Sampler Platter: Friday, August 15 2014

Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week.  The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial in-and-of-themselves.  But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.

Let's start sampling: 

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John Piper, A Godward Life: Savoring the Supremacy of God in All of Life.  Multnomah, 1997, p. 17. 

"Teaching that lasts - and books that last - will be the kind that 'bleed Bible.'  C.H. Spurgeon said of John Bunyan, 'Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him.  He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God.'"

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Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times.  InterVarsity Press, 2014, pp. 27-28:

"What we...need is a constructive overarching vision of Christian engagement in today's advanced modern world, one that is shaped by faith in God and a Christian perspective rather than by current wisdom, and one that can inspire Christians to move out with courage to confront the best and worst we may encounter....

"We do not not the outcome [of our present state of affairs], so we have to act in faith through the chronic obscurity of the present.  What we do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that we are called to 'have no fear,' and therefore not to indulge in what is currently the world's dominant emotion, fear.  Nor are we to to respond to the specter of crisis and decline with either nostalgia or despair.

"What then should be our response? / It is, I believe, that we trust in God and his gospel and move out confidently into the world, living and working for a new Christian renaissance, and thus challenge the darkness with the hope of Christian faith, believing in an outcome that lies beyond the horizon of all we can see and accomplish today."

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Trevin Wax interviewing Donald S. Whitney, "Spiritual Disciplines, Legalism, and Laziness" at www.thegospelcoalition.org (posted August 12, 2014):   

"...the spiritual disciplines—both the personal disciplines (which are the subject of [Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life]) and the interpersonal ones (the subject of my Spiritual Disciplines Within the Church)—are means of grace. In other words, these disciplines are God-ordained means by which we experience God and His grace. Our job is to place ourselves before God by means of these disciplines, and then, when we look to Him by faith through them, we can expect to experience Him and His grace."

Click here to see the full post from which this excerpt was taken.  Please note the usual disclaimer, that my recommendation of this post is not necessarily an endorsement of everything else on the site where this was posted.