June 2012
2 posts
Mostly Still
I have my moments but no one
wants just moments. They want
magic and birthday cake - all the time.
I wish I could, I know how to fly on
airplanes, you could come here,
I know I am not all that great,
but I am mostly quiet,
I am mostly still.
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“Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical...”
– Paramahansa Yogananda (via penseesduchoeur)
Well that was greatly needed. Self-analysis is painful though
(via allcameundonethemomentyoumeantit)
YES!
May 2012
70 posts
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Truth Obeyed
J. I. Packer:
“Truth obeyed, said the Puritans, will heal. The word fits, because we are all spiritually sick — sick through sin, which is a wasting and killing disease of the heart. The unconverted are sick unto death; those who have come to know Christ and have been born again continue sick, but they are gradually getting better as the work of grace goes on in their lives.
The church, however,...
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July 6th (ii)
We are water, forest fire, white noise, holidays - all you can eat babies.
Cat whiskers, self denial, clouds and I am sorry - luxury. Where do I begin? Mountains? Fireworks? Triumph? Slim odds - comeback? I told you all this was not going to be pretty, victory for the ages - amid piss, sweat, tears, pills, rot, but not necessarily in that order.
Please, and sound - foaming mouth.
Belly-ache...
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To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
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July 6th
When I breathe, I inhale fireflies and soda pop, neon light for the masses.
In my dream, your teeth were destroyed. You were sitting on the floor with your legs crossed and your teeth were fucked.
This is not to say I am sorry and this is not to say I am not sorry. We all are sorry, passing on the right and eating ice cream cones. In the dark I fumble for light and end up with my shoelaces...
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December 24th
This one for time. This one for beginning. What is left? What has been left? What has been forgotten? Mild-mannered polite decay, this is for y’all. Rotten, granite, bark, fog, my name replaced. My life - piss yellow and dreams.
The worst is over, swallowing smoke, preacher preaches and life goes on. I fade out and life goes on. Get back to the matter at hand, turn things around, start...
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The Heart of Discipleship
By Jonathan Parnell:
Discipleship is about values. This could not be clearer in the Gospels. Jesus’ call is for a double action: leave and follow. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” he first said to Peter and Andrew in Matthew 4:19. And “Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Then to James and John. And “Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.”...
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Marvellous, Infinite, Matchless Grace
“All your church attendance, all your religious activities, your Sunday school attendance medals, your journals, having a “quiet time,” reading the Scriptures—it’s all in vain if you don’t have Christ.
We are saved, sanctified, and sustained by what Jesus did for us on the cross and through the power of his resurrection. If you add to or subtract from the cross, even if it is to factor in...
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“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
– Ernest Hemingway
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Direction from the Couch
This is it and I have got a lot of things to take care of - no fucking around this time, how many chances do you have left Mr Taylor? Make this count.
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I wish I could tell you everything and be honest and loved forever, there are so many things you’ll never know.
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There are all these roads that no one notices. There are all these things that you wish you did but don’t.
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Where...
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What Does Jesus Do With Sin?
By Jared Wilson:
“The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’” – John 1:29
John the Baptist commands a beholding of the sin-taking-away Lamb. What do we see in this beholding? How exactly does Jesus take away our sin?
Here are 6 things Jesus does with sin:
1. He Condemns It.
Jesus puts a curse on sin. He marks its...
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God Takes Action
“God takes action in Christ against sin, death, and the devil. The doctrine of justification is not about the workings of impersonal law in the universe, or about manipulating its outcomes, but it is about God. The moral law is simply the reflection of the character of God, and when God acts to address the outcomes of the broken moral law, he addresses these himself, himself taking the burden of...
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We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
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Everything Matters
By Jake Belder:
It is common to hear Christians talk about “living in the light of eternity.” Not too long ago, there was a popular video going around in which Francis Chan talked about this very thing, using a long rope as an illustration. The Bible, of course, speaks of this too—Paul says that “we fix our eyes not on what is seen but what is unseen. For…what is unseen is eternal (2 Cor. 4:18)....
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Repentant
From Jared Wilson:
How do you know when someone is repentant? In his helpful little book Church Discipline, Jonathan Leeman offers some guidance:
A few verses before Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 18 about church discipline, he provides us with help for determining whether an individual is characteristically repentant: would the person be willing to cut off a hand or tear out an eye rather than...
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Overcoming Temptation
Earlier this year David Mathis sat down with Don Carson to discuss sanctification. In this three-minute clip, Carson talks about some simultaneous steps to take for overcoming temptation, including a deepening delight in Jesus.
Popout
Sanctification is the theme of this year’s Desiring God National Conference — “Act the Miracle: God’s Work and Ours in the Mystery of Sanctification.” Visit...
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Proverbs 3:3-4
DON’T LOSE YOUR GRIP ON LOVE AND LOYALTY. TIE THEM AROUND YOUR NECK; CARVE THEIR INITIALS ON YOUR HEART. EARN A REPUTATION FOR LIVING WELL IN GOD’S EYES AND THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE.
(The Message)
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What is Church Membership?
From Jonathan Leeman:
What is church membership? Answer: It’s a declaration of citizenship in Christ’s kingdom. It’s a passport. It’s an announcement made in the pressroom of Christ’s kingdom. It’s the declaration that a professing individual is an official, licensed, card-carrying, bona fide Jesus representative. More concretely, church membership is a formal relationship between a local church...
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Interview with J.I. Packer
(HT: Justin Taylor)
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A Letter from John Piper
By John Piper:
Dear [Sarah],
You asked what happens to people who live far away from the gospel and have never heard about Jesus and die without faith in him.
