Take 5 minutes for this

I just came across some great 5-minute interviews of David Powlison (by C.J. Mahaney), and they are fabulous...very insightful and convicting/encouraging. Here they are:

1. A Narrated Bibliography with David Powlison (this one is actually about an hour).
2. Good Advice vs. Good News (4:41).
3. Cravings and Conflict (7:19).
4. What Is Real vs. What I Feel (5:45).
5. The Value of Human Emotion (5:28).

I recommend you start with Good Advice vs. Good News to get a flavor for the content, and I trust you will be edified.

Am I influencing you for good or ill?

Some of you may be familiar with the curriculum called Changing Hearts Changing Lives, put out by the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation, and taught by David Powlison and Paul David Tripp. It's a DVD of thirteen 30-minutes sessions, and Kristen and I have just started working through it together. I've watched most of the sessions previously, and I highly recommend it (and I look forward to watching and discussing the rest of them with Kristen).

It is basically about biblical counseling and the role that each of us play in helping one another along in our growth in Christ. Here are the 2 foundational assumptions that were communicated in the first session, about our lives as believers:

1. All of us are people in need of change.
2. God has called all of us to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands.

One big takeaway for me was the biblical truth that, in one sense, all of life is counseling. We are constantly giving and receiving counsel, either knowingly and directly or unknowingly and indirectly. We are all influencing each other to one degree or another, so an important question to ask is, Am I influencing you for good or ill? Am I pointing you to Christ as your source of hope and joy, or to something else? As Tripp put it, "You are influencing people every day. The question is: Is that influence Biblical?"

Cultivating God-honoring humility

We recently went on a beach weekend with some of the young adults from our church, to Corolla, NC. 24 adults in one house, plus one Owen and one Baxter. It was lots of fun. Here is the group shot we took at the end of the weekend.



I taught 3 sessions on Cultivating Humility, using much of C.J. Mahaney's book, Humility: True Greatness (I highly recommend this book). It seemed to be a fruitful time of learning and discussion (each teaching time was followed by a time of small group discussion/application). C.J.'s handy definition of true, God-honoring humility is this: "Humility is honestly assessing ourselves in light of God's holiness and our sinfulness." Isaiah 6:1-7 is a good place to go in Scripture for this.

I think it can only help us to ask ourselves at any given moment, "Am I presently motivated by pride or by humility?...am I big right now (in my estimation) and God small, or is God big right now and me small?...who is currently at the center of my universe: God, or me?", and to ask the Holy Spirit for the grace and power to change.

Sick, but not destroyed

I've been sick now for a few days, thankfully not with any version of the flu. I usually get pretty knocked out, and a terrible sore throat starts in sometime around the 2nd day (like right now).

One thought/prayer that the Lord has used to help me immensely is this: that I can be more driven and influenced by the Holy Spirit who dwells within me than by my physical body which is experiencing one of the effects of living in a sin-wrecked, fallen world. As unpleasant and sometimes painful as my current experience is (and it is very minor compared to the sufferings of others), because of the victorious work of Christ I can walk by the Spirit and not be downcast in soul because of the infirmity of my body.

I'm sick right now (as perhaps some of you are as well!) because I live in a world of sin, but I am not under the dominion of sin or its effects because of the redeeming work of Christ on the cross for me. As often as I can remember that, and believe that, I can be sick, but not destroyed (2 Cor 4:7-12).

Starting again

A good pastor-friend of mine once gave me a simple and practical encouragement to persevere in a much-neglected daily Bible reading schedule by saying, "If you stop 1,000 times, just make sure you start 1,001 times!"

So, after about a 3-month break, I'm starting again on this blog. I hope to post things on here quite regularly that are a bit more brief and stream of consciousness-like. I know it will benefit me, and I hope that it will benefit you as well.