“God can use programs. I know people who have come to faith at evangelistic events…. But I don’t think programs are the most effective or even the primary way we should do evangelism.” - 9 Marks

“…what superintelligence means, why there is so much buzz around it, whether the buzz is justified, and how superintelligence may open doors to share about a God whose ways are higher than our own” - Reasons

“n Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, Lucy S. R. Austen harmonizes Elisabeth’s public writing with the journals and letters Austen had access to, which I feel is the strength of this book.” - P&D

“Becket’s 2023 Religious Freedom Index: American Perspectives on the First Amendment, Fifth Edition (Index) examined Americans’ perspectives on ongoing court cases, parental rights, and how the next generation sees the role of faith in America.” - Daily Citizen

“The country’s perception of clergy hit a new low in recent Gallup polling, with fewer than a third of Americans rating clergy as highly honest and ethical.” - CToday

(Reposted from 2021. Original comments included.)

History is boring! How many times has that been said, mostly by schoolchildren who have to learn names, dates, and events for an exam? History can be boring, but it doesn’t need to be.

“Mark Ward and Tim Miller from Shepherd’s Theological Seminary explore repentance in depth as an expansion of Miller’s article, ‘Is Repentance a Change of Mind or Something Different?’” - Word by Word

“Gilson is quite a good guide to many issues. Still, she fails to warn about the serious errors associated with Revoice, and she even quietly affirms some of these errors herself.” - Ref21

“The state Senate voted 23-10 to enact the Save Adolescents from Experimentation, or SAFE, Act. The bill initially passed the Senate on Dec. 13, 24-8.” - W.Examiner

In 2023 data, “28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated…. That’s marginally lower than our surveys indicated in 2022 and 2021, and identical to what we found in 2020 and 2019” - Pew

Related: Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe - Pew

“There is a case for cursing the darkness. But it is better to light a candle, and better still to light many.” - Public Discourse

Read the series.

Number 2: Image of God. Everyone is infinitely valuable. Treat him that way.

God not only runs the world; he created it. From scratch. (Google ex nihilo sometime. The official meaning is “from scratch.”) All of it. Everything is from his hand, originally.

But not everything is of equal value. He created light, and darkness, and water, and dirt, and plants, and animals. They’re all worth something, because he decided they’re worth creating.

“Steven D. Smith’s The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity traces the successive transformations of how we understand conscience by highlighting three key figures in its redefinition in the Anglo-American world: Thomas More, James Madison, and William Brennan.” - Religion & Liberty

“This shift has landed us in what can be called ‘standpoint epistemology.’ … the view that everything we think and know, and even what we consider knowledge to be, is determined solely by our race, ’gender,’ sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and other identity categories.” - Breakpoint

“We breathe a sigh of relief when we get to chapter 38 and bow in reverence before the Lord God’s majestic monologue. Yet we may be left scratching our heads over the lack of response to Elihu’s speeches.” - Desiring God

“If gentle parenting were just a mood board for solving parenting difficulties in nonconfrontational ways, I’d have nothing to say against it. But when you dig more deeply…you find at least two that stand opposed to the Bible’s teaching about parenting.” - TGC

“Combined with the 26% increase in 2021, Southern Baptists have seen a 46% increase over the past two years emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite those recent jumps, the numbers are still part of a negative trend since the early 2000s.” - Lifeway

“Was she right to lie? What does that say to us about our own relationship with truth? Can we ever tell a similar lie? There are other instances in the Bible where similar lies are told.” - Don Johnson

“Barna… research found most urban dwellers consider the church as simply ‘a piece of the puzzle’ in dealing with issues like homelessness, poverty, healthcare and racism.” - The Baptist Paper

“Hamas in its Covenant was a relatively early adapter of this ideology [Salafism], but it was far from the last. In subsequent years radical militants influenced by Salafism used the same reasoning to justify taking arms against the Arab ruling class” - Providence

Read the series.

“Journalist Rob Downen posted the email, which is contained in the filings of a now-settled lawsuit against Paul Pressler, the Southern Baptist Convention, the SBC Executive Committee and First Baptist Church in Houston.” - BPNews

“we’re so close to the situation that it’s hard to see anything other than the struggle. We see the ‘black,’ but we can’t see how that same struggle fits into the bigger picture. We can’t see the overall beauty because we’re too close to the picture.” - Chuck Lawless

“While Lambert marks Bavinck and Kuyper out as being aberrations within the Reformed tradition (an assertion not supported by the literature), Bavinck actually points a way forward …to counseling that affirms the necessity and relevance of Scripture and the usefulness of common grace.” - London Lyceum

“Rape is so horrible that we easily transfer our horror to the wrong object. We must not impose the ugliness of rape or incest upon either the innocent woman or the innocent child.” - Randy Alcorn

“One natural response is to shut down challenging questions for fear faith’s foundations will crack. But forbidding questions is unhealthier than wrestling with honest doubts.” - TGC

“Americans’ ratings of nearly all 23 professions measured in Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll are lower than they have been in recent years… Nurses remain the most trusted profession, with 78% of U.S. adults currently believing nurses have high honesty and ethical standards.” - Gallup

“Christians who attend gay weddings are just like Christians who obey a transgender person’s preferred pronouns: they’re tacitly affirming sin.” - CPost

“The March for Life’s theme this year, ‘With Every Woman, For Every Child,’ highlights the phenomenal work being done by pregnancy resource centers.” - Daily Citizen

Plenty of people are zealous for God, but their zeal is based on bad information. They actually don’t know God at all. This is Israel’s problem.

In Romans 9 to 11, the apostle Paul segues from his theological musings about salvation to a question no Christian can ignore—what about Israel? He spends most of Romans 9 defending God from accusations of failure (9:6-13), unjustness and cruelty (9:14-18), and unfairness (9:19-21). God dispenses mercy and hardness of heart as He sees fit (Rom 9:14, 18). The clay has no right to object to the potter’s decision (Rom 9:20-21).