From Challis.com

Padkos December 2015

Plunge Your Mind Into The Ocean of God’s Sovereignty - Desiring God blog.
Moral Relativism “As Walter Isaacson, Einstein’s most important biographer, explains:
“In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was not caused by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.””
How To Know If You Are Called
Essential Life Skill – Teachability
I Am What I’ve Been Through [this title provides enough food for thought and prayer]
Stop Sending Missionaries ( I would add : make sure they are really converted, born again follower of Jesus)
Dear God, I Don’t Want To Serve You This Way….

Lordship is not Legalism

Padkos – November 2015

40 Thoughts For 40th Birthday –  Jared C Wilson

7 Subtle Symptoms of Pride –  Fabienne Harford   ( 7 points from Jonathan Edwards)

You Can’t Serve God and Entertainment – Philip Holmes

My Spouse Is My Best Friend? – Mark Jones

Miscarriage And The Confusion of Sinful Grief – Jamie Carlson

What is Holding You Back? – Laura Elliot  “So reader, where does that leave you? What is "your thing," and why aren't you doing it?”

6 Assassins of Man’s Contentment -  Darrin Patrick   “Contentment is the fuel for a life well-lived. “

The Songs of Jesus  - Tim Keller

Protect Your Marriage – Jim Newheiser

You Are Meant To Move Mountains – Jon Bloom  “

How would you live differently if you really believed that nothing would be impossible for you?

Don’t let cynicism squelch that question. Our lightning quick and loud unbelief is not commendable. It is perverse, twisted. It robs us of more than we know. When contemplating such a question, it can be tempting for some of us to quickly point to the errors of the word-of-faith movement and reaffirm that we aren’t going to fall in that ditch. Good. We should not. But that does not excuse us to live at peace with little faith and impotence in kingdom ministry.”

Hardwired For Awe – Paul Tripp 

An Identity That Can Handle Either Success of Failure – Timothy Keller (video)

Bad Doctrine Versus Heresy

Timothy Keller on the Psalms

7 Sentimental Lies You Might Believe

The subtle seeds of pride grow an oak of self-worship in the heart.

Padkos–October 2015

The Battle Larger Than A Culture War  –  Trevin Wax  “The character of God’s kingdom people in a secular age must be holy. For this reason, the battle against fleshly desires is always bigger than any cultural battle.”

Speck Removing  –  John Piper  “ So when Danny asks, “How can we ever know with certainty that we see clearly enough to take the specks out of another person’s eyes?” my answer is, “Certainty is not the issue here, Danny. Humility, Scripture, prayer, and love are the issue. God has set up the church so that imperfect, fallible, even uncertain people are called upon to rescue each other. Don’t let uncertainty excuse you from obedience. If someone is drowning and you can swim, but you are not certain you would have enough strength to pull them all the way back to the land, and there is no other way to save them, what does love do? Don’t make a god out of certainty. It may prove to be a cloak for fear of drowning.”

Consistent Spiritual Discipline – Not Legalism  - John Piper  Excerpt from a 1991 sermon…might as well have been last weekend!

Frequently Abused Verses – God’s Goodness Leads to Repentance – Grace To You blog   “It is impossible to preach the goodness of God without talking about sin and judgment because its very meaning is bound up in those terms. When we see our sinfulness and rebellion against God, and when we see our hypocrisy in condemning others for committing the same wrath-deserving sins, then we can also marvel at God’s goodness in patiently and tolerantly withholding the wrath that we deserve.”

Is The Social Gospel The Whole Gospel? – Grace To You Blog  “So where does that leave works of social justice such as feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and caring for the oppressed? No one would argue that they are bad things to do. Indeed James defines them as integral to pure religion (James 1:27). But do those acts of mercy have any role to play in a person’s salvation?”

The Trinity – RC Sproul  I’ve never heard the Trinity explained like this…

Christian Art – Why? – Mark Altrogge

Early Warning Signs of AOC -  Stephen Altrogge

Maturing Well, Not Aging – Barnabas Piper

GK Chesterton Engaging With Culture  - Trevin Wax  “Chesterton was a big man (in more ways than one) who made a big splash. How did he engage his culture and why does he still matter? I offer four reasons:”

Book Review – Stop Your Complaining – Tim Challis  “If you read a book like this one and come away with two simple things—a deeper disgust of complaining and a heightened desire for gratitude—your time has been well-spent. And I think that is what you will find if you read it.Stop Your Complaining is short but not trite, light but still significant. It’s exactly the book I needed today.” [reminded me of Jerry Benjamin’s book on ‘Murmuring’]

