Category: Links

Links for the Weekend (2026-11-06)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Don’t Stock the Pantry with Temptation

Darryl Dash has some advice for us with regard to fighting against sin: start earlier!

We are used to preparing for almost everything. We prepare our clothes, our food, our vacations, and more. Paul is saying that whatever you do, do not prepare to sin. Instead, actively take steps to cut temptation out of your life. Deliberately arrange your life so that sinful desires are harder to satisfy. Avoid certain environments. Put a filter on your phone. Cancel that streaming service. Throw away those books. Cut out influences that tempt you toward sin.

Identity & Literature: Eeyore is Worse Than You Remember

Justin Poythress writes about some of the dangers of pride.

Pride tells you that you are worth a lot more than you’re getting. You’re amazing, brilliant, talented, kind, considerate, and self-sacrificing—it’s just no one ever sees. No one recognizes how exceptionally humble and valuable you really are. Poor you.

How do I help my children who are constantly arguing with each other?

Lauren Whitman (from CCEF) answers this question in a short video. (A transcript is available.)

Thanks to Cliff L for his help in rounding up links this week!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-10-30)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

How to Flourish Even After Realizing that You Kind of Suck

How do we recognize our sin but not fall into despair or self-loathing? Griffin Gooch helps us think about an answer.

I thought I’d grown past this by now. I wrote a whole doctoral dissertation on this topic. I teach and write on formation constantly, but I’m often disappointed in my own formation. Some days I catch myself more concerned with performing spiritual maturity than actually becoming spiritually mature. I want to be further along, but I’m not. I want to be humble; I’m not. It’s embarrassing—writing this is embarrassing.

Will I Be Able To Talk To My Relatives In Heaven?

Kevin DeYoung answers this question in a short video.

Ledger

Our poem of the week: Ledger, by Kate Bluett. This poem is about the debts we accrue and God’s great forgiveness.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called We Need Faith to Study the Bible. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-10-23)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

How Can Heaven Be Better than Earth if We Are Married on Earth but Unmarried in Heaven?

Tim Challies wrestles with Jesus’s teaching about there being no marriage in heaven.

I don’t think we are the only ones who find it hard to take joy in Jesus’s words that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). If it is true that there is no marriage in heaven, then I may get a few more decades with Aileen as my wife, but will then spend the rest of eternity without her being my wife. In all honesty, I struggle to see how this can be a good thing. We experience such joy together, such pleasure, such friendship, such unity, and each of these is growing with time rather than diminishing. So how can heaven be better than earth if we are married on earth but unmarried in heaven?

In the light of eternity: A wife’s faith through her husband’s young-onset dementia

I was encouraged to read this story of a woman caring for her husband who has dementia.

For a while after his diagnosis, I made monthly Zoom calls to Greg, often including buddies from our college days. It was great fun reminiscing about the past and catching up on what was happening in each other’s lives.

I asked Beth recently if those calls were useful anymore. She hesitated, but admitted that Greg increasingly struggles with any social situation and probably doesn’t remember the calls the next day.

The Glaring Difference Between Being Truly Repentant and Being Merely Remorseful

Here’s a Crossway video featuring Matt Boswell talking about the difference between being repentant and remorseful.

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-10-16)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Where I End And We Begin

Alan Noble writes about where we find ourselves as individual Christians when we’re called to be part of a community (the church). Is there room for individuality?

Your personal dreams and desires still matter before God. They don’t get absorbed into the Blob of belonging to Others, but they do get tempered by them. Your right relationships to others help you see healthy ways to order your desires to God. When your relationships are unhealthy, they encourage you to develop perverse desires or to abandon your good desires for the sake of the Others.

Calibrate Your Conscience

Jacob Crouch urges us to tune our consciences to the Word of God.

On the other hand, sometimes the conscience has become dull. That check engine light stopped working years ago, and the things that we should be bothered by are not even on the radar. This dull conscience needs to be calibrated so that we don’t continue to walk in sin! The dull conscience no longer registers sin, and we walk without that God-given voice of reason in the everyday things of life.

Monstrance

Our poem of the week: Monstrance, by Kate Bluett. This lovely poem is about being filled by the Spirit.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called Niceness Is Not Enough. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-10-09)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

4 Truths to Preach to Your Sorrows

Tim Challies meditates on Romans 8:28 and offers some bedrock truths for us to remember when we are experiencing sorrow. Here’s one of them.

