Thursday Roundup (2/16/17)

This week’s video addresses the Jehovah’s Witness argument that most Christian Bibles suppress the Old Testament name of God. The podcast wraps up our consideration of The God Delusion by taking up Dawkins’ categories of “explanation, exhortation, consolation, and inspiration” to compare the Christian and atheistic worldviews. And the links of the week cover the Holy Spirit and The Shack, marriage and parenting, the danger of allowing politics to kill our witness, and more!

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“Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation: loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong.”
~ Francis Schaeffer

Latest Video

Do most Christian Bibles suppress the name of God, as Jehovah’s Witnesses allege? It is true that the Hebrew name YHWH is usually translated “the Lord” in English Bibles, but there’s more to the story than that…

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Answers for Ambassadors Podcast

In the final chapter of The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that religion isn’t needed for “explanation, exhortation, consolation, or inspiration.” As we finish the book, this episode uses those four ideas to distinguish between the atheistic and Christian worldviews.

Answers for Ambassadors is available via SoundCloud or by searching in iTunes and most other podcast players. You can also direct your podcast player to the podcast RSS feed.

Best Reads of the Week

It’s got a bit of a click-bait title, but “You Cannot Serve Both God and Theology” makes a profound and important point. “Theology will kill you if it does not kindle a deep and abiding love for the God of the Bible, and if it does not inspire a desire for his glory, and not ultimately our own.”

Another good piece: “The supernatural ordinariness of the work of the Spirit.” Excellent observations on how the Spirit works and implications for life and ministry.

This warning from Don Carson is convicting and compelling. “[First-century Christians] kept witnessing, kept getting martyred, and so on, and it was a revolution, finally, a spiritual revolution. We can’t do that today, at least we find it very difficult, because we’re so busy being angry all the time that at the end of the day not only do we lose our credibility with people on the left, they start demonizing us back, but we have no energy or compassion left to evangelize.”

Tim Challies explains why he won’t be seeing or reviewing The Shack movie. His concern is deeper than the book’s bad theology.

Two helpful articles on painful and difficult topics: Hal and Melanie Young passionately warn against Fifty Shades Darker and the perversion of love it encourages. And on a not-altogether-different topic, John Fort offers excellent advice for how to react the first time your child admits watching porn: “The most important take away for any child in this scenario is to experience that Mom and Dad are safe people to talk about sexual temptations with.”

On a happier note, I was encouraged by Melissa Edgington’s meditation on where romance lives in daily married life.

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Photo of the Week

Great Spangled Fritillary

I photographed this Great Spangled Fritillary on a lantana bush in my mother’s garden several years ago.

(Check out other photos at my Etsy shop.)

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