Tag: Spiritual Disciplines

Saturday Strands

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Loose strands for our growth:

The Christian’s Keystone Habit – Reagan Rose (RP)
But if you begin by carefully identifying a single keystone habit and focusing all of your attention on that, you’ll discover that other good habits follow it. So, this leads to a very important question: What keystone habit should we begin with?

Hospitality: A Command for Our Joy – Kyleigh Dunn (GCD)
If I hadn’t grown up in a community that loved hospitality, I wouldn’t naturally think of having people over for a meal. I can cook, but most of what I make is not that exciting. I love being with others, but too much social interaction exhausts me. Despite those excuses and the uncertainties children add to the picture, we’ve chosen to prioritize hospitality. This is in part because of the joy it’s brought to our lives but also because Scripture commands us to.

A Deadly Foe of Spiritual Growth – Tim Challies
As we live out the Christian life and cooperate with the Holy Spirit through the precious means of grace, we face a number of foes, a number of enemies that mean to derail us from our pursuit of God. Of all those enemies, none may be more prevalent and none more deadly than complacency.

Everyone Has Their Own Facts Now – Patrick Miller (Endeavor)
Indeed, our very concept of “being informed” is changed by this context. We become misled in our opinions, not because someone lied to us (though plenty of that happens online) but because online information is disjointed, superficial, and contextless. It creates what Postman calls “the illusion knowledge” while leading its consumers further away from actual knowledge. As a result, Postman writes, “we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.” The problem is that you can correct ignorance. “But what shall we do,” asks Postman, “if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

Flashback: Gentle Marriage
This is the great test of gentleness. It is easy to put on show in public, but what are we like at home? Are we gentle with each other, or are we harsh, brawling, loud, or manipulative?

Passion Points

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Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:

The Cumulative Effect of Our Little Choices – Randy Alcorn (EPM)
Following Christ isn’t magic. It requires repeated actions on our part, which develop into habits and life disciplines. Our spirituality hinges on the development of these little habits, such as Bible reading and memorization and prayer. In putting one foot in front of the other day after day, we become the kind of person who grows in Christlikeness.

Your Sin Begins with a Felt Need – David Bowden (DG)
The more we put our faith in the truth of who God is for us in Christ, the more he fills in the places within us that are lacking. As he does this, the Holy Spirit creates new desires within our hearts (Romans 8:1–11). These new desires cut temptation’s legs out from under it and lead us away from sin and toward holiness.

Who Was Saint Patrick and Should Christians Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? – Stephen Nichols (Ligonier)
Perhaps we remember him best by reflecting on the “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” which has traditionally been attributed to him. The word breastplate is a translation of the Latin word lorica, a prayer, especially for protection. These prayers would be written out and at times placed on shields of soldiers and knights as they went out to battle. St. Patrick’s Lorica points beyond himself and his adventurous life. It points to Christ, the one he proclaimed to the people who had taken him captive….

Instructive Worship – Andrew Roycroft
The beauty of true worship is that we address ourselves to God, but we also address one another with who God is and what he has said. We worship in our spirits, by the power of the Holy Spirit, but also with deep intellectual investment, with an eye fixed on the glory of the gospel as well as a heart tuned to its sentiments. Such worship is deeply didactic, it retrains the flagging disciple, it prohibits empty sentiment, it draws our attention and our affection towards the God in whose presence and power we are meeting.

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day!

Passion Points

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Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:

The Lost Spiritual Discipline – Tim Challies
Watchfulness is “a careful observing of our hearts and diligent looking to our ways, that they may be pleasing and acceptable unto God.”

Eight Ways to Become More Humble – Jane Tooher (GTF)
Thankfulness stops pride growing. We can thank people for things that they do and who they are, and that’s important and encouraging for them. But we’re to thank God for that person, for the way he has worked in them. Thankfulness is a sign of a believer.

Organic Food, Essential Oils, and the Gospel of Grace – Stacy Reaoch (DG)
When promoting our own choices for food and medicine is becoming the latest form of evangelism, we are showing where our hope really lies — and that we are close to forgetting the gospel we say we hold dear.

Your 7 Job Responsibilities as a Church Member – Jonathan Leeman (TGC)
Will you sit back and stay anonymous, doing little more than passively showing up for 75 minutes on Sundays? Or will you jump in with the hard and rewarding work of studying the gospel, building relationships, and making disciples? We need more hands for the harvest, so we hope you’ll join us in that work.

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day with your local church!

Passion Points

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Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:

Spiritual Disciplines and the Sinkhole Syndrome – Donald Whitney (Ligonier)
Pursue the Lord with a relentless, lifelong, obstacle-defying passion. Resolve never to let your daily life keep you from Jesus daily.

