All that can be said after reading this prayer is “Who am I but another one of God’s wayward children”. No better then the many that have gone before me. I’m reminded of the words of Apostle Paul in 1st Timothy 1:15; ….”Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

THE CRY OF A CONVICTED SINNER

THOU RIGHTEOUS AND HOLY SOVEREIGN,

In whose hand is my life and whose are all my ways,

Keep me from fluttering about religion;

            fix me firm in it,

            for I am irresolute;

            my decisions are smoke and vapour,

            and I do not glorify thee,

            or behave according to thy will;

Cut me not off before my thoughts grow to responses,

            and the budding of my soul into full flower,

            for thou are forbearing and good,

            patient and kind.

Save me from myself,

            from the artifices and deceits of sin,

            from the treachery of my perverse nature,

            from denying thy charge against my offences,

            from a life of continual rebellion against thee,

            from wrong principles, views, and ends;

            for I know that all my thoughts, affections,

                   desires and pursuits are alienated from thee.

I have acted as if I hated thee, although thou art love itself;

  have contrived to tempt thee to the uttermost,

       to wear out thy patience;

  have lived evilly in word and action.

Had I been a prince

            I would long ago have crushed such a rebel;

Had I been a father

            I would long since have rejected my child.

O, thou Father of my spirit,

       thou king of my life,

                   cast me not into destruction,

                   drive me not from thy presence,

                   but wound my heart that it may be healed;

                   break it that thine own hand may make it whole.

“The Cry of a Convicted Sinner”, Page 38 from;

The Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions

(East Peoria, IL, Versa Press, Inc, 2007)

Used by permission

Posted on December 2nd, 2011 by deanna
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

It has been a long time since we have posted any quote. With the trials affecting our staff, the time working has been spent focusing on the necessities. So again we attempt to share with our readers quotes from some of the greatest men the Lord has called to preach to his people.

J. C. Ryle was a preacher who lived from 1816 – 1900. If you are familiar with his writings then you already know how wonderful it is to read and reflect on what he has written. Here is a website that is devoted to sharing J. C. Ryles’s writings; http://www.jcrylequotes.com/. Spend time browsing through the many quotes, and just to help you get started…..here are some that will benefit any young man you know.

5 Dangers For Young Men

1. Pride

“Young men, do not be too confident in your own judgment. Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don’t trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives experience, and therefore deserves respect.”

2. Love of Pleasure

“Youth is the time when our passions are strongest—and like unruly children, cry most loudly for indulgence. Youth is the time more..

Posted on June 21st, 2011 by deanna
Filed under: Men, Quotes | No Comments »

Putting On Christ / Putting Off Sin

by Justin Taylor.

I’ve been intrigued by Paul’s idea of “putting on” and “putting off,” and wanted to investigate a little further.

Posted on June 8th, 2011 by Kevin
Filed under: Sanctification | No Comments »

Advice for Slow Readers – The Gospel Coalition Blog.

Compared to many, I am a slow reader. I have spent hours on speed-reading techniques to no avail. It’s embarrassing to read something together with my wife, since she usually gets a few paragraphs ahead pretty quickly. I can imagine the disappointment she feels to have to wait at the end of each page. It’s also frustrating to see many close friends moving along quickly down their reading lists, overwhelming me with “must read” suggestions. Maybe you’ve felt the same way.

For a few years now, I’ve used a reading plan that has helped me get through a pretty good number of books every month, despite my setback of being a slow reader. For the frustrated and overwhelmed readers, here are a few suggestions.

Read in 15 minute segments.

The maxim of “do everything in the 15-minute periods of time, because the hours never come” is certainly true–especially for parents with small children. I try to follow that wisdom with my reading plan. Usually, at 10:45 a.m., I’ll stop what I’m doing and spend 15 minutes reading. After my 15 minutes is up I go back to what I was doing. I do the same at 2:45 p.m.. I can maybe get 30 pages read with both slots (I told you I was a slow reader). If I do that over every day of the week, that’s 150 pages—a small book or half of a big one. That is 150 extra pages I usually don’t have read by the end of the week. It doesn’t seem like much, but it goes a long way when it seems like there’s never any reading time.

Get up 40 minutes earlier.

I don’t mean to sound like a Puritan, but early in morning is the best time to knock out a big chunk of a book. We have a 2-, 3-, and 5-year-old and once they’re up, kiss any quiet and focused time goodbye. So after devotions, I usually try to set aside at least 40 minutes of reading of time. My computer, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, and all other distractions are still tucked away. By the time I’ve moved from my devotions to reading a book, I’m on my second cup of coffee. My brain has ceased from lagging.

Use the odd times to read.

At the gym, I usually spend 30 minutes on the bicycle. Instead of listening to music or watching the horrible Hollywood news on the TV screens, I bring along a book. Because I’m exercising, and my rebelling, out-of-shape muscles can distract me, I usually bring a biography or some good classic piece of fiction that doesn’t take too much brain power.

Read widely and more than one book at a time.

There was a time when I had a bad habit of not finishing books. There are some who read books because they’ve gotten everything they need from it, they need to move on, or they know the arguments well enough to know where the author will go. But my reasons weren’t so virtuous. I simply grew bored with the books or was lured by the next new release.