Kevin DeYoung on PG Wodehouse

When Depression Descends – John Piper Audio (full message HERE)

Memorizing an Entire Book – Andy Naselli  (includes Vimeo link to video)

Sermon Audio

Don’t Coddle Your Fears – Jon Bloom

7 Ways to Grow Without Seminary – Nancy Guthrie

19 Turning Points – Justin Taylor

Glorify God in Grey Areas – Grace To You blog

Mysticism – FAQ – Justin Taylor

September 2015 Padkos

From a series on ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ on The Grace To You blog

Identity

Salvation

Purpose

A Basketful of Encouragement  –  Linda Green 

Dependence – Randy Alcorn  “Charles Hummel wrote that “the root of all sin is self-sufficiency—independence from God.” God has taught me that whether we write or build or draw or fix things or make a home for our families, He wants us to yield our gifts to Him, and depend on Him for the next step, even the next breath.”

 

Age of Authenticity – Kevin DeYoung

“In a day where people disdain hypocrisy more than any other vice and prize transparency more than any other virtue, you can be as obnoxious as you want to be, fail spectacularly, and sin repeatedly, as long as you never pretend to be any better than you really are. It makes no difference what errors you say, think, or do, if only you are true to yourself. This is life in the Age of Authenticity.”

“Perhaps the biggest danger of all in the Age of Authenticity is that our authentic self gets misplaced. For those who have been joined to Christ through the miracle of faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, being true to ourselves means being true to Christ in us.  Remember, it was the Gnostics who peddled the false gospel of salvation-through-self-awareness, while the authentic gospel promised something better than authenticity. The New Testament says little about getting in touch with the real you and a lot about walking in step with the real Him. If you follow the logic of Matthew 23 it becomes clear that hypocrisy is essentially saying one thing and doing another. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that what we do or think or feel matters less than whether we admit to doing and thinking and feeling those things. To act in a way that is right and proper, even when you feel something different, is not hypocrisy. It’s called maturity.”

“Authenticity is not to be confused with repentance.”

“To act in a way that is right and proper, even when you feel something different, is not hypocrisy. It’s called maturity.”

 

Making Time For Books – Hugh McGuire  “I started to wonder: could training myself to read books again help me manage the digital information stress in the rest of my life? Could the cure for too much information be slower information? In the same way that snake venom can be used to produce curative antivenom, I wondered whether that old, slower form of information delivery—books—could act as a kind of antidote to the stress caused by the constant flow of new digital information. Whether my inability to sustain my focus—at work, home, and on reading books—could be cured by finding ways to once again sustain my focus…on a book.”

 

  Samson & Gideon – Grace To You Blog– (see the whole series )

``Spiritual victory and usefulness begin with genuine humility, brokenness, and self-distrust—turning to God as the only true power.``

3 Types of Fool – Tim Challis

 Legalism or Discipline?   - Sarah Walton  “Godly disciplines are not legalistic. Rather, they are the appropriate and wise response of a chosen, forgiven, and redeemed child of God.”

“For that reason, it is beneficial for us all to seek wisdom in prayer, counsel, and the Word to see if there are areas in our lives that may require us to put new habits and disciplines in place for the purpose of laying aside anything that does not help us run well. For each of us, this will look different, but with the same goal in mind. May we spur each other on to this! Not in a guilt-ridden, legalistic way, but as fellow racers, encouraging one another towards the upward call we have in Christ Jesus.”

3 Objections to the Doctrine of Election  - Tim Keller

Reading Better, Retaining More – Trevin Wax    “Most good books are good precisely because there is one main thought you walk away with. If you are unable to summarize a book in a couple sentences, or easily assess the contribution it makes to the topic it covers, either you are a muddled reader or the book came from a muddled thinker.”

