Category: Links

Links for the Weekend (2022-09-09)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Money’s Not the Problem

Paul Tripp reflects on problems that we have with money, and what those problems can tell us about deeper matters.

Your financial life is always determined more by the desires of your heart than by the size of your income. To the degree that you ask money to provide for you what it was never meant to provide, to that degree you will find it very hard to be careful and disciplined in your use of money. Money can’t buy you a satisfied heart, money can’t buy you peace and happiness, and money can’t buy you a reason to get up in the morning. Money isn’t meant to be your source of comfort when you are hurting or of hope when you are feeling discouraged. Money can’t and was never intended to give you life. To ask money to do any of those things will always lead to money troubles.

The Messy Home of Blessing

Raising children can be really hard. This article reminds us why that hard work is worthwhile, despite what others might say.

Whenever God gives a child, he’s entrusting us with a precious and eternal heritage — a new life that will never end, and that, Lord willing, will grow to change and shape the world in all kinds of ways (maybe even having children of their own). Their impact on eternity will easily outweigh whatever work the world holds up as more meaningful and consequential.

Jesus Wants You to Know You Are Weak

Even Christians need to be reminded that there is no such thing as self-reliant Christianity.

Why highlight this point if we are already gospel people? Because we need constant reminders. Jesus reminded His disciples that they were already clean because of the word he had spoken to them (John 15:3). This motley crew of ragamuffins didn’t have it all together and neither do we. We are so forgetful. We often do our devotions and move into the workday as though the weight is completely on our shoulders. We treat our vocations, our hobbies, our parenting, and sometimes even our ministries as though we don’t really need much help. We’re like the adopted child who keeps trying to prove to his parents that he is part of the family.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article written by Caroline Higginbottom called Toward Mending a Divided World. 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 (2022-09-02)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Sometimes I Struggle With the Bible

As Christians we know that we should read the Bible, but sometimes that feels like a tall task. Scott Sauls confesses the difficulty he has reading the Bible at times, but explains why he keeps at it.

Indeed, honest Bible readers—even skilled teachers of the Bible like C.S. Lewis—have found parts of it difficult, puzzling, mystifying, and even offensive. As much as we can rejoice in, get inspired by, and find comfort in certain parts of the Bible, other parts will disturb us—namely, the parts that contradict our feelings, instincts, hopes, dreams, traditions, and cultural values. I recently saw a quote that said, “Men do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself. They reject it because it contradicts them.”

Why Does Justice Matter?

We may mean different things when we refer to “justice,” but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it. Jonathan Noyes tells us why justice should matter to Christians.

Justice is a universal moral principle, and it’s an objective moral good. It’s the single best word to capture God’s purpose for human conduct, individually and corporately (i.e. governments). The standard of what’s just and unjust is not a matter of personal opinion or preference. In this way, justice is a category of truth, with an important difference. Standard truth claims correspond to what is. Justice corresponds to what ought to be. Justice tells us what should be. 

The Problem with the Self-Help Movement

What’s the difference between self-help and sanctification? Jen Wilkin has a good, short video explanation.

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 (2022-08-26)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Why We Sleep (And the God Who Doesn’t)

Nick Tucker reflects on David’s ability to sleep while in danger and God’s inability (!) to sleep.

To think about God’s greatness, we naturally tend to talk about what God can do. We, however, are going to consider what God can’t do—and when you realise what God can’t do, his greatness might just blow your mind.

Senior Saints, We Need You

This is a great encouragement for all of us to care for and learn from our older brothers and sisters in the faith.

It’s time to step up our efforts at ministering to (and with) these older brothers and sisters. They have so much to contribute to the church. “Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days” (Job 12:12). But they need help discerning how best to mature in faith and practice as their bodies decline. They need encouragement to finish their race with endurance, resilience, and joy.

Slow to Anger

Here’s an encouraging meditation on God’s patience, particularly as it is captured in the phrase “slow to anger.”

