Weekly Roundup: Productivity, pseudo-expositional sermons, soli Deo gloria, chiding sin in love.
Productivity, pseudo-expositional sermons, soli Deo gloria, chiding sin in love.
Resources
What Having a Child Taught Me About Personal Productivity | Reagan Rose | Redeeming Productivity
Reagan Rose just became a father. His thoughts about how this affects his thoughts of productivity are really sweet.
Biblically and practically work is an important part of life. But work is not all there is to life.
Having a kid is like unlocking a new world in a video game. You thought you knew the lay of the land, but suddenly there are entirely new vistas open to you. When you become a parent this whole range of experiences and emotions which had previously been dormant awaken in vibrant colors. It’s a little alarming, frankly.
…Having a child is like having a grenade lobbed into your stack of neatly ordered priorities. It reshuffles the deck. It changes everything.
Two Kinds of Sermons that Seem Expositional But Really Aren’t | Matthew T. Martens | 9Marks
I like his older article a lot, too!
Too many sermons focus on the biblical text, but fail to exposit the main point of the scriptural passage under consideration. To be clear, this critique isn’t merely an academic or definitional one. If a sermon fails to unpack the main point of the text at hand, the pastor is failing to preach the whole counsel of God regardless of how throughly the speaker examines the scriptural passage. Such a sermon fails to communicate what God intended to communicate by inspiring that text.
Soli Deo Gloria: To God Alone Be the Glory | R.C. Sproul | Ligonier Ministries
Have you ever asked the question, “Why did God save me, and not him/her?” I have. There is only one answer: Soli Deo Gloria.
In fact, salvation is of the Lord from beginning to end. Yes, I must believe. Yes, I must respond. Yes, I must receive Christ. But for me to say “yes” to any of those things, my heart must first be changed by the sovereign, effectual power of God the Holy Spirit. Soli Deo gloria.
Never chiding another’s sin, except acting in love | Augustine
We should never undertake the task of chiding another’s sin unless, cross-examining our own conscience, we can assure ourselves, before God, that we are acting from love. If reproaches or threats or injuries, voiced by the one you are calling to account, have wounded your spirit, then, for that person to be healed by you, you must not speak till you are healed yourself, lest you act from worldly motives, to hurt, and make your tongue a sinful weapon of evil, returning wrong for wrong, curse for curse. Whatever you speak out of a wounded spirit is the earth of an avenger, not the love of an instructor. … And if, as often happens, you begin some course of action from love, and are proceeding with it in love, but a different feeling insinuates itself because you are resisted, deflecting you from reproach of a man’s sin and making you attack the man itself—it were best, while watering the dust with your years, to remember that we have no right to crow over another’s sin, since we sin in the very reproach of sin if anger at sin is better at making us sinners than mercy is at making us kind.1
Leeman, Jonathan. The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline. Crossway Books, 2010, p. 87. Quoting Augustine’s Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (57), as quoted in Garry Wills, Saint Augustine, A Penguin Life Series (New York: Viking, 1999), 111-12. ↩︎
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