Archive for the Recommended Link Category


Nov 14

Have You Ever Said, “I’ll Never Change!”?

2014 | by Trent Hunter | Category: Recommended Link

Christian growth is a hard work. It’s also a fruitful work because of the Spirit and the grace of God.

Here’s what Paul says in Philippians 2:12–13: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” In real ways, growing in godliness is our work. And yet it’s a work powered by the grace of God. It’s possible because of him, and he gets all of the credit.

In his article, “I’ll Never Change!” Jon Bloom from Desiring God has given us some encouragement for our struggle to fight sin and mature as Christians.

We all must come to terms with the way we are. But there are two ways we must do this. The first is to cultivate contentment with who God designed us to be, which results in a wonderful liberation from trying to be someone we’re not. The second is to lay aside the burdensome weight of the fatalistic resignation that we’ll never be any different than what we are, which results in an enslavement to our sin-infused predilections.

Cultivating Contentment and Fighting Fatalism

Cultivating contentment in the person God designed us to be is based on our belief in the glorious gospel truths that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), knitted us together in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13), caused us to be born again (1 Peter 1:3) so that we are now a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17) who lives by faith (Galatians 2:20) in the God who provides all we need (Philippians 4:19) so that we can exclaim with joy, “by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10)!

Believing these things sets us free to increasingly pursue living in the freedom that Jesus has provided us (John 8:36).

But they can be hard to believe in the face of our persistent sins and weaknesses, things we are so keenly aware of. Instead, we are tempted to believe the horrible, heavy lies that God’s grace toward us must, in fact, be in vain (1 Corinthians 15:10) or else simply withheld by a disapproving, unsatisfiable Heavenly Father, because we keep stumbling in the same old “many ways” (James 3:2) and we’ll never, at least in this age, ever really be “more than conquerors” (Romans 8:37).

Believing these things confines us to living in fear, shame, and the apathy of fatalistic resignation. We buy into the seductive, hope-sucking, energy-depleting, self-pitying deception that “I’ll never change.” The destructiveness of this lie goes beyond a particular sin or weakness. It creates a mindset of surrender that leads to further kinds of self-indulgence, compounding our problem and sense of defeat.

We must fight to take these lies captive and destroy their fatalistic arguments (2 Corinthians 10:5) so that we can lay aside the weights of their sins (Hebrews 12:1).

Read the rest of Bloom’s article here.

Nov 8

A Blog for Depression, Addiction, Worry, Etc.

2014 | by Trent Hunter | Category: Recommended Link

If you struggle with sin and its curse or know and help someone who does (all of us), then you should check out the blog over at the website for The Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).

ACBC is an organization devoted to training and certifying Christian men and women for faithful disciple-making in the context of Biblical counseling. The better we know ourselves and one another as the church, the more we’ll feel the need for this kind of help.

Here are examples of articles from ACBC’s Blog in the last two weeks:

To learn more about ACBC and its work, click here.

Oct 9

Adoption, A Good Blog, and Redeeming the Time

2014 | by Trent Hunter | Category: Recommended Link

We should do this more often. That is, point you to good blogs around the web. We’re good at linking to good resources, but pointing you to a good blog is like teaching you to fish.

One blog you should know about is Head, Heart, Hand, by David Murray.

In a given week, David will interact with theology, culture, politics, and everyday Christian life issues. Today he blogged on a moving video of an adoption story from Pittsburgh.

[RSS and email readers, click here to view this video]

Here’s David’s follow-up reflection:

A challenging adoption: “We end tonight with a detective who took on one of the most challenging cases of his career.”

A head-and-heart adoption: “Solving it took teamwork between his head and his heart.”

A merciful adoption: “Most of the kids who come into this gym are street-kids, many of them have been born into poverty.”

A searching adoption: “When they stopped showing up at the gym one day, Jack went out and found the older boy.”

A compassionate adoption: “He looked terrible, bags under his eyes, 12 years old….What no one knew was just how bad these kids had it. They were in a foster home and had foster parents who were extremely abusive and neglectful.”

A sovereign adoption: “They had had it as worse as any other kid that has lived in the city of Pittsburgh…and I’d had enough of it.” “Jack Mook took matters into his own hands…and got the kids placed in a new home.”

A sacrificial adoption: ”…And got the kids placed in a new home…his.”

A beneficial adoption: One of the kids said, “I slept the best I ever did that night.”

An enjoyable adoption: Mook said “I’m loving this. It’s awesome. It’s the best thing I ever did in my life.”