I discovered that if I read a couple different books at a time, I usually won’t get bored and not finish one. Even more helpful, I found, was when I read widely. In other words, I try to keep from reading two or three books of the same kind. For example, I am reading three books at the moment. In the morning, I’ve been spending 30 minutes reading Retrieving Doctrine: Essays in Reformed Theology by Oliver Crisp. It’s a good, boring book to grit my teeth and read through, not too worried about making notes in the margins. I spend the last bit of my morning reading time with Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, as I follow Mark Dever’s plan of reading through a church history figure each month. At the gym, I’m reading Churchill by Paul Johnson. During my 15-minute reading segments, I’ve been reading P. G. Wodehouse’s My Man Jeeves. This variety keeps me from being disinterested in one of the books and giving up on it.

Work hard to finish a book.

It’s true that a bad book is not worth your time. But not finishing a book is an easy bad habit to get into. There are three or four enticing books that come out each month that tempt us all to forsake our current one. Don’t do it. Finish books! Don’t be tossed to and fro by the pretty paperbacks that fill the “New Books” aisle. Good books are less common than you think. Important books are rare. And we probably shouldn’t label anything “great” until it at least hits the second printing. In the last five years, there were around 1 million books published in the United States. It’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t find one as good as Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis, none will be as important as Augustine’s On the Trinity, and not one as great as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

These principles have helped me go through a pretty steady reading list every month. I’m still a slow reader, so the number of books I read won’t dazzle you. But I’m reading enough to be regularly strengthened, encouraged, and stretched. I even happen to fool some into thinking I’m a fairly quick reader.

John Starke is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and managing editor of TGC Reviews, the book review site of The Gospel Coalition. You can follow him on Twitter.

Posted on May 30th, 2011 by Kevin
Filed under: Discipleship | No Comments »

via Seven Thoughts on Time Management.

by Douglas Wilson

1.The point is fruitfulness, not efficiency. You should want to be fruitful like a tree, not efficient like a machine.

But this fruitfulness is a function of God’s blessing, and it is surrendered work that is blessed work. Seek that blessing, and seek it through concrete surrender. Such surrenders are not abstract. Put your Isaacs on the altar. Every interruption is a chance to surrender your work to the only one who can bless your work, particularly when the interruptions come from your kid wanting to play catch.

We can see the principle with the sabbath and the tithe. Less blessed is more than more unblessed. 90% blessed goes farther than 100% unblessed. 6 days blessed are far more fruitful than 7 days unblessed.

2. Build a fence around your life, and keep that fence tended. You should have a life outside your work, and your family should be enjoying that life together with you. Go to work at a reasonable, predictable time, and come home at a reasonable, predictable time. Keep your work on a regular schedule, not an absolute schedule. If the barn catches fire, allow that to interrupt your schedule. But if the barn catches fire three times a week, then perhaps some preventative thinking is in order. When you are driven by the tyranny of the urgent, most of the urgencies aren’t. Let the fence hold.

3. Perfectionism paralyzes. Chesterton once wonderfully observed that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. The sign of a fruitful worker is that he understands the critical difference between “that won’t cut it” and “that is just fine.”

4. Fill in the corners. I typed the outline for this with my thumbs while sitting in a comfy chair at the mall while my wife was being a merchant ship that brings goods from afar. This was far more productive than staring vacantly at a neon Tito Macaroni’s sign would have been. If you have a commute, use the time to listen to books instead of inane DJ chatter. If the books get too serious, or if you do, go back to the DJs.

Do not despise how much can be packed into small corners. I live in a small town, and so my commute is four minutes, more or less. There have been times when I have arrived at the office with the same song playing as when I pulled out of the garage. And yet I listened to David McCullough’sJohn Adams like that. It was a great steak, and cutting it into little tiny pieces did not diminish the flavor at all.

5. Plod. Keep at it. Slow and steady wins the race. Truisms are true. Work adds up, provided you are doing it.

6. Take in more than you give out. If you give out more than you take in, you will . . . give out. Your lake should have snowmelt streams running into it. Every vocation requires constant learning, constant development.

7. Use and reuse. State and restate. Learn and relearn. Develop what you know. Cultivate what you have. Your garden plot is the same as it always was, so plow deeper. Envying the garden that others have cultivated plows nothing, and brings forth a harvest of nothing.

Strive for deep conviction more than superficial originality, and deep originality will come. Your tomatoes will take the ribbon at the fair, provided you learned how to grow them in your own dirt.

Posted on May 30th, 2011 by Kevin
Filed under: Discipleship | No Comments »

10 Things an Effective Minister Must Remember.

by Douglas Wilson

1. You are a minister of Christ, for the people. You are not a minister of the people, for Christ. Always preach Jesus.

2. Acknowledge your sins to God, and do what He says to do about them.

3. Your principal credentials for ministry are maintained, or not, within your marriage and family.

4. Your family is a community within the larger community of your ministry. But this community of family still needs to be a gated community.

