Dealing with Lust

In the booklet Impure Lust, John Flavel gave seven directions for dealing with lust:

1. Beg of God a clean heart, renewed and sanctified by saving grace.
2. Walk in the fear of God all the day long, and in the sense of his omniscient eye that is ever upon you.
3. Avoid lewd company, and the society of unclean persons; they are panderers for lust.
4. Exercise yourself in your calling diligently; it will be an excellent means of preventing this sin.
5. Put a restraint upon your appetite: feed not to excess.
6. Choose a spouse and delight in the one you have chosen.
7. Take heed of running on in a course of sin, especially superstition and idolatry.

Preaching to Unbelief

Ideas such as pluralism, individual freedom, tolerance, and the relativity of truth form a matrix that works against belief in a God who defines reality and the exclusive, specific claims of Jesus to be Lord of every person. Against this implausibility matrix belief in the Christian God and Jesus as Lord simply does not make sense. Christianity becomes a dead option.

Why Churches of Christ are shrinking – more thoughts

So a lot of our young adults either give up on church altogether, continue to go out of loyalty, or look somewhere else for something with substance. Because, for us, substance isn’t merely proving something to be true. We want to know how it helps. “What does that mean for me?” is our prevailing question when it comes to spirituality. We grew up in homes with one of the highest divorce rates in history, but with parents who were highly religious. “It’s true” doesn’t get us very far, because that didn’t change our family’s lives. This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about truth, it simply means that we’re desperate to see it change people, not just intellectually, but how people think, how they feel, and how they act. And when we get spurned by older people for wanting to “feel” God (which is somehow synonymous with “entertainment,” which I’ll never understand) we lose the energy to stick around.

7 Life Misconceptions Portrayed In The Super Bowl Ads

1. Happiness is for sale.
2. Self-confidence can be quickly found in the right purchase.
3. Youth culture represents the pinnacle of life’s seasons.
4. Sex is the ultimate goal.
5. To watch television is to experience life.
6. Adventure/Respect is discovered in the right automobile.
7. A website will solve your life problems.

From the Sky: a film about drone strikes, family, and resistance

‘From the Sky’ will be among the first (if not the first) narrative works of cinema from the U.S. to show the impact of drone strikes on civilians in the Arab world