grow the size of the congregation, they needed to make their services more appealing. They needed to remove some of the traditional elements of worship and replace them with ones they deemed fresh and attractive.

Sadly, what they deemed fresh and attractive proved to mostly just be unserious. By the time we attended, the prayers had become perfunctory, the preaching focused on felt needs, and the music relied on bad adaptations of modern hits. It wasn’t all bad: Bland coffee had given way to boutique coffee but, sadly, at the same time, sound principles of worship had given way to pragmatic ones.

After the preacher had told us how to be better people by trying harder and after the pastor baptized a man who told the congregation he was still co-habiting with his girlfriend, the band struck up yet another badly-rhymed and badly-performed adaptation of a pop song from the 80s—a song about partying and drunkenness that they had modified to ostensibly be about Jesus. By this time I was cringing with second-hand embarrassment and constraining what I was certain was righteous anger. I whispered to my family, “This is just so dumb. I’m never coming back here.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. It was just plain dumb. And we never did return.

It struck me that day and has struck me often ever since that to harm a church, Satan does not need to make the worship services heretical. He does not need to replace truth with damnable error. He just needs to make the worship services dumb. He just needs to make them trite and vapid. He just needs to make them unserious. And eventually, the church will diminish in strength and decline in power and lose the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It’s important to consider, then, that if Satan wants to harm your church, it is possible he will raise a heretic to the pulpit or introduce a wolf into the membership. But it is also possible he may cause the members to begin to feel embarrassed by what they consider old-fashioned patterns of worship and to ask for or demand something else. He may cause the pastors to begin to feel sheepish about lengthy prayers, to doubt the usefulness of reading substantial passages of Scripture, to wonder if it inhibits preaching to tie the point of a sermon to the point of a text. He may encourage the church to pursue what they deem fresh and attractive or what they think will draw the community around—perhaps especially in the area of music. He’ll slowly reshape the church from the instructions of Scripture to the whims of the people. He’ll slowly reshape the church’s worship so it slides from holy to worldly, from sacred to profane, from meaningful to dumb.

There is another church I remember from my childhood. My aunt and uncle attended a Presbyterian church that held to a strict interpretation of the Regulative Principle. The only elements the church permitted in worship were the elements the New Testament explicitly prescribes. The most obvious evidence of this was in their singing, for they sang only the Psalms and sang them without any musical accompaniment. I once asked my aunt why, when she visited our church, she would not sing the hymns. Her reply was, “In the Old Testament, God struck people dead for worshipping him the wrong way.” I can’t say that I ever agreed with all the convictions of those Presbyterians or the strictness of their understanding of the Regulative Principle, but I can most certainly say that I respected them. Whatever else was true of their worship, no one could say it was unserious. No one could say they took their instructions from anyone but God.

And this, I think, is the key. The great question each person and each church needs to ask is simply this: Do we believe God tells his people how to worship, or do we think God leaves that to us? Do we need to trust that God knows how we need to worship him and that he has given us specific instructions, or can we determine that God is glad to have us worship him however we see fit? Different answers to those questions will lead churches in very different directions.

The answer that was nearly universal until the rise of the attractional model and the answer that will serve us best in any age is this: God knows us better than we know ourselves and therefore tells us how we ought to worship. His instructions are not to be received with embarrassment or resentment and not with hesitancy or disobedience. Rather, they are to be received with humility, awe, and wonder that God would not only permit us to worship him but tell us how to worship him in the ways that are best. This means that instead of creating ways to worship we can simply receive ways to worship and instead of trusting ourselves, we can trust him. As always, it falls to us to search his Word and then obey his Word. It falls to us to worship him as he has commanded, for he knows best.

Good morning. Grace and peace to you.

There are lots of great books lined up for you in today’s Kindle deals. The list includes several that are for parents.

“Self-shaming is a defense mechanism rooted in the belief that we’re unlovable to God and others. We voice the harsh words we fear others are thinking—as if beating them to the punch might soften the blow or inspire us to change. Ironically, self-shaming doesn’t protect us; it only perpetuates harmful lies and keeps us in bondage.”

How can you know if you are self-righteous? And what does it have to do with “I don’t deserve this?”

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This wonderful piece of writing celebrates one of God’s great creatures and draws some important lessons from it.

I enjoyed this meditation on what we may see and know in eternity.

Paul O’Brien considers the concept of equality and asks where it comes from.

This is universal, isn’t it? “I have to admit that my heart sometimes grows cold to realities that should never cease to amaze me. It’s easy to become spiritually dull at truths that cause angels to wonder.”

In a small church a pastor will be able to get to know—to really know—his people and the value of each and every soul. Where in a big city church he may preach to anonymous masses, in a small country church he will preach to well-known individuals.

