Have a look!

Answer: Be the sun and wait 7.6 billion years.

The folks over at Desiring God have been putting out a lot of excellent posts in the past few days, have a look:

• Distinguishing the True Gospel
• How Pastoring Shapes Preaching
• Preaching into Evangelicalism
• Everyone Who Has Been Born of God Overcomes the World
• Helping Kids to Worship at Church

Enjoy!

In John Piper’s Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce he says

This gospel that must be “cordially” embraced (that is, with the heart and affections, not just the head) is the good news that reconciliation and a righteous standing with God precede and ground even the Spirit-given enabling for practical holiness.

And then he quotes from William Wilberforce himself that

The true Christian…knows therefore that this holiness is not to precede his reconciliation to God, and be its CAUSE; but to FOLLOW it, and be its EFFECT. That, in short, it is by FAITH IN CHRIST only that he is to be justified in the sight of God.

It is a common belief that we must be good enough before we are ready to believe the gospel, that once we can get past some certain stumbling block in our lives we will be in a good spot to start paying attention to God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus said he came to call sinners to repentance, not the righteous (Like 5:32). If we try and get to a good enough place before believing in the gospel, we end up trying to be the very thing Jesus came to eradicate; self-righteousness. What’s the cure? Brokenness. God says the sacrifice he desires is a broken and contrite heart (Psalm 51:17). How long will you continue to try and fix yourself apart from Christ?

“And there they continued to preach the gospel” - Acts 14:7

Each Tuesday a different reflection on the gospel and its continual effect on our lives

From John Piper’s short biography of William Wilberforce:

[The true Christian] walk in the ways of Religion, not by constraint, but willingly; they are to him not only safe, but comfortable, “ways of pleasantness as well as of peace” [Prov. 3:17]…With earnest prayers, therefore, for the Divine Help, with jealous circumspection and resolute selfdenial, he guards against, and abstains from, whatever might be likely again to darken his enlightened judgment, or to vitiate his reformed taste; thus making it his unwearied endeavor to grow in the knowledge and love of heavenly things, and to obtain a warmer admiration, and a more cordial relish of their excellence…”

I am embarrassed to admit that much of my knowledge of Wilberforce came from the “Amazing Grace” movie recently found on DVD. Piper has done a wonderful job of looking into what made William tick and found that it was undeniably Christ and a life lived joyously in Him. You can probably read through this book in a few hours so I would recommend this if you are interested in getting a quick summary of his life and his passions.

I wanted to post some reference material for those who may be new to this whole “blogging” thing. If you have a blog yourself, you probably won’t benefit much from this. But, if you only go to a few websites a week and are interested in learning a bit more about what this is all about, then continue on.

What is a blog?

Blogs started off as a type of diary on the web. People called it a log of your life and so the name web-log came about and was soon shortened to blog. People soon took advantage of this technology and made it personal. They began to update their webpages daily with all types of things. If you had a weird computer problem that you fixed you could post the solution on your blog to let others take advantage of the lessons you learned. If you went on vacation and took a lot of pictures you could post the pictures along with some of the details about your vacation for others to see. If your pastor preached an interesting sermon on Sunday morning, you could post your thoughts on it along with a link to the recording so that others could listen as well. There are plenty of possibilities and the technology is simple enough that anyone who knows how to send an email can setup a blog.

How can Christians benefit?

Continuing on from the last example, we can see how Christians might benefit from blogging. There are thousands of blogs that have a Christian theme to them, and many of these can be a great reference source. Some write about their thoughts on passages in the Scriptures, some write about what it means to have a Christian worldview through day-to-day events, some write about current events in the news from a Christian perspective, some focus on theology, worship, devotions, prayer, and some are an extension to a ministry already in place. Writers can be anyone from pastors, elders, church leaders, lay-people, and seminary professors. The key here is the ease of use, difficult technology should not keep you from starting up a blog.

Starting a blog

1. Go to Wordpress.com
2. Click “Sign Up Now” (it’s all free of course)
3. Fill out the information (don’t worry about a lot of the details, everything you fill out can be modified later on)
4. Start blogging! Here is a good resource to help you with some rules on how to write.

Reading blogs

I’m listing two ways to read blogs (ok, one is a joke), I’m sure everyone has their own opinion on the best way to do it, but I’m going to write about what works for me. There really is no good way to explain this, you just have to jump in and try it out for yourself, so follow the instructions below and feel free to ask questions or comment if something needs further explanation below.

Option 1

1. Find all the blogs you like, here’s a list to get you started.
2. Visit them every day and read what they say, if you have 20 blogs you like, this could take a few hours!