If we were God in heaven, we would have grown impatient with people like us long ago. Our anger rises quickly in the face of personal offense. Our frustration boils over. Our judgments readily fire. And apart from the daily renewal of our minds, we can easily measure God “by that line of our own imaginations,” as if his thoughts matched our thoughts, and his ways our ways.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called What the Holy Spirit Does for Us. 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 (2022-08-19)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Is Your Gospel an Urban Legend?

What’s the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus? From our behavior and our stories, our children should be able to see a big difference.

I imagine that it was not too difficult, even when our girls sort of believed Santa was a real person, to separate the importance of Santa from Jesus because our familial life didn’t revolve around Santa. We didn’t read every day about Santa or discuss how Santa would want us to treat our friends at school. We didn’t talk about the importance of Santa for our everyday life. Dad didn’t write books about Santa or preach on Sundays about Santa. When we sinned against our kids, we didn’t come to them for forgiveness out of a desire to make Santa look beautiful. We didn’t tuck them in with prayers to Santa. And the community of faith we raise our kids in isn’t devoted to Santa. In the grand scheme of things, learning Santa wasn’t real was not a huge deal.

Look Until You See

Cassie Watson urges us to behold beauty in all areas of our lives, especially those where it might be hardest to discover.

When I’m feeling crushed by my to-do list or discouraged by my weakness, I need to slow down and look ever more carefully until I see. In my ordinary days, there’s my niece’s giggles, letters in the mailbox, delightful endpapers in picture books, and Australasian figbirds. The more I look, the more I see. 

Overcoming Sinful Anger

With some help from Jonathan Edwards, Nick Batzig takes a look at sinful anger.

The issue of sinful anger is one that is not addressed enough in theologically conservative circles. It is one leading mark of self-righteousness; and, is a sin of which we need to repent and against which we must watch and pray.

A Sonnet on the Transfiguration

The poet Malcolm Guite has written poetry celebrating and reflecting on different parts of the church calendar. This poem on the transfiguration of Jesus is particularly good.

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 (2022-08-12)

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 (Always) Be Efficient

Efficiency is wonderful for jobs, but efficiency is terrible for relationships.

Who wants an efficient friendship? Or marriage? Who would want to visit an efficient park, or art museum? Who prefers drive-through fast food to a slow evening meal where the conversation lasts longer than the courses? It’s great to be efficient, but it’s not always great. Sometimes it’s better to be inefficient and let time slip away while we immerse ourselves in something (or someone) that isn’t a task to accomplish or a to-do box to tick.

How Job Teaches Us to Grieve With Hope

Marissa Bonduran writes about the choices we have when faced with sorrow and looks to the book of Job for guidance.

When Job said that the Lord gives and takes away, he acknowledged that all we experience has passed through the loving and purposeful hands of a trustworthy God. Throughout the rest of the book, Job continues to wrestle with what happened to him and what he knows is true about God. This is not an easy truth to grasp, but Job was willing to press into the Lord in search of the truth. As readers we watch his friends struggle with their own understanding of who God is. As we read the story of Job, there is much we can learn about how God works in our lives (Rom. 8:28).

How Connectivity Made Us Miserable

I appreciate Samuel James’s keen thinking about culture, technology, and faith. In this article he writes about Netflix, the iPod, and Facebook and the change they all underwent in the late 2000s. He argues that these changes have been working against our happiness since then.

Simply put, the idea that maximum access to the Internet, the utilization of all our culture and all our spaces to bring us closer to the ambient Web, has made our art less enjoyable, our relationships less accessible, and our experiences less meaningful. Americans today pay more money to get less out of their tools and less out of their art. Connectivity is making us miserable.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article written by Charissa Rychcik called Loving My Neighbor, Not Assuming the Worst. 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 (2022-08-05)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

New Resolve After 55 Years in My Wheelchair

This article was written by Joni Eareckson Tada, who has been a quadriplegic since 1967. She reflects on the Americans with Disabilities Act and writes about the ways she works to help people with disabilities not just have access but belong.

