🪼
blake kathryn
No title available
PR's Tumblrdome
Today's Document
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Janaina Medeiros
Sweet Seals For You, Always
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
No title available
Product Placement
YOU ARE THE REASON
NASA
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
noise dept.
we're not kids anymore.
if i look back, i am lost
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Sweden
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Singapore
seen from South Korea
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
@davidlindell
Lose the importunity of prayer … lose the real conflict of will and will, lose the habit of wrestling and the hope of prevailing with God, make it mere walking with God in friendly talk; and precious as that is, yet you tend to lose the reality of prayer at last.
P. T. Forsyth
When I really enjoy God, I feel my desires of him the more insatiable, and my thirstings after holiness the more unquenchable.... Oh, for holiness! Oh, for more of God in my soul! Oh, this pleasing pain! It makes my soul press after God... Oh, that I may feel this continual hunger... Oh, that I might never loiter on my heavenly journey!
David Brainerd, The Diary
My dad and I co-wrote a piece for the May/June issue of Vital Magazine. You can check it out here: https://t.co/4lzsPGQbh9
Broken Things
“… altars are usually built on broken things.
Ancient altars were built of rocks and stone, which prompts reflecting on the geological process by which they occur. Cracked open under the stress of heat or cold, or the shattered remnants from volcanic explosions or violent shaking, rocks are “hard things” that we encounter—small parts of larger difficulties comprising a whole planet.
Life has its own “volcanic” upheavals—when relationships overheat and sear, or when the coldness of rejection stings our hearts. Circumstantial seismic events grind over or around us, leaving a trail of brokenness in their path and piling up a wall of doubt before us. What we do then becomes decisive. We can drag disappointment, resentment or hurt around with us, and become burdened with the weight of these stone-like things. Worse, we can retaliate: get mad and throw those things at somebody else.
Or we can do what God told Abraham to do. We can gather up those hard, broken things and lay them before the Lord—building an altar and worshiping the One who hold our lives and our tomorrows, and who never forgets His promise!”
Jack Hayford, Manifest Presence
This is the basic principle of Christian living, you do whatever you do to please the Lord. That’s it. Every other ambition ends with your last breath, but not this one. The Apostle Paul says the ambition that marks the life of a believer is an ambition that extends into eternity. If this is your ambition, the fruit of your life will not be earthbound.
Day at the park.
The Princess and the Goblin
A conversation between Princess Irene and her Grandmother:
“I’ve brought Curdie, grandmother. He wouldn’t believe what I’ve told him and so I’ve brought him.”
“Yes – I see him. He is a good boy, Curdie, and a brave boy. Aren’t you glad you’ve got him out?”
“Yes, grandmother. But it wasn’t very good of him not to believe when I was telling him the truth.”
“People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it!”
- George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
Pentecostal DNA
"Pentecostals live out both the Reformed emphasis on the sovereignty of God and the Reformed affirmation of the goodness of embodiment. That's why I don't experience much tension between these core aspects of Reformed identity and charismatic spirituality.
The church's DNA is pentecostal. And one of the exciting things about living and inhabiting pentecostal spirituality is that it is an invitation to also worship with the rest of the world. The explosion of the Spirit's work in world Christianity looks like pentecostal spirituality. It is important for Reformed Christians not to be scared of that, and in fact to see in that an invitation of the Spirit to live out the Reformed intuitions we talk about all the time."
-James K. A. Smith, The Devil Reads Derrida
A Silly Idea
"A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.... Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means--the only complete realist."
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Boring Preacher a Contradiction in Terms
"I am disturbed therefore when I am told by members of churches that many of the younger Reformed men are very good men, but that they are very dull and boring preachers; and I am told this by people who themselves hold the Reformed position. This is to me a very serious matter; there is something radically wrong with dull and boring preachers. How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes? I would say that a 'dull preacher' is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher."
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching & Preachers
The Powerful Appropriation of Power
Prayer brings with it, as food does, a new sense of power and health… The life of every organism is but the constant victory of a higher energy, constantly fed, over lower and more elementary forces. Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God’s moral strength. We must work for this living. To feed the soul we must toil in prayer… Prayer is the powerful appropriation of power, of divine power. It is therefore creative.
- P. T. Forsyth, Soul of Prayer
Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing. ... Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him. ... Friends... open their hearts to each other by what they say and do. ... We must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship, as well as an intellectual and volitional one, and could not indeed be a deep relationship between persons if it were not so.
J. I. Packer, Knowing God
Something to Look Forward To
Here is something new to look forward to on Thursdays. This year on the blog, and perhaps beyond, each Thursday I will post a quote that I have found significant. At times I may explain the reason for my post and at other times the quote will have to suffice. Today’s inaugural post is a short poem by George Herbert entitled “Prayer (I).” Here Herbert speaks to a topic of erroneous scope and weight in a mere one hundred words. See if these words ring true to your experience…
PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softenesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood
Here's the trailer for a new film on the life and legacy of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. The full film releases April 14, 2015.
