Links for the Weekend (2023-01-27)

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

Leave the Throne of Guilt

Scotty Smith shares his experience of learning how to pray not because he felt guilty, but because he delighted in the triune God. Union with Christ was the key to unlock his prayer life.

As a young believer in the late sixties, the joy of my new life in Christ was palpable and plenteous. But pretty soon, I started to feel the pressure of a new burden to “get it right.” I had consistent quiet times, underlined verses in my Bible (in three different colors), and engaged in Scripture memory. I fellowshipped, witnessed, and prayed. Unfortunately, these crucial spiritual disciplines functioned more as a means of guilt (or pride) than as a means of grace. Many of God’s good gifts are misused and disused until they become rightly used. This is certainly true of prayer.

Expose Your Kids to Hard Truths

Here’s an essay urging us not to shy away from some of the “grittier” parts of Scripture with our children.

Continually discussing the beauty and hard realities of Scripture will help children love truth and the God who embodies it. And it’ll give them a discerning ear when engaging culture apart from the watchful eye of their parents. We have the opportunity to demonstrate that the Christian faith is rational, understandable, and more beautiful than the culture that will fight hard to persuade our children otherwise.

How to Think about God Promoting His Own Glory

If we evaluate God’s purposes and actions through the grid of what would be righteous for a human, we’re bound to go wrong. This article calls us to remember how different from us God is when we think about his focus on his glory.

So now we come to the issue of God promoting his own glory. The same principle applies to God doing things “for the sake of his name” and “for his glory” and requiring people to worship him. If you are troubled by the thought of this, consider the possibility that you are imagining how you would respond to a human being who did this—a fallen, sinful human being who did not deserve your worship. That is not who God is. And so, in order to understand God rightly, we need to adjust our interpretation of his actions in light of his moral perfection, not judge him as if he were also a fallen human being with a dangerously inflated ego.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called A Primer on Encouragement. 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.