Aging with quadriplegia may be filled with extra challenges, but it doesn’t demoralize me. With God’s help, I hold everything lightly. I try not to grasp at my fragile life, nor coddle it or minimize my activities at Joni and Friends just because I’m getting older, growing weaker, and dealing with more pain. Rather, I find great comfort and joy in dying to self and living every day to serve the Lord Jesus and others around the world whose disabilities are far more profound than mine.

How Do Hearts Grow?

Pierce Taylor Hibbs proposes this answer to his question: “Maybe our hearts mature as they focus more on giving and less on getting.” He uses the rest of his article to explain.

Heart-growth is a matter of giving. It’s a posture of the soul, to offer with both hands and not expect or demand anything in return. If you want to know if your heart is growing, if you’re not just waking up each morning and being the same old yesterday-self, then consider how you’re giving your time, energy, and resources to others. Hearts wax with giving, and they wane in selfishness. Thank God he gives us grace so that we can give it again. 

This Is My Body Given for You

While the exact saying “This is my body, given for you” only appears in the Bible at the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Mitch East shows that the entire story of the Bible can be told using similar words.

This re-telling of the Bible puts the lie to an article of secular faith, which is: “My body is my own.” Nothing could be further from the truth. God gave me my body at my conception through the mutual gift my father and mother made to each other. The God-man gave us His body two thousand years ago and re-presents His body to the church each Sunday around the Lord’s Table. Christ gives the Church, His body, to me in the form of brothers and sisters unified by the Holy Spirit.

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 (2022-07-29)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Take Time to Be Unproductive

This is a great article, especially for people who have a nagging sense that they should always be accomplishing something. Many of us need to hear the advice to slow down.

What we think of as boredom or unproductive time can be a great gift. In the spaces opened by moments of slowness, if we don’t immediately fill them with more tasks or distractions, surprising things often happen: our bodies breathe and relax a bit, our imaginations open up, and our hearts can consider all manner of ideas. We have space to evaluate how we spoke to a colleague that morning or notice a young parent struggling with a child. Only by slowing down, and not immediately filling the space, do we start to sense God’s presence and the complexities of the world — including both its beauties and problems, our wonder and fears.

How to Handle the “Why” Questions

There are so many things God does that leave us baffled and, at times, frustrated. Katie Faris provides some encouragement from the book of Job about our desire to know why bad things happen.

At the end of the book, Job is comforted. And his story offers comfort in our trials too—but perhaps not in the way we might expect. Job’s comfort and ours doesn’t come from having all our questions answered or problems solved. Job finds—and teaches us to find—comfort in God’s sovereignty.

How Is the Sexual Revolution Affecting Women and Girls Today?

Jen Oshman answers this question in video form for Crossway. (There’s a transcript too.) Her answer focuses on the error of thinking the body and the soul are separate.

So many women and girls in our age are walking around with this trauma and these deep, deep wounds because they’ve sought to separate their bodies from their souls. But the truth is we are unified. We are embodied souls, and our bodies were created good by our good God. And so we must cherish and honor and protect and steward our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our souls well and in a unified way.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called When Conviction Comes to the People of God. 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 (2022-07-22)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Why You Should Study Theology

Theology often gets a bad reputation as dry and confusing. (That’s just poorly communicated theology!) Scott Slayton gives us three reasons why we should commit ourselves to studying theology.

When we read and study theology, we come to a better grasp of God’s personal attributes and how he interacts with the world. We see how God revealed himself in the past through encounters with men and women in Scripture. For example, when he passed by Moses in Exodus 34, he proclaimed about himself, “The Lord, gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” You cannot learn that about God by looking at a sunset. Also, think about his interactions with Job in the closing chapters of the book that bears his name. There, we learn that God is all powerful, has no competitors, yet is gracious and restores those who have been broken.

Why Christian Teens Have an Identity Crisis

Sara Barratt looks at the constant questioning of identity in today’s young people and traces that back to a lack of the knowledge of God.

