Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:
What Dulls Your Appetite for God? – Marshall Segal (DG)
We are prone to let the pleasures and burdens of daily life become excuses for putting off Christ and his commands. When the cost of discipleship rises, when the cross we bear weighs heavier and heavier, we are tempted to scramble for excuses not to come.
Scripture Before Phone, and Other Habits That Could Change Your Life – Trevin Wax
We underestimate the power of habits, especially those we adopt unconsciously, as a result of our busy and hurried lives. We like to think of ourselves as spontaneous and authentic in our worship and work, when in reality we’re enslaved to habits and patterns that dominate our waking moments. As a consequence, we are wonderless in an age of wonders. Our technology has only freed us up . . . to live like slaves.
Lord, Deliver Me from Distraction – Jon Bloom (DG)
We’re becoming conditioned to distraction, and it’s harming our ability to listen and think carefully, to be still, to pray, and to meditate. Which means it is a spiritual danger, an evil from which we need God’s deliverance.
How to Encourage that Preacher – Tim Challies
These are just a few examples of the kind of encouragement preachers love to hear. I expect you’ve noticed that the best ways to encourage a pastor about his preaching are also the best ways to personally gain the most benefit from it. Prepare yourself to bring this kind of encouragement and you’ll prepare yourself to see Jesus instead of the preacher, to better understand the passage, to apply it to your life, and to discuss it with others so you can apply it together.
Hope you have a great Lord’s Day hungry for God and His Word!
Someone whose task is to exhort others to a life of godliness in response to the gospel of grace should himself reflect that holiness.
But all that hurry has gotten me no farther ahead. It’s actually set me back. It’s diminished me. My efforts to gain time have only lost it. Whole epochs of my existence have swept by me in a blur, with nary a cheap souvenir to remember them by. There are seasons and seasons of my life swallowed whole, buried in a black hole of forgetting…. Through all that haste, I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.
Brian J. Mikul 