Friday Links

Here are some links I’ve come across this week that are worth checking out.

Gunner has moved to Raw Christianity. In his introductory post, he writes:

I said that what I’ve always wanted to be is someone who doesn’t seek to be a polished disciple or a smooth Christian but who is authentic and on-edge and full of faith and biblical risk-taking. I don’t want my life to be full of monotone prayers and programmed evangelism and dull worship and bland confessions and dutiful quiet times and shallow relationships and American comforts and spineless choices. I want to be aggressively Christian. I want to have a Bible-soaked mind and an unwavering endurance and a tireless passion and a trembling fear of God.

The New Attitude Blog has some good thoughts on how to disagree humbly. One of the points that Mark Lauterbauch makes is this:

Be quick to hear the position of those you disagree with and make sure it is understood so well that they tell us we are stating it fairly. I like to begin my rebuttal while they are speaking but that is a mark of pride. Pride also results in false stereotypes, generalizations, and extreme examples.

Carolyn Mahaney links to a video that shows how beauty may not even be fleeting, it may be fake. In her comments on it, she writes:

God did not send Jesus to this earth to die so that women could get over their self-esteem problem and feel better about themselves. No, He sent his Son to die to rescue us from our sinful, futile quest for physical beauty and to reveal to us the satisfaction that comes from knowing God—whether we are beautiful or not!

And before I can wear out my Valley of Vision CD, I see that Sovereign Grace is releasing a Christmas album, Savior: Celebrating the Mystery of God Become Man.   With a title like that, I doubt it’ll have a Jesus version of Jingle Bells or Frosty.   You can download one of the songs for free here (though checkout is req’d).

And I read most of this overview of religious affections to my class yesterday.