Tag: Limitations

Links for the Weekend (2025-03-28)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

The Paradox of Ease: Why Friction is Good for You

Trevin Wax explains how convenience and getting all we need with ease is not necessarily good for us. And it doesn’t make us happier. He adds reflections on the Christian life coming out of this truth.

What would life be like if we could eliminate all friction? If we could do away with resistance? If fulfilling our desires were as simple as pressing a button, so the gap between what we want and what we experience shrinks to nothing?

“This is the aspiration of the digital,” Barba-Kay argues. It’s “to make the world fully pliant to [our] will.” The goal is to reduce the resistance between desire and fulfillment. And in theory, this should make us happier. If we could eliminate struggle, wouldn’t joy be easier to come by?

It hasn’t worked out that way.

On Failure

To be human is, sadly, to know failure. Alan Noble examines worldly grief and godly grief in the context of failure.

My favorite part of this verse is the phrase “without regret,” because to me this is the whole key to understanding how to avoid worldly grief. Godly grief has a trademark: it doesn’t come with regret. There’s no obsessing over the failure or going over the details again and again to try and fix things in your mind. Godly grief accepts that Christ has forgiven us and that is more than enough. And so we are free to live.

Lenten Sonnets

Andrew Peterson is writing sonnets through Lent this year, so I’m sharing two of them for the poetry section of the links this week: Lenten Sonnet X, 2025 and Lenten Sonnet XVII, 2025.

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 (2024-03-08)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

Our limits are a gift from God

We don’t often thank God for our limitations, but Aaron Armstrong argues that might just be what we need to do.

Even more than reminding us that we are not God, our limits encourage us to see the goodness of life together. Of being part of a community that bears one another’s burdens, weeps with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice. People with whom we can share our weaknesses, and God uses to carry us forward.

When the Walk Becomes a Crawl: One of the Most Hopeful Reminders I’ve Read about Sanctification

Justin Taylor shares an excerpt from a David Powlison book that gives great encouragement about the speed and direction of sanctification.

But, in fact, there’s no formula, no secret, no technique, no program, no schedule, and no truth that guarantees the speed, distance, or time frame. On the day you die, you’ll still be somewhere in the middle. But you will be further along.

10 Reasons the Old Testament Matters to Christians

Christians don’t often need to be convinced of the value of reading the New Testament. But the Old Testament is a different story. Here’s a list of ten reasons the Old Testament really matters, with great explanations.

To understand the Old Testament fully, we must start reading it as believers in the resurrected Jesus, with God having awakened our spiritual senses to perceive and hear rightly. As Paul notes, Scripture’s truths are “spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14) and only through Christ does God enable us to read the old covenant materials as God intended (2 Cor. 3:14). This, in turn, allows our biblical interpretation as Christians to reach its rightful end of “beholding the glory of the Lord” and “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:14–18). Thus, we read for Christ.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called What My Children Taught Me About Grace. 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 (2023-10-27)

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 Mourn Over Your Sins

This article is a great explanation of the discipline of “spiritual mourning.”

When you mourn your sins, seeing them for what they are, it can be easy for you to despair. Instead remember that when God shines the light on your sins, his great purpose is to lead you to Jesus, the friend of sinners. In him you will find hope. Hope is a signature mark of spiritual mourning, and it arises from faith in Christ and all that he has accomplished through the cross.

A Word to My Inner Perfectionist

Amy Medina has some really helpful thoughts about the difference between our sin and our finite limits as humans.

And in this Truth, there is freedom. I don’t need to get it all right. I can’t. I never will. In fact, when I insist on impossible standards for myself, I’m trying to pretend to be an infinite God. Taking time to rest, depending on others, and giving myself grace when I make mistakes are not signs of weakness, failure, or sin. On the contrary, accepting my finiteness is an expression of humility. I am not God. 

That Time the Bible Said to Follow Your Heart

How do we reconcile parts of the Bible which seem to be at odds? The answer is usually some form of pay attention to the context! This article is a good example of context-sensitive Bible reading.

The larger context is always important for any verse. When the author of Ecclesiastes exhorts his readers to any action, he is always doing so with a view toward wise behavior. When he says “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God” (5:1), or “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart” (9:7), or “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days” (11:1), these are calls for wise living.

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 (2/18/2022)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

The Paradox of Parenting and How To Trust God More

Many parents struggle with giving up (perceived) control of their children and “releasing” them into the world. Cara Ray wrote about how a scare in her daughter’s life reminder her about depending on God.

Children may try to assert their control, but they are completely dependent on their parents for survival. And that’s how we are to be as God’s children. We may be adults, but spiritually, we have to become like children. Greatness isn’t found in our perceived self-sufficiency but in our utter and complete dependence on the Father. 

Wordle and Our Longing for the Limited

I’m guessing you may have heard of the word game Wordle. It’s a lot of fun! Chris Martin has some thoughts about what the popularity of this game might say about cultural appetites at the moment.

The vast majority of our interaction with the internet is defined by constant, on-demand consumption. We can binge years of television in weeks. We can scroll Facebook or TikTok for hours and never run out of new bits of entertainment. There is no limit to the number of tweets or emails we can send (unfortunately). Limitless consumption has long been the allure of the internet, but when you can gorge yourself on memes and tv shows, it all can start to taste the same.

How Great (Psalm 145)

Here’s a video of a new song by Sovereign Grace Music, a setting of Psalm 145 to music.

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 (4/24/2020)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

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

We’re Living a Pruned Life—Whether We Want to or Not

Lore Ferguson Wilbert writes about the limitations the coronavirus pandemic has forced upon all of us. And she wonders, helpfully, about what those limitations can teach us and how the change can ultimately be good for us.

This is what limitations do to us. They remind us of who we are at our core. They simultaneously reveal the spaces in our bodies, minds, hearts that we like to keep hidden, while at the same time revealing the spaces in our bodies, minds, and hearts that we didn’t know were hidden at all. I am revealed to be both worse than I thought and somehow better, too. I remember who I am without the trappings of fill in the blank.

Your Strength Will Fail

At Desiring God, Jon Bloom writes about afflictions and comfort—all the kinds of affliction we meet and the ways that God provides comfort.

Whatever it takes to help us experience this comfort, to help us set our real, ultimate hope on God, is worth it. It really is. I don’t say this lightly. I know some of the painful process of such transformation. I’ve received some of the unexpected answers of God to my prayers. But the comfort God brings infuses all temporal comforts with profound hope. And when all earthly comforts finally fail, it is the one comfort that will remain.

Are You Conveying the Loveliness of Christ to Your Kids?

On its blog, Crossway has published an excerpt from a new book by Dane Ortlund. I enjoyed reading about the attractiveness of Jesus’s love and how we can communicate that to the children in our lives.

With our own kids, if we are parents, what’s our job? That question could be answered with a hundred valid responses. But at the center, our job is to show our kids that even our best love is a shadow of a greater love. To put a sharper edge on it: to make the tender heart of Christ irresistible and unforgettable. Our goal is that our kids would leave the house at eighteen and be unable to live the rest of their lives believing that their sins and sufferings repel Christ.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called The Transforming Power of the Crucifixion. 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.