In the same way that playing matchbox cars on the front lawn loses its attractiveness when we’re invited to spend the afternoon at a NASCAR race, sin loses its appeal as we allow ourselves to be re-enchanted time and again with the unsurpassable beauty of Jesus.
—Dane Ortlund

There is a close connection between prayer and humility. This being the case, there is also a close connection between prayerlessness and pride. Those who believe they are self-sufficient feel no need to petition God for his help, for his strength, for his wisdom. It is only those who admit their lack who will cry out to God.

In this vein, H.B. Charles lays out a sobering challenge that is worth deeply pondering and working into your life: “The things you pray about are the things you trust God to handle.” Conversely, “the things you neglect to pray about are the things you trust you can handle on your own.” In this way, both prayer and prayerlessness are deeply significant and even deeply symbolic.

To pray is to admit we need help; to fail to pray is to indicate we feel no need for help. Is there any area of life in which we need no divine help whatsoever? Of course not! Then there is no area of life we should not pray about; there is no petition too small. We can, we must, make our requests known to God.

I’m grateful to P&R for sponsoring the blog this week. They wanted to ensure you had heard about a new book on apologetics titled Every Believer Confident. The book “simplifies apologetics and empowers Christians to effectively present the gospel in all its glory and rationality.”

There are, indeed, some new Kindle deals today. You should also check out Westminster Books where they’ve got a deal on Gavin Ortlund’s new book about disagreeing but remaining friends.

(Yesterday on the blog: Lest We Drift)

Melissa has a good one here. “God uses all kinds of means to refine us, to make us more like Jesus. And there isn’t much that will cause us to cling to Him more than the unexpected. We often feel afraid, cheated, angry, and alone when our visions of what would be are shattered. Once we are operating in the heartspace of what could have been, well, it takes time for us to begin to see God’s work in us.”

I had never heard of the band Stillcreek until yesterday, but then basically listened to their music on repeat. They are singing their way through Psalm 119 and doing so beautifully. I have linked to the first song here, but look up the EP on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever you use.

Stephen always asks good questions. “Here’s a question for the church as it stands in the shallows of the post-Christian beach in the West: Are we simply preparing ourselves for an orderly returning tide of faith, or are we preparing ourselves for a returning, tumultuous spiritual tsunami that will upend our practices, challenge our assumptions about reality and refuse our neat categories?”

I know I have linked to quite a few articles on sports betting, but I do so because I’m so concerned about young men getting sucked into it. “Don’t be fooled by how destigmatized sports betting has become. Just because you can now do it on your phone from the comfort of your suburban living room, as opposed to in the dimly lit, smoky Vegas casino, doesn’t mean the dangers are less real. The less seedy, more acceptable ‘brand’ of sports betting today is what makes it so concerning.”

“My friends talk a lot these days about how to spend more time with others in person. We sincerely wish we could be more present with the people we care about most. And we all acknowledge that our screens get in the way. We want to be personally attentive, but battle the incessant magnetism of our phones.”

What a great thing it is when being a Christian makes you a better man. This article comes from the mission field but could apply to any believer.

The trees that reach the highest heights had better be certain their roots reach far into the ground where they can be stabilized and supported, where they can drink deeply and grow strong.

It is better to pray often with brevity than rarely but at length.
—D.A. Carson

This week the giveaway is sponsored by P&R Publishing.

Do you want to defend your faith but aren’t sure where to begin? Mark Farnham’s accessible guidebook simplifies apologetics and empowers Christians to effectively present the gospel in all its glory and rationality. This new edition includes practice case studies, chapter review questions, and a new chapter on engaging in gospel conversations over the long term.

ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE

P&R is giving away TEN copies of Every Believer Confident.  All you need to do to enter the drawing is to fill in your name and email address in the form below, which will add you to P&R’s mailing list.

Giveaway Rules: You may enter one time. Winners will be notified by email on February 11, 2025.

We all love to be part of a movement, don’t we? There is a kind of exhilaration that comes with being part of something that has energy and excitement. There is a kind of spiritual thrill that comes with being part of something that is premised upon sound doctrine and fixated on the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what compelled so many to associate themselves with what was varyingly labeled “New Calvinism,” “Young, Restless, Reformed,” or the “Gospel-Centered Movement.”

Lest We Drift

It is a bit strange, only twenty years after it all began, to read what is already a kind of post-mortem of the movement. Yet that is a part of what Jared Wilson offers in his new book Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel. In its pages he asks: What went wrong with this movement? How did it gain such momentum, then lose it again? What mistakes were made and how can we avoid them in the future?