Partially Hydrogenated Bible Studies  - Jen Wilkin

Don’t Be A Sucker – John Piper – video

Padkos - August 2015

What to Do While You’re Waiting On God   - Linda Green  (the listed items look good, have yet to read the whole article)
Thin Is A Western Cult  -  Sam Kee  “As I listened, I noticed that a huge assumption was driving their defense: thin is beautiful.  I thought to myself, “You’ve bought into the lie!”  I was hoping they’d refuse to acknowledge the premise of “thin,” which has become a Western cult.”
Gentle Selfishness  - “But a gentle selfishness, because of its very gentleness, is subtle, deceptive, and far more difficult to detect than the blatant kind.”
“Gentle selfishness is dangerous exactly because others can’t always see it and it seems harmless, so it hardens us in our sinful inward focus. It is the subtlety of this selfishness that is the problem, and we all have it. Godly gentleness will actually help us kill selfishness, because it is not weakness, but controlled strength. Christ displayed this perfectly; selflessness that was gentle even in the face of crucifixion, so that He could pray, “Father, forgive them.” His saving selflessness is not only the source of our forgiveness, but also the power to break even the gentle selfishness in our own lives.”
Loving Without Hypocrisy  - John MacArthur  “The authenticating mark of our Christianity, before an unbelieving world, is our love for other believers. Jesus affirmed this when He said; “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another””
But what does this kind of love look like? A brief survey of the one anothers in the New Testament gives an excellent picture. We are commanded to: Build up one another (Romans 14:19); serve one another (Galatians 5:13); bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2); be subject to one another (Ephesians 5:21); forgive one another (Colossians 3:13); teach one another (Colossians 3:16); comfort one another (1 Thessalonians 4:18); rebuke one another (Titus 1:13); encourage one another to do good (Hebrews 10:24-25); confess our sins to one another (James 5:16); pray for one another (James 5:16); and be hospitable to one another (1 Peter 4:9-10).
Be Careful of Nice People – Tim Challis  “As human beings, it seems that we are drawn to niceness. We like nice people and encourage people to behave in nice ways. We dislike people who aren’t nice or who don’t behave in nice ways. We teach our children to be nice and juxtapose niceness with a host of vices: grumpiness, cruelty, mean-spiritedness.”
“Why isn’t niceness a fruit of the Spirit? Because niceness is a hollow trait that a human can generate even without the inner working of the Holy Spirit. Niceness may require some force of will in the face of disagreement or controversy. It may require restraint. But it does not require an inward transformation.”
How to Repent Without Really Repenting – Jim Elliff
Vintage Kindness – Bryan Loritts   “Kindness has often been confused with niceness, and this is unfortunate.”
2 Ways a Christian Can Defeat Himself – Trevin Wax quotes Francis Schaeffer
A Christian can defeat himself in two ways: one is to forget the holiness of God and the fact that sin is sin. The Bible calls us to an ever deeper commitment in giving ourselves to Christ for him to produce his fruit through us.
The other is to allow himself to be worn out by Christians who turn Christianity into a romanticism. The realism of the Bible is that God does not excuse sin, but neither is he finished with us when he finds sin in us. And for this we should be thankful.
– Francis Schaeffer, No Little People
Jesus is Praying For You – John Piper  - Great video! “In five minutes, John Piper talks about the daily warfare for your faith. With Satan against you, and temptation around every corner, how do you know you will be a believer tomorrow morning? Piper reminds us about the seriousness of Satan’s desire for you and the absolute security we have in Christ.”
Jesus And The Journey To Joy  - John Piper  - “If it’s true that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, as we saw in Philippians 1:20–21, then joy or satisfaction in God is a mandate. It’s not optional. If we say joy in God is icing on the cake or a caboose on the train, then we’re saying glorifying God fully is icing on the cake. It isn’t.” Read more at http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-secret-of-joy-in-suffering

Watershed Differences Between Calvinists and Arminians – John Piper (audio and transcript)  “Or I might say it like this: You can tell if someone is an Arminian or a Calvinist by how they answer the question, “What was the decisive cause of your faith in Christ?” So you go up to somebody and you ask, “What was the decisive cause of your faith in Christ? Was it God or was it yourself?” And the Calvinist says, “The decisive cause of my faith was God” and the Arminian says, “The decisive cause of my faith in Christ is myself.”

The Way Is Hard But He Is Strong –  Jon Bloom  “Hell’s one primary objective is to destroy faith in God. All of its elaborate strategies and all of its diabolical energies are focused on one thing: breaking the power of the word of the Lord by undermining our trust in it. The universe was created and is upheld by the Word of God (John 1:3, Hebrews 1:3), so hell must break the power of the Word of the God, if it wants to win.”
3 Things To Remember Before You Criticize –  Justin Taylor  “Critique done poorly—whether through overstatement, misunderstanding, caricature—is a losing proposition for all. It undermines the credibility of the critic and deprives the one being criticized from the opportunity to improve his or her position.”
Inhabiting The Psalms  –  Heather Walker Peterson  “The Psalms were the hymnbook of Jesus’ time, and the Scripture most quoted by him in the Gospels.”
The Armour of God - Doug Batchelor
Finding Truth, by Nancy Pearcy - Book Review by Tim Challis.