God loves me. It’s the simplest of truths but also the most important and the most formative. Why? Because if you really believe that God loves you, you will respond differently to your trial than if you think God hates you, or if you think God is apathetic toward you, or if you just aren’t certain how God relates to you. Preaching to yourself “God loves me” establishes your relationship with God in your own mind and heart. You may be tempted to reason from this hard thing to the belief that a bad circumstance must point to a bad relationship. But when difficulties come your way, it does not mean that God’s character has changed. It does not mean that his disposition toward you has changed. It does not mean that his relationship to you has changed.

How to Be Happy at Work

Dan Doriani writes about different approaches to work and he offers recommendations that will help Christians to be satisfied with work.

A few years ago, researchers compared the job satisfaction of people who aimed for enjoyment at work with those who aimed for meaning, or work that reflected their values. Perhaps counterintuitively, the survey found that people who pursue their values, rather than happy feelings, have “higher passion and job satisfaction, and lower turnover intentions.”

If we compare feeling good and doing good, doing good brings more satisfaction over time. Similarly, if we compare the pursuit of pleasure to the pursuit of purpose, purpose is more satisfying over time.

Revelation Is Not a Puzzle: 4 Keys to Interpretation

Daniel Hyde offers some help for us as we read and try to understand the book of Revelation.

The book does ask to be understood. Yet not in the way so many think. The seals, trumpets, and bowls are not a collection of coded predictions that we can confidently match, one by one, to individual events in a modern timeline. If each symbol pointed to one datable event, how would we identify which event among thousands? Thus, we’d get endless interpretations and no certainty, and the book would stay closed.

That’s why I say Revelation was not given like a mass of puzzle pieces to be solved. God did not give Revelation to be interpreted by us but to interpret the world for us. That one sentence changes what you’re doing when you open it. You’re not the detective. You’re the one being shown something.

So how do you read Revelation? Here are four keys: Read it as a book about Christ, to reveal, written in Old Testament signs, and to be heard and obeyed.

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-10-02)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Can We Trust the New Testament Text We Have Today?

John Samson writes about the manuscript evidence for the Bible and how that affects its trustworthiness.

The telephone game is fun exactly because it was designed to distort the message. It is one slim chain, one whisper at a time, and you cannot check the whisper you heard against anything else, not even the whisper before the one you heard. By the end of the line, you have no way to test anything that occurred along the way. Distortion is basically guaranteed.

The New Testament is the exact opposite to this.

The Sports Gambling Epidemic is Only Getting Worse

Cole Claybourn explains the seriousness of the sports gambling epidemic.

It’s never been easier to bet on sports, and people have never been more interested in doing so, data shows. According to 2026 Bank of America consumer account data, the number of online betting users increased significantly in the summer of 2026 thanks in part to the World Cup, with first-time users in June and July more than triple January levels. Millennials and Gen Z accounted for 88% of online betting activity in July.

Meditation XXIV

Our poem of the week: Meditation XXIV, by Mark Rico. This poem is about God waiting to sing creation into being.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called No Longer On Repeat. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-09-25)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Just Do It

Zak Mellgren writes about the Bible’s call to good works for those who are saved. He wants to make sure that our understanding of grace leads to faithful action, not inaction.

Christianity is not a spectator sport. When God saved you, he bestowed upon you the Team Jesus jersey through no achievement or effort of your own. You could never have earned it, yet he placed it on your shoulders in love and grace. But he did not only give you a team jersey. He gave you his word (the playbook) and his Spirit (the athletic ability to play the game). You have literally been granted supernatural power to do what was once impossible: to repent and obey in faith. So how strange it would be if you thanked the Lord and walked cheerily towards the sideline, admiring your clean, spotless new jersey, and sat down to cheer everyone else on instead of stepping into the game? T’would be strange, indeed.

A Theology of Music

Griffin Gooch’s article about music and theology describes the way music can echo or exalt the goodness of God.

Something about the way God crafted our sense receptors to metabolize chords and notes incentivizes joyful transcendence. As such, all these melodic vibrations and frequencies are a reminder that He meticulously designed our universe with more goodness and beauty than He needed to. We’d technically be able to survive without music, but a life without it wouldn’t be life to the full.

You Are Not Your Trials

The hard parts of our lives mark us and form us, but they do not define us.

