Late last night I worked on the family budget. Early this morning Twitter sent me my ESV Daily Bible verse:
Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality (Romans 12:13).
What timing! We middle-class believers have some questions to answer: Are we managing the resources God has given us so as to be able to give to needy saints and show hospitality? If not, why not? Can we identify any excessive spending habits that could be restrained for the sake of helping our brothers and sisters in need?
Having money to spend on ourselves is a blessing. But there is a way to maximize that blessing (Acts 20:35). Each of us can probably think of a needy brother or sister right now who could stand for us to choose the greater blessing.
Because God made us for different purposes, men and women should be educated differently. This does not mean that they cannot be educated by the same people, in the same room. But at the very least, if those who are instructing them have egalitarian assumptions, and they teach the boys and girls as though there were no difference between them, then they are asking for trouble. The trouble they are asking for is that of wrecking masculinity in boys. Sexually-integrated education, whether at home or in the classroom, must acquire the wisdom of biblical discrimination.
(Doug Wilson, Future Men, 115)
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During a recent meditation on 1John 1:5-10 an aspect of the passage caught my attention that had laid dormant in my understanding and application of the passage until now. John mentions that an implication of “walking in the light” is that we have “fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1:7).
We don’t need to miss the important truth that in commanding that we “walk in the light” rather than “walk in darkness”, John intends that these are pattern of life issues. In other words, the normal flow of your life should be to walk in the light of Christ rather than walk in the darkness of your flesh. A good friend told me last week that he had always avoided this passage because when he read it he always walked away with the impression that we weren’t supposed to sin. I don’t think that is the case at all. As a matter of fact, the issue is that some of John’s audience were either in denial of or living to justify their sin (1:6, 8, 10). Essentially, what John is saying is that everybody sins. The issue isn’t that we sin. The issue is this: “What do we do with that sin when we do sin?”
This is where the new insight comes in. (more…)
I had heard about Rachel Barkley’s testimony but had not taken the time to listen to it until today – the day that God laid her down to die…and live. I wept out loud in celebration for the Gospel and goodness of God demonstrated through Rachel’s faith as she embraced her cancer, defiantly stating that death is not dying. Rachel was 37 years old. Listen to her testimony. It will take an hour of your day, but it will be an hour well spent. You won’t regret it.