Let me pause for a moment to address the matter of nomenclature. I have never been a fan of the term “gospel-centered.” I generally eschew it because I find it novel (new to the Christian lexicon) and abstract (difficult to understand and apply). Nevertheless, it is the term Wilson uses for the movement and he defines it this way: “Gospel-centrality as a concept is essentially a summation of historic Reformed theology and Protestant spirituality that adherents would argue are as old as the Bible. … in its paradigmatic sense, gospel-centrality is shorthand for a Reformed understanding of biblical spirituality, bringing with it distinct truth claims that give the ideology substantial implications for life and ministry.” At some point, a movement based on Reformed theology was challenged to become a movement based on gospel-centrality. In my estimation, it never quite took and never quite worked. But let’s press on.

Wilson begins with a short biography of himself that could easily be the biography of so many people who had come to faith in seeker-friendly churches but then began to long for something more—a faith that had more content and more substance. Through the new technology of the internet, they encountered John Piper, R.C. Sproul, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, or some of the other prominent preachers or teachers. Before long they had embraced Reformed theology and, in many cases, the idea of gospel-centeredness. But that was then and this is now.

More and more leaders my age who once seemed so committed to the ministry philosophy of gospel-centrality now seem to have moved on. And they haven’t all migrated to the same place. The balkanization of the young, restless, and Reformed tribe has resulted in silos and splinters, some more substantial than others. They run the gamut from social gospel–style progressivism and Christian “wokeness” to right-wing political syncretism and legalistic fundamentalism. Even among the numbers who still hold to the doctrinal claims of Reformed theology and its implications for gospel ministry, there are now a number of factions and divisions along political and cultural lines. I thought we were “together for the gospel.”

Didn’t we all, at least for a time? Wilson’s particular concern is the idea and doctrine he has championed and defended for all this time: gospel-centrality.

Gospel-centrality really is God’s way for the Christian life and church. Gospel-centrality really is biblical. But part of doggedly committing to the centrality of Christ’s finished work in all things is being sober-minded—aware of our own inclinations to add to, subtract from, or otherwise attempt to enhance or augment the powerful work of the Holy Spirit through the message of grace in Christ. It’s not enough to be aware of how Mark Driscoll and others drifted. It’s our own drift that calls for our attention.

This drift is the concern at the heart of his book. Understanding what happened is the theme of the first couple of chapters and understanding the consequences is the theme of the next five.

So what happened?

For this particular armchair coroner, the primary cause of death was that the influencers and authorities of gospel-centrality failed to rise to the occasion of quickly changing cultural challenges and threats to theological orthodoxy. The movement’s thought leaders were assimilated into the pacifying (and compromising) swamps of “Big Eva” and thus lost their reformational fire—and their reformational credibility.

If you were along for the ride, you’ll appreciate his history of the movement’s rise and fall, and perhaps sometimes cringe as you remember some of its defining moments.

But more important than this is his warning about five different kinds of drift, which are not drifts from a movement but drifts from the gospel. Hence, whether or not you are “gospel-centered,” you will benefit from reading and considering them.

He begins with a drift into victimhood and explains that if we root our identity in anything other than Christ, we effectively place ourselves at the center and can soon become convinced we are victims of society or circumstances. “The cross does not secure your body from victimization,” he says. “But it does secure your identity from victimhood.” He then discusses the all-too-common drift into dryness in which Christ no longer thrills our souls and we go casting about for different kinds of delight. This will always lead to spiritual dryness and drift. “Religiosity cannot ultimately keep us from apostasy. If anything, it might expedite it, as we find it harder and harder to keep up the religious efforts without a renewed heart. The machinery of ‘spirituality’ cannot move for long without the oil of spiritual vitality. And this spiritual vitality can come only from friendship with Jesus.”

Wilson warns as well about the kind of superficiality that weds Christianity to a consumerist culture and the kind of pragmatism that replaces trust in Scripture with confidence in whatever methods appear to be effective. A chapter that may take some by surprise in a movement characterized by its commitment to the gospel is one about the temptation of legalism, for “the leaven of legalism is subtler than we realize.” We may think our focus on the gospel inoculates us against legalism, but legalism can take on new and deceptive forms. “We see the new legalism at work in evangelicalism today when we conflate secondary and even tertiary doctrines with primary ones. We see it at work when we prioritize cultural conformity over gospel unity and insist on extrabiblical litmus tests for orthodoxy that are more in line with tribal affiliations than with Christian communion.” A concluding chapter pleads with Christians to be aware of the tendency and temptation to drift—to leave behind the gospel and center the Christian life and the Christian church on anything else, anything less.

I have read most of Wilson’s books over the years and appreciate this one as much as any of them. His telling of history is both interesting and illuminating (though I think there could have been more said about the role of women in popularizing the movement such as writers like Gloria Furman, Emily Jensen, and Laura Wifler who rose with the movement and carried it to their demographic of young moms). Of more importance is his focused and timely warnings about both the tendency to drift and the specific ways in which each of us is prone to drift. No matter what movement we are part of or what label we prefer to wear, as long as we are “Christian,” these chapters are pure gold.