A full adoption: “This week he went to court and did one better…adopted the boys and made them Mooks.”

A happy adoption: “You’re a Mook,right? You happy? Good!

And I just love the next line when Mook says “Good, now you’re going home to cut my grass,” and the journalist closes with, “Safe to say, the thought of chores has never been more welcome.” Isn’t that exactly how the adopted Christian feels about obeying and serving God? It’s no chore; it’s so welcome.

Life is short and in sin we fritter away our time—especially these days on the internet! One way to productively channel your screen time is to direct your clicks to blogs like Head, Heart, Hand.

Jul 25

Time Management for Acts of Love

2014 | by Trent Hunter | Category: Recommended Link

It’s always time for a good post on time management. In his article, “Four Lessons in Fruitful Time-Management,” David Mathis has given us some important wisdom for a more fruitful and loving life.

Acts of love don’t just happen.

At times we may experience the power of the Spirit in such a way that some good deed seems to flow naturally from our heart, through our hands, to the benefit of others. But plucking a ripe raspberry from the bush in a moment doesn’t mean that it just appeared. Weeks and months of sunlight and rain, proper nutrients and right conditions, went into the slow daily growth of good fruit. And so it is with our acts of love for the good of others.

There is a process to the production of love, as the apostle Paul counsels his protégé Titus: “Let our people learn to devote themselves to good works, so as to help cases of urgent need, and not be unfruitful” (Titus 3:14). Good works don’t just happen. Meeting the needs of others doesn’t appear out of thin air. There is a process — a learning — to devote ourselves to good.

And one significant “spiritual discipline” is learning to manage our time in the mission of love, both in terms of proactive scheduling and planned flexibility. Previously, we suggested “fairly rigid blocks for our proactive labors, along with generous margin and planned flexibility to regularly meet the unplanned needs of others.” Now to the tune of making that more specific, here are four lessons in fruitful time-management, for the mission of love.

In the rest of the article, Mathis reflects on four lessons for managing our time:

  1. Consider your calling
  2. Plan with big stones
  3. Make the most of your mornings
  4. Create flexibility for meeting others’ needs

Read the whole thing here.

Jun 5

Parents, Require Obedience of Your Children

2014 | by Nathan Sherman | Category: Gospel,Quote,Recommended Link

Last year John Piper posted an article, “Parents, Require Obedience of Your Children.” In the eight months or so since I’ve read this, we’ve tried to implement the nine principles that Piper offers in the parenting of our children. Each time we discipline our children (who are all under the age of 6), we ask:

1) Why am I about to discipline you? (Because I love you)

– and –

2) What would happen if I didn’t require your obedience and discipline you? (You would be on a trajectory of greater disobedience and rebellion)

In these formative years of childhood, we are trying to cultivate quick obedience from our children to their human authorities, so that when they are no longer children, they will, Lord willing and by his grace, quickly obey their heavenly authority.

I am writing this to plead with Christian parents to require obedience of their children. I am moved to write this by watching young children pay no attention to their parents’ requests, with no consequences. Parents tell a child two or three times to sit or stop and come or go, and after the third disobedience, they laughingly bribe the child. This may or may not get the behavior desired.

Last week, I saw two things that prompted this article. One was the killing of 13-year-old Andy Lopez in Santa Rosa, California, by police who thought he was about to shoot them with an assault rifle. It was a toy gun. What made this relevant was that the police said they told the boy two times to drop the gun. Instead he turned it on them. They fired.

I do not know the details of that situation or if Andy even heard the commands. So I can’t say for sure he was insubordinate. So my point here is not about young Lopez himself. It’s about a “what if.” What if he heard the police, and simply defied what they said? If that is true, it cost him his life. Such would be the price of disobeying proper authority.

I witnessed such a scenario in the making on a plane last week. I watched a mother preparing her son to be shot.

I was sitting behind her and her son, who may have been seven years old. He was playing on his digital tablet. The flight attendant announced that all electronic devices should be turned off for take off. He didn’t turn it off. The mother didn’t require it. As the flight attendant walked by, she said he needed to turn it off and kept moving. He didn’t do it. The mother didn’t require it.

One last time, the flight attendant stood over them and said that the boy would need to give the device to his mother. He turned it off. When the flight attendant took her seat, the boy turned his device back on, and kept it on through the take off. The mother did nothing. I thought to myself, she is training him to be shot by police.

Click here to read Piper’s nine principles and how the gospel transforms obedience.