“Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice, and let them say among the nations, ‘The LORD reigns!’”

(Yesterday on the blog: God Has Found You Faithful)
Be Worthy of Your Gray
Andrée Seu Peterson: “Scripture says men are held in bondage all their lives by fear of death (Hebrews 2:15). And women by fear of gray. The secret is that once confronted, the boogeyman is not so formidable after all.”
When No One Is Watching: The Heart of a Christian Remote Worker
Reagan Rose has an article meant to challenge those who work from home. “If we’re being really honest, at times we’ve all taken advantage of the remote work arrangement in a way that felt less than honest. The problem, however, isn’t that remote work makes us lazy workers. It just makes it easier to get away with.”
Who Will ‘Stand in the Gap’?
D.A. Carson tells of a particularly important verse. “I do not have a ‘life verse,’ or even a favorite Bible verse. That is not a criticism of those who enjoy such blessings; it may even be a confession that in some domains I have a short attention span. But I would find it easier to list a hundred (or a thousand!) verses that have shaped my life in some significant way than to list one that can claim exclusive influence.”
More Concerning News on Social Media and How It Influences Us
“I’m very concerned about social media, where it is taking us, and how hard it is to extract ourselves from it, even if we want to. Worse, many of the platforms seek to get their users hooked, and data suggests they are downright harmful in a number of ways. I’m beginning to start thinking about ways to reduce how much I rely on these platforms.” Many of us share such concerns.
If a Tree Falls in a Forest?
“The woods looked like a maze of intersecting lumber.  Limbs, torsos of torn trees, and scattered boughs needed to be cleared. Power saws buzzed in nearly every direction. As I walked I found myself humming an old Fanny Crosby hymn, Rescue the Perishing. ‘Rescue the perishing, care for the dying. Jesus is merciful. Jesus will save.’”
Why Are So Many Young Childless Men Getting the Snip?
There is something so very tragic about this. “Often the reason that men are giving to Dr Low, who often asks them to consider their options before going ahead with the surgery, is that the world is running out of hope and why would you want to bring a child into it? Hope has gone. Climate change, sustainability issues, warfare, massive political upheaval. What’s the point of dumping that all on a young person? Won’t they hate you for it anyway?”
How Do I Read the Old Testament Historical Books Devotionally? (Video)
Dr. Peter Lee answers in this brief video from RTS.
Flashback: The Depth of My Depravity
You don’t know how deeply sinful you are by your unrighteousness deeds, but by your rejection of God and his grace. That is the most serious, heinous, and damnable sin of them all.

Sin can no more stand against the presence of the Holy Spirit than darkness can resist the gentle, all-pervasive beams of morning light. —F.B Meyer

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

It’s Zondervan who is headlining today’s list of Kindle deals.
(Yesterday on the blog: Prayers That God Will Not Answer)
Fantastic Fireflies (Video)
The John 10:10 Project continues its stellar series of videos on the wonders of God’s creation.
God’s Sovereignty, Our Suffering, and Robots
“Christianity faces a tough question regarding the conflict between the Bible’s claim toward God’s sovereignty and our suffering. This question can be asked in a variety of ways—from skeptics’ challenges (‘How can you say there is a God?’) to saints’ laments (‘Why God, why?’). In this article, written more to the saint than to the skeptic, I’d like to address one weak answer to this question and offer three better ones.”
The First Lesson of Prayer
“Prayer is essential to our spiritual lives. That’s probably not a surprise to anyone. But what is a surprise is how many of us think we are terrible at praying.” J.A. Medders addresses this well.
Heap burning coals on his head?
What does the Bible mean when it speaks of heaping burning coals on a person’s head? This article offers a plausible explanation.
The Miseducation of the Pastor
“When it comes to theological education, this means most students enter seminary thinking that what they need above all is to master theological truths, when what they chiefly need is to be mastered by these truths. To say this another way, what seminary students most need to learn is the way of life that emerges among those who have received scriptural truths not merely as facts to be memorized, preached, and defended, but as theological givens, as bricks in a foundation upon which they live and move and have their being.”
20 Scriptures to guide our online speech
Just like the title says, here is Scripture that can help guide our online speech.
Flashback: Accomplishments as High as Heaven, Character as Low as Hell
No one ever resigns. No one ever steps aside. No one ever has such integrity that he counts himself disqualified and removes himself from public ministry. Or very few, anyway.

The price of victory is constant vigilance. Yes, there is grace to cover all our sin; but that grace leads us to mortify it, not to tolerate it. —Sinclair Ferguson

We’ve heard it at both weddings and funerals, as both aspiration for a life lived together and as commemoration of a life lived well. In these two contexts and so many others we’ve heard the “love passage,” the Bible’s beautiful description of love enacted in the life of the Christian: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.” And so on.

One of the descriptions can be rendered in a couple of different ways, but most translations understand it as a term related to accounting: “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” Here we have the image of a person opening an accounting book to carefully record every wrong that has been done against him. He writes a date, he writes a name, he writes a description of the hurt or harm, the insult or injury. And he does this not only to chronicle it all but to justify future retaliation.
To keep such a close accounting, a person must first be observant. He must look for every wrong that has been done to him, he must make a careful study of it, and he must write out a precise record. He has to be more than a casual observer of wrongs, but a scrupulous student of them.
In contrast to this, the Bible admonishes us toward something like a self-controlled modesty in which, just as we might avert our eyes from another person’s nakedness, we avert our eyes from another person’s sinfulness. Just as we do our best not to dishonor loved ones by allowing our eyes to linger on their exposed immodesty, we do not allow our minds to linger on their exposed depravity. And, because we haven’t permitted ourselves to see it, we do not permit ourselves to make a record of it.
And so the Christian is to keep no record of wrongs. Yet I find it every bit as important to keep no record of rights—of the right and good things we have done to others. And that’s because the accounting we are always tempted to keep is not merely of other people’s bad deeds but our own good deeds. Our ledger doesn’t only have a column of their debits, but also of our credits. And when we become convinced there is a disparity between the two, we can become despondent and entitled—despondent that we are not being loved as well as we are loving and entitled to be loved more and better.
Yet this is not the way of the Christian, for love rejects all basis of comparison to simply love according to the second great commandment: “love your neighbor as yourself.” And, indeed, this is how we are to love because this is how we have been loved—loved by Christ himself. Jesus loved us without keeping an accounting, without ensuring that he was being loved to the same degree that he was loving. Jesus loved us without maintaining an exhaustive record of all the ways he had succeeded and we had failed. The heavenly books are not storing up a record of misdeeds for which he will someday retaliate against us. But neither are the heavenly books storing up a record of all the right deeds he did so he can condemn us in the comparison.
Love simply loves—it loves humbly and joyfully, it loves purely and sweetly, it loves freely and completely. Love loves without analyzing, without comparing, without accounting. Love keeps no record of wrongs and love keeps no record of rights.