Here is what I think the Bible teaches.
God always punishes people because of what they know and fail to believe. In other words, no one will be condemned for not believing in Jesus who has never heard of Jesus.
Does that mean...
I would live forever if I could, but not like this.
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Supplies
I’d like to spend a month or two locked inside with you. Only going out to stock up on supplies, maybe go bowling. Mostly we could sleep and feel each other up like teenagers, document the time in words and pictures and videos. People would pay to see our lives, because our lives are our own and we are not happy people most of our lives, but we don’t take it out on anyone else.
I get...
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Catastrophe
Our life is one catastrophe after another. Disaster dogs us. I’m the luckiest man alive, and you know what that means. Earthquakes, landslides, falling trees. Wind and rain and rising waters. What the hell, we survive. The coyotes are screaming on the other side of the field; it’s a strange music. The stars are out. It’s lovely here, and like the world, I marry you every day.
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The Gospel is Big Enough to Defend Itself
Russell Moore:
Sometimes believers will throw up their hands in frustration with non-Christian people they know. “I have said everything I know to say to her about the gospel,” one might say. “She already knows it all and doesn’t believe.”
Often what we seek is another argument, a hidden angle that our interlocutor hasn’t thought through before. But that’s rarely how the gospel is heard and...
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Deal with Persistent Guilt
From a fantastic little book, The Bookends of the Christian Life, by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington:
[A] little-known seventeenth-century Puritan, Thomas Wilcox … wrote Honey Out of the Rock, one of the most helpful essays we’ve found on dealing with persistent guilt. We’ve updated into modern language a series of Wilcox’s instructions for dealing with persistent guilt:
- Shift your focus...
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Counterfolds
Say what you were going to say, finish the thought.
Stay if you want to stay, leave if you do not want to stay.
There are plenty of coffee shops with wifi that take credit cards
and at the moment I still have credit.
Wish you could see me now.
Wish you could see me always - no in betweens -
no skipping in the track.
No more cleaning out the closet.
Your old car, the plush seats with...
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A Suitable Saviour
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6)
Faith implies the enlightening of the understanding to discover the suitableness of Jesus Christ as a Saviour, and the excellency of the way of salvation through him. While the sinner lies undone and helpless in...
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My Song is Love Unknown
My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be Oh who am I, that for my sake My Lord should take frail flesh and die?
He came from His blest throne salvation to bestow But men made strange and none the longed-for Christ would know But O my Friend, my Friend indeed, Who at my need His life did spend
Sometimes they strew His way and His...
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Gospel Humility
Tim Keller on Gospel-Humility:
“C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity makes a brilliant observation about gospel-humility at the very end of his chapter on pride. If we were to meet a truly humble person, Lewis says, we would never come away from meeting them thinking they were humble.They would not be always telling us they were a nobody (because a person who keeps saying they are a nobody is actually...
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Choices
Pick your life out of a hat.
Pick the one with the most colours,
if you are colourblind we are very sorry for you.
Pick a husband with a lot of money.
Pick a wife that everyone at the office will be jealous of.
This is what people do, don’t feel so bad about yourself
when you wake up even more alone.
Drink your coffee black.
Download music illegally from the internet.
Flirt with...
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Cure for a Cold Religion
From Erik Raymond:
So encouraging to know the neither the problem nor the solution has changed in the last 350 years:
“The reason our affections are so chilled and cold in religion—is that we do not warm them with thoughts of God. Hold a magnifying glass to the sun, and the glass burns that which is near to it. So when our thoughts are lifted up to Christ, the Sun of righteousness, our...
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Scope
Mike Williams, Professor of Systematic Theology at Covenant Seminary and author of the wonderful and needed book Far as the Curse Is Found:
“Many of our students come to us having been carefully nurtured and discipled in the biblical story and have already begun to lay hold of the breadth of it. Many others, however, come only with the story of the larger culture or that of popular Christian...
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"In Jesus' Name"
Praying “in Jesus’ name” is more than attaching the phrase to the end of each prayer. So what types of prayers are prayed “in Jesus’ name”? In this three-minute clip from his latest sermon, Pastor John says it has more to do with our prayer’s content than in its closing. He provides us with four prayer-filters.
Popout
(HT: Tony Reinke)
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The Word Did It All
“Take me, for example. I opposed indulgences and all papists, but never by force. I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip of Amsdorf the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing: the Word did it all. Had I wanted to start trouble…. I could...
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Luke
From Andy Naselli:
The concluding chapter of this new book lays out six key theses about Luke’s theology:
Darrell L. Bock. A Theology of Luke and Acts: God’s Promised Program, Realized for All Nations. Biblical Theology of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012.
“Although there are many themes,” Bock notes, “six issues within the scholarly conversation are most important” (p....
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The Danger of Bibliolatry
Kevin DeYoung:
Which poses the bigger risk of idolatry–a high view of the Bible that sees Jesus submitting to the Scriptures or a low view of Scripture that sees Jesus standing apart from the Scriptures? Some Christians fear that if they have a high view of the Bible they will end up denigrating Jesus and being guilty of bibliolatry. But what if the danger of idolatry is much more likely when you...
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Missing Reality
“A strange thing I have observed over many years in this business of news gathering and news presentation is that by some infallible process media people always manage to miss the most important thing. It’s almost as though there were some built-in propensity to do this. In moments of humility, I realize that if I had been correspondent in the Holy Land at the time of our Lord’s ministry, I...