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Why Prayer and Bible Study Are Not Enough

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That title sounds pretty bad on the face of it. So don’t hear me diminishing the importance and significance of prayer and Bible study in the slightest. In fact, I originally started one of the chapters in my book this way: “If you do nothing else, other than read your Bible in faith every day, […]

Have We Missed the Meaning of the Incarnation?

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Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 8:9: For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. Here’s the point: Sometimes, helping the poor requires taking part of their burden on ourselves, and suffering deprivation […]

The Meaning of Justice

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In his excellent book Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City, Tim Keller quotes Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke’s very shocking, but absolutely correct, definition of justice: The righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community; the wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. Keller expands: Most people think of […]

The Difference Between a Christian and Non-Christian

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Very well said by Mark Dever in The Deliberate Church: Building Your Ministry on the Gospel (note: this might be slightly paraphrased, because it’s from my notes and I don’t have the actual copy of the book with me right now): The difference between Christians and non-Christians is not that non-Christians sins whereas Christians don’t. The […]

The Necessity of Distinguishing Relief and Development

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In both cases, the goal is to help the person back to self-sufficiency. But the strategies in each case are different — often profoundly so. Relief The goal of relief is to meet pressing, urgent needs that are causing great hardship to a person or group. You don’t worry about things like “dependency” here; you […]

27 Tweets from Jesus

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This is a great post by Adam Jeske on whether Twitter is shallow and whether Jesus would use it. He starts: I get frustrated when people say social media (and Twitter in particular) is shallow. I get especially frustrated when my well-intentioned Christian friends say this. Because we use incredibly short phrases that are really […]

A Simple Way to Pray

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Just came across this book at Ligonier Ministries called A Simple Way to Pray. It contains a short booklet Martin Luther wrote for his barber on how to pray. RC Sproul had this to say about Luther’s pamphlet: “No book has done more to revolutionize my personal prayer life than this little book by Martin Luther.” That’s quite […]

Biblical Typology in Romans 11:34-35

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My friend, Andy Naselli, somehow was amazing enough at managing his time and work to obtain 2 PhDs. His second dissertation was published last summer, and as with everything he writes, it is incredibly clear and well argued. It’s called From Typology to Doxology: Paul’s Use of Isaiah and Job in Romans 11:34-35. For any […]