5. Your toolbox is the Bible, always the Bible. It is the only book you have that is infallible and absolute.

6. If this makes you neglect other books, it is proof that you are neglecting the one book you pretend to have.

7. You are to preach, teach, lead, admonish, and encourage with authority. Don’t do it like a muttering scribe.

8. Surround yourself with men who respect you, not men who cater to you.

9. Attack sin from the pulpit. Proclaim grace from the pulpit. You have a high vocation that should require some level of courage. Thunder the Word.

10. In the fulfillment of the Great Commission, never forget the big picture. The point is the success of the army, and your church is simply a platoon. You should want a successful platoon, of course, but only to the extent that it advances the larger mission. And always remember that Jesus is the supreme commander.

Posted on May 24th, 2011 by Kevin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

After reading this prayer I began to reflect on how I view sleep. Sleep always brings a welcome relief for my tired body and mind, restoring me for the new day to come. Sleep has also been a friend allowing me to escape, momentarily; from a difficult day, from trials and temptations, from disappointments and heartache.

I was surprised to discover that the puritans suffered from sleeplessness as I do, brought on by guilt, worries, bad dreams. This should not have been surprising considering the same creator God made us all. But, never did it occur to me to think about my death when going to sleep. I do see it differently now. Consider this, the last time we close our eyes will be the first time we see Glory!

SLEEP

BLESSED CREATOR,

Thou hast promised thy beloved sleep;

Give me restoring rest needful for tomorrow’s toil.

If dreams be mine, let them not be tinged with evil.

Let thy Spirit make my time of repose a blessed temple of his holy presence.

May my frequent lying down make me familiar with death,

            the bed I approach remind me of the grave,

            the eyes I now close picture to me their final closing.

Keep me always ready, waiting for admittance to thy presence.

Weaken my attachment to earthly things.

May I hold life loosely in my hand,

            knowing that I receive it on condition of its surrender;

As pain and suffering betoken transitory health,

            may I not shrink from a death

            that introduces me to the freshness of eternal youth.

I retire this night in full assurance of one day awaking with thee.

All glory for this precious hope,

            for the gospel of grace,

            for thine unspeakable gift of Jesus,

            for the fellowship of the Trinity.

Withhold not thy mercies in the night season;

                        thy hand never wearies,

                        thy power needs no repose,

                        thine eye never sleeps.

Help me when I helpless lie,

            when my conscience accuses me of sin,

            when my mind is harassed by foreboding thoughts,

            when my eyes are held awake by personal anxieties.

Show thyself to me as the God of all grace, love and power;

            thou hast a balm for every wound,

                        a solace for all anguish,

                        a remedy for every pain,

                        a peace for all disquietude.

Permit me to commit myself to thee awake or asleep.

“Sleep”, Page 165 from;

The Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions

 (East Peoria, IL, Versa press, Inc., 2007)

Used by permission

Posted on May 6th, 2011 by deanna
Filed under: Prayer, Valley of Vision | No Comments »

A great quote from T. F. Torrance in his article, “The Hypostatic Union” (36, paragraphing mine) —

It is important to see that if the Deity of Christ is denied, then the Cross becomes a terrible monstrosity.

If Jesus Christ is man only and not also God, then we lose faith in God and man.

We lose faith in God because we could not believe in a God who allows the best man that ever lived to be hounded to death on the Cross—is that all that God cares about our humanity and its search after God, after truth and righteousness and peace?

Put Jesus Christ a man on the Cross, and put God in heaven, like some Mohammedan deity imprisoned in His own lonely abstract Deity—and you cannot believe in Him, in such a god who is monstrously unconcerned with our life, and who does not even lift a finger to help Jesus.

But if you deny the Deity of Christ we lose faith in man also, for that means that man is such that when he sees the very best, the very highest and noblest the world has ever known, he crucifies it in spite, and will have nothing to do with it except to hate it.

Put God in heaven, and Jesus a man only on the Cross, and you destroy all hope and trust, and preach a doctrine of the blackest and most abysmal despair.

Denial of the Deity of Christ destroys faith in God and in man, and turns the Cross into the bottomless pit of darkness.

But put God on the Cross, and the Cross becomes the world’s salvation.

All the Gospel rests upon the fact that it is God who became Incarnate, and it was God who in Christ has reconciled the world to Himself.

via The Cross: Not a Terrible Monstrosity – Desiring God.

Posted on October 30th, 2010 by Kevin
Filed under: Christ, Doctrine | No Comments »

“The Gospels tell us the kind of thing that our Lord is ready to do for us, in the way in which he is ready to do it . They are not only history; they are more than history. They are a living message coming to us in our problems and perplexities.”  — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones from The Path to True Happiness

Posted on September 29th, 2010 by Kevin
Filed under: D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Gospel, Quotes | No Comments »

From Tim Challies

In the past few months I have been trying to be a little bit more intentional about spending time with the children, trying to grab the moments that exist and trying to create memories. Mostly I’m just trying to know them and to be known by them. And I know that one of the best ways I can do this is by spending time individually with each one of them. Read More

Posted on September 28th, 2010 by Kevin
Filed under: Discipleship, Family, Fatherhood | No Comments »