If we took stock of who we are becoming, one of the things we will clearly see is that the hands of our Sculptor seem to have been most formative during the days of difficulty and trial. Though we might have been too blinded by our pain at the time to recognize it, in retrospect we would have to admit that those dark days of difficulty were forming days. It was during those days that God chipped away at our sin and self-reliance; at our lack of trust and immaturity.

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-09-18)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Where to Find Your Happy Place

Andrew Wilson writes about happiness and joy: why do they exist? How do we find them? He explains how we find ultimate joy in God’s presence.

But it’s Solomon’s father, David, who goes even further. He declares that beyond dwelling in any physical structure, being in God’s presence and the joy it brings is the only thing he wants in life: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple” (27:4). God’s presence is so delightful that when you experience it, you don’t want anything else.

A Replacement for Judas: Acts 1:15–26

Jeffrey Stivason explains how the way the apostles replaced Judas highlighted God’s appointment.

At first glance, Acts 1:15–26 is a puzzling passage. Luke devotes twelve verses to the replacement of Judas Iscariot! That is unexpected. Even more surprising is the method by which the apostles make their replacement decision. After identifying two qualified men, they cast lots to determine who would become the twelfth apostle. Did you hear that? They cast lots.

Mustang Grape

Our poem of the week: Mustang Grape, by Kate Bluett. This poem is about a vine growing in Texas and also about desire for the Lord.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called Those Who Hope Are Transformed. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-09-11)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

It’s Not Too Late to Make This a Great Year of Bible Reading

Tim Challies encourages us not to give up on the year if our devotional life hasn’t gone like we wanted. He offers suggestions on how to make the most of the rest of the year with regard to prayer and Bible reading.

By the end of August, many people have come to admit that the dreams they had for Bible reading that year have not been realized. Maybe that’s your reality. Maybe you set out strong in January and kept up the habit through the first half of the year, but then summer came along, routines were disrupted, and things haven’t been the same ever since. Or maybe you planned to read through a daily devotional but didn’t enjoy it as much as you thought you would. Maybe you found your reading plan was just a bit too heavy for the realities of your life. Maybe you got sick and couldn’t read for a time, or had a baby and have had to build entirely new routines. There could be any number of factors. 

I simply want to encourage you not to surrender the rest of this year. In fact, I want you to believe that you can still make this an extraordinary year of reading your Bible. However, for that to be the case, you will need to take a bit of time to consider how to read, what to read, and how to either form a new habit or re-form an old one.

How to Treat Sexual Thoughts

Alan Noble provides advice for dealing with impure, sexual thoughts.

For some of us, impure sexual thoughts come up often, for others, hardly at all. That’s just how God designed us. But society clearly wants us thinking about sex all the time, and more importantly, society wants us to engage and dwell on those thoughts. It appeals to our sexual passions. Because that’s how we are led to buy more products and services. As a result, for some Christians, their interiority can be crowded with impure thoughts daily. And they may hate themselves for it. They may experience shame. Regret. Self-loathing. Distrust of self. And also a feeling of helplessness. The thoughts just keep coming. How do you stop them so you can pay attention to what’s in front of you, to who is in front of you? How do you love your brothers and sisters in Christ by thinking of them in holy, respectful, familial ways?

How to Pray When You Feel Like You Pray the Same Thing Every Day

If you’re wondering for some practical tips on including Scripture in your prayer life, this article is a good resource.

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Links for the Weekend (2026-09-04)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Advice for a Young Bride

Melissa Edgington writes about how dependence in marriage should be embraced, not discarded.

If I could give advice to a young bride today, after three decades of experimentally learning how to live a life that’s hopelessly and gloriously intertwined with a man’s, I would urge her to embrace her dependence on her husband. I would tell her not to just embrace it, but to revel in it, enjoy it, and celebrate it as one of the great joys of married life.

6 Reasons to Study the Bible

Glenna Marshall offers six compelling reasons to study the Bible.

We study the Bible not to become smart but to become wise in the things of God. We study the Bible to know the ultimate author, hear what he has to say, walk closely with him, and reflect him to the world around us. When we open our Bibles to observe, take notes, pray, ask questions, and search diligently, we will be transformed as our minds are renewed by the inspired words of God.

Pleading My Righteousness?

Have you wondered how to handle the occasions in the psalms when the author asks God to deal with him according to his own righteousness? Dan Crabtree offers advice.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called How to Enjoy Your (Vain) Life. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here.