The Best Book I Read in 2014
Hands down, John Webster's little book, Holiness, was my favorite read of 2014. Clocking in at 105 pages, it's short but profound. Through the fall, as I marked, highlighted and underlined my way through it's chapters, I was again and again called to worship and wondered (which should be the ultimate aim of any work of theology). It is very rare for me to finish a book's final page and immediately want to reread the introduction, but that is the case here. I will admit that the first chapter didn't capture me like the ones that followed; however, I do not doubt that when I revisit those pages I will find treasure that I missed the first time around. For theology students looking for something to read devotionally in 2015, I would wholeheartedly encourage you to couple 5 pages of Webster with your daily reading of Scripture. You won't be sorry.
Kill or Be Killed
The following is a guest post by Micah Cartee.
Micah Cartee is a Biblical Studies student at Evangel University. He is married and has two children. Additionally, he works full time. It’s fair to say he is a pretty busy guy. You can follow him on Twitter here.
I greatly appreciate Micah's passion, and I am confident you will benefit from what he has written here.
“They did not destroy the peoples, as the Lord commanded them, but they mixed with the nations and learned to do as they did.” (Psalm 106: 34-35)
Adultery does not happen in an instant; a family isn’t destroyed overnight. It starts with the “smallest” desire of lust for another, and blooms into an insatiable desire to do what was once unthinkable. It does not matter how “small” we think our sins are; even the “smallest” of sins can quickly lead to our destruction. Satan’s principal tool is deception. If he can make you think, “This is not a big deal” he has you right where he wants you. In that moment you are simultaneously lying to yourself and believing your lie.
Sin is Serious Business
The puritan pastor and theologian, John Owen, wrote, “be killing sin or it will be killing you.” Sin is serious business. We can try to ignore it or distance ourselves from it but if left undealt with, it will always come back. This is demonstrated time and time again throughout the scriptures, and it is readily apparent through the Israelite’s chronic idolatry.
God recognizes sin’s deadliness, which is why He commanded Israel to “devote them” (pagan worshipers) “to complete destruction”(Deuteronomy 7:2). This would have removed pagan influence and could have kept Israel true to God; however, Israel did not destroy the surrounding pagans. Instead, they decided they knew better. Sound familiar? We too ignore what God clearly commands, guided by what we have determined is most expedient to our personal satisfaction. Yet, as we read the Old Testament we find ourselves asking, “What are they thinking? Don’t they know that is a bad idea?”
We inhabit this same cycle. We read about the Israelites and ask, “When will they learn?”, and then we turn around and do the same things. God calls his people to holiness and a ferocious hatred for sin, yet we fool ourselves if we simply believe that God has saved us from an eternity away from him but fail to embrace God’s perspective on sin’s destructive power. Israel did not destroy their sin, so it eventually led to their destruction and exile (2 Kings 17:7-23).
So How Do We Kill Sin?
Here I return to Owen:
If we do not abide in prayer, we will abide in temptation. Let this be one aspect of our daily intercession: ‘God, preserve my soul, and keep my heart and all its ways so that I will not be entangled.’ When this is true in our lives, a passing temptation will not overcome us. We will remain free while others lie in bondage.
We kill sin in our lives by renewing our minds (reorienting) in prayer. In prayer we see the power and love of God. In prayer we make our requests to a loving Father to keep us from entanglements and we are able to do so boldly because we are his children (Romans 8:12-17). Through prayer we cultivate the habit of daily killing sin. Even as the thoughts enter our mind, we take them captive through prayer so these thoughts do not grow into unholy actions. In faith we trust that by the Spirit that God will enable us to say, “No” to sin and “Yes” to Him with greater resolve.
Where Joshua failed to faithfully lead the children of Israel to obey God by destroying those who would pull them into sin, Jesus has prevailed in setting us free from sin’s power (Romans 6:22). It is with this confidence that we take up the call to be strong and courageous.
Battle sin, and know that God is on your side! Fight in prayer and proclaim Victory. Though the conflict still rages, the war is won!
N.T. Wright on The Complementarity of Marriage
Complementarity is a theme that runs through Scripture from beginning to end. We see it in the Bible's language surrounding heaven and earth; God and Israel; Christ and the church; men and women. This reality has massive implications for what it means to live out God's vision for marriage, not to mention the way we understand the arch of redemptive history.
Push play and let the light bulb come on.
*An added bonus of this clip is getting to listen to N.T. Wright talk for 16 minutes and 36 seconds. Enjoy.