Lay Aside Every Suitcase – Tim Challies
A suitcase is a perfectly good thing that may just kill you in an emergency evacuation. It is a perfectly good thing, but it isn’t good enough to risk your life for. And our lives are full of good things that may just slow us down, that may just hinder us from matters that are far more important—matters of eternal consequence.

Thank God For Your Job (Doesn’t Matter What Your Job Is!) – Tim Challies
As you enjoy rest from your labors, why don’t you take a bit of time to thank God for your labors. No matter what they are, they are evidence of his kindness and mercy toward you.

How to Help Your Children Become Better Sermon Listeners – David Prince
These thoughts are certainly not exhaustive and you may have other creative ways that come to mind, but the key is to not act like getting them in the building is the end of your parental responsibility.

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day!

Worthy of Worship

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SpiritualDisciplinesThe more we focus on God, the more we understand and appreciate how worthy He is.  As we understand and appreciate this, we can’t help but respond to Him.  Just as an incredible sunset or a breath-taking mountaintop vista evokes a spontaneous response, so we cannot encounter the worthiness of God without the response of worship.

– Donald Whitney in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

Passion Points

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Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:

Take a Break from the Chaos – David Mathis (DG)
You need a break from the chaos, from the noise and the crowds, more than you may think at first. You need the spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude.

John Macarthur on Helps and Hindrances to Joy – David Murray
In a sermon on Rejoice Always (1 Thess. 5:16), John Macarthur listed eight sources of joy and then six thieves of joy. I’ve summarized them…

Discipleship in the “Age of Authenticity” – Trevin Wax
The church’s response must be to proclaim a gospel that comes from outside ourselves – no matter how countercultural this may seem. When people in our culture discover how exhausting it is to try to be “true to themselves,” when looking further and further inward eventually shows them they haven’t the resources to transform their own lives, the church must be ready to break in with good news that life change isn’t mustered up from within but granted through grace from without.  We are to challenge the narrative that happiness is found solely in self-expression. The biblical view of the self is that we are broken, twisted, and sinful. The self is something that needs redemption, not expression.

Spurgeon’s Three R’s: A Useful Method for Evangelism – Jeff Robinson (TGC)
But recently, in my regular reading of C. H. Spurgeon’s sermons, I have discovered an excellent and pithy approach to the gospel, one that is fully biblical and establishes both man’s universal dilemma and God’s antidote in Christ: Spurgeon’s “Three R’s”: ruin, redemption, and regeneration. I like Spurgeon’s outline for several reasons: it is simple, the alliteration makes it easy to remember, the biblical texts all surround the number three (another aid to memory for the throes of nerve-busting, face-to-face evangelism).

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day with your local church exalting our great God!

Passion Points

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Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:

5 Great Reasons To Memorize Scripture Today – Tim Challies (from Donald Whitney)
There are few areas of the Christian life where there is a wider gap between what Christians want to do and what Christians actually do than in this area: memorizing Scripture.

A Simple Method To Organize Your Prayers – Tim Challies
Christians have created many patterns and systems to help them as they pray. One of my favorites is John Piper’s model of praying…

Spiritual Disciplines, Legalism, and Laziness – Trevin Wax (with Donald Whitney)
When I consider my own spiritual life, I can’t help but think about certain practices and disciplines that the Lord has used to shaped me over the years.

A Gospeled Church – Jared Wilson
You cannot grow in holiness and holier-than-thou-ness at the same time. So a church that makes its main thing the gospel, and when faced with sin in its ranks doesn’t simply crack the whip of the law but says “remember the gospel,” should gradually be seeing grace coming to bear. 

You see above two posts interacting with Donald Whitney whose revised version of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life just came out.  Highly recommended!

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day with your local church!

 

Passion Points – Habits

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This week, I want to share some good posts about what I call Passion Habits.  Passion habits are those things we do because of our passion for God and compassion for people.  These are habits ideally motivated by Christ’s passion for us.  Passion habits are traditionally called spiritual disciplines.  They might be habits we do individually or corporately or both.  So here are some good thoughts about some of these habits:

Scripture – J. C. Ryle points to the necessity of being often in the Word.

Prayer – Trevin Wax shares what the Romanian church has taught him about corporate prayer.  We can learn much from their example.

Worship – Kevin DeYoung shares why his church worships the way they do.

Service – Jon Bloom encourages us to serve in the shadow God places you.

Evangelism – Mark Altrogge considers ways to influence people toward Christ.

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day worshipping the Lord with your local church.

 

 

Web Weekly

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The best around the web this week that I found deals with spiritual disciplines – habits that help us grow in love for God and people, and indeed that are expressions of our love for God and people.

Coram Deo reminds us of the need to keep it simple, coming back to the basic disciplines of life.  Chris Brauns calls us to consistent prayer with a quote from Bryan Chappell.  He Is My Delight gives a great example for compassion in outreach.