Option2

1. Take advantage of “feeds” and have all the websites come to you!
2. Download this file to your computer (right click and say Save Target As or Save Link As), it is a good “starter list” of some blogs I have found useful for Christian news and references. Don’t do anything with the file yet, just save it somewhere on your computer and remember where you put it
3. Go to Google Reader
4. Sign in with your gmail account or click “Create An Account” to get started (it’s all free of course)
5. Fill out the information and you’re all set
6. Once you have an account, sign into Google Reader, now you want to start adding blog feeds to read
7. Click on settings in the upper right hand corner
8. Now click on Import/Export
9. Click “browse” and then find the file you downloaded in step #2
10. Click “upload” and you’re all set
11. Now if you click “Back to Google Reader” you will see all of your subscriptions and their current feeds
12. Play around with Google Reader to get the settings the way you want them. If you’re really up for a challenge, have a look at the keyboard shortcuts to really speed up your reading
13. Most of these blogs are updated at least once a week if not everyday. As they are updated, your Google Reader unread items will increase just like your email inbox so don’t be afraid of the “Mark All As Read” button if you every have hundreds of unread posts (don’t worry, you can’t delete them like emails, they will always be there)
14. Now, as you find other blogs or websites that have feeds (look for this symbol on the webpage or in the address bar that you type the website’s address into) click on the feed and choose to add it to Google Reader and you will have those posts show up in your Google Reader account.

This is a really brief intro to blogs and reading blogs. Please comment and ask questions in the comment area below. Enjoy!

Does everyone receive the Voice of the Martyrs newsletter, if not, please click here.

Please note, the next section is very graphic. This month there is a story of Lorenzo who had been a Christian for 2 years when he got married. Soon after, he went into the village of Jomalho where the villagers were not fond of evangelical Christians. When the villagers found out who he was, they began to form a mob. From the article:

…but Lorenzo was captured by the angry mob. As the villagers beat and kicked him, Lorenzo screamed, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! I’m young and just got married!”

The mob tied a rope around Lorenzo’s neck, and the sobbing newlywed was forced to dig his own grave. Witnesses say some villagers smashed Lorenzo’s teeth and then gouged out both his eyes. Several men tugged on one end of the noose while others pulled on the opposite end. They choked Lorenzo to death, threw his lifeless, battered body in the shallow grave and smashed his skull with rocks. They filled in the grave with dirt and returned to their homes and businesses as if nothing had happened.

I had never heard of Chiapas. Please pray for Lorenzo’s family and his new wife. Please pray for the church to be excellent witnesses to those who seek to expel Christ from their country.

Rather than just posting one article, here are some articles that I’ve found interesting recently.

• Deepak Chopra on Who is Jesus? - “I want to offer the possibility that Jesus was truly, as he proclaimed, a savior,” Chopra wrote. “Not the savior, not the one and only Son of God. Rather Jesus embodied the highest level of enlightenment.” My take: yikes.
• Man arrested for carrying a Koran, Bible, and a box-cutter. My take: certainly this wasn’t the only thing he was carrying, why did we only hear about these books?
• Florida school will teach evolution but only as a theory. My take: evolution is a theory, who argues this one?
• Scientists capture giant antarctic sea creatures. My take: great title, lame creatures.
• African dinosaurs. My take: awesome artwork.
• Applying OT law today. My take: a better take is at Expository Thoughts.
• Avoid every appearance of evil. My Take: I thoroughly enjoy Reclaiming the Mind Ministries.

I would like to suggest to those who blog regularly on Christian topics and would consider their blog to be a “Christian blog” to look into making it available on the Kindle.

• What this means - anyone who subscribes to your blog would have your posts sent to their Kindles automatically, every day. Subscribers pay between $0.99 and $1.99 per month to Amazon to subscribe to your blog. I doubt bloggers see much, if any, financial profit in this but that’s a rare goal to have in what we do.
• Why do it - as of now, they have a few categorized blogs available to subscribe to but there is not even a category for “Religion/Spirituality”. Judging from the online form, they are looking to begin one though. So, I would love to see the majority of what I consider the good, Christian blogs out there made available for people.
• How to do it - if you want to submit your blog to the Amazon Kindle website to have it listed and made available for people to subscribe to, click here. You will fill out a form and then receive an email asking for more information. From what I can tell, someone will read through your blog and see if they want to list it. I haven’t gotten further than this so I can’t tell you what’s next…
• Why I think this is important -I’ve submitted my blog to Kindle and the email I received back is very crude, which tells me they are really just beginning this process and are early on in the development. My small call is for Christians to be at the forefront of this just in case it actually takes off rather than playing catch-up with technology as we occasionally do. I’m not highly optimistic that a lot of people are going to pay for blogs that they can get for free but, who knows, maybe this fee-based thing will go away soon if the popularity is strong enough (or if advertisers have a chance to play). I think there is a lot of good material out there that folks, believers and non, can benefit from.

Here’s a good post relating to some of the things dealt with on this blog. Enjoy!