Lists of “who you are” statements are filled with deep truth but often little substance. You are loved . . . but those words hardly make a dent in love-hungry hearts if they don’t understand who loves them. You are chosen . . . but chosen by whom? Why were we chosen? You are redeemed . . . but those words mean nothing if we don’t deeply comprehend what we’re redeemed from and the greatness of our Redeemer’s heart. Far too often, we open with the “you are,” “we are,” “I am,” story instead of the “he is” story. 

What Is Promised to the Two or Three Who Are Gathered in Jesus’ Name?

We’ve all heard (and quoted) the promise about Jesus being present when two or three people are gathered in his name. Amy K. Hall takes a close look at the context of that promise, as well as the Old Testament background, and explains that we’ve likely been using this incorrectly!

Jesus goes on to explain that church discipline, if done in this manner, will have the weight of God behind it (i.e., whatever they bind or loose on earth shall have been bound or loosed in heaven). Then he says, “Again”—note that the “again” indicates he’s not changing the subject here but referring back to the two or three witnesses previously mentioned—“Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask [in context, regarding church discipline], it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven.”

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 (2022-07-15)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Community: A Struggle to Fit

I enjoyed this article about the church and what we can learn by living in community with people different than us.

I might have to grow in patience as I listen to others who take longer to formulate their thoughts. At the same time, others will have to grow in gentleness in how they respond. God does not want my rough edges rubbing against you, though they will, and will continue to do so until glory. But my rough edges will make you smoother, and your edges will help shape me. When I embrace people who are different from me, it stands to reason that my heart will need to be reshaped so we can fit together. This is not always a pleasant prospect, but it is a beautiful one.

How to Keep Yourself from Loving Money

The biblical antidote to the danger of loving money is contentment. How can we pursue contentment?

How do we resist the pull? By pursuing the ordinary ways God has given to grow our faith. When we worship together each Sunday or pray and meditate on his Word, he reorients our perspective. The routine rhythms of the Christian life, almost imperceptibly, steel our spine against the allure of “more.”

Nipping Gossip in the Bud

This article lays out three steps to take in order to battle gossip.

One reason gossip can be so difficult to define is that it so often masquerades as something more mundane, perhaps even beneficent. I’m sure you have witnessed plenty of prayer requests shared on someone’s behalf that seemed to include unnecessary details or salacious information. You’ve probably heard your share of “words of concern” that bordered on insinuation or improper speculation. Maybe you’ve offered such words yourself. I know I have.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called How Do We Obey the Gospel? 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 (2022-07-08)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

A Declaration of Dependence

This was published on July 4, just so you get the reference in the title. But this is a wonderful reminder of just how dependent we are. Here is just one of Aimee Joseph’s declarations.

I am more entrepreneurial and creative in devising ways to glorify myself and expand my own kingdom than I am in seeking to worship and glorify the only One who is worthy (Hosea 8:11-12). I am more resolute at running after lifeless idols than I am at following the One living God (Hosea 2:5; Hosea 11:2; Hosea 11:7).

Bootstrapping is Folly

Glenna Marshall wrote about sanctification, obedience, and individualism.

But what about sanctification? Our salvation is a work of the Spirit, but isn’t the Christian life up to us? I used to think so. Saved by grace through faith, sanctified by my own strength. I wouldn’t have used the term “bootstrapping” back in my young years of the faith, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I was trying to be really good, to read my Bible often, to pray, to be obedient—all in order to keep my right standing with God. If I missed some Bible reading or fell asleep praying, I figured the Lord must be disappointed in me. So, I tried harder. And harder still. And I began to hold other people to a standard I could never hope to meet. I may have been saved by grace, but I was determined to be sanctified by grit. It was a terrible way to live. 

Teach Us to Number Our Days

Cindy Matson writes about “numbering our days” (as in Psalm 90). She helps us think through several bad methods of counting and offers some thoughts about how to number our days properly.

Whatever the number of our days here on earth may be, that number represents a specific quantity. A quantity that will come to an end sooner or later. Eternity represents a quantity that never diminishes no matter how many days go by. Numbering our days God’s way means that we live with eternity in view, using each day here on earth in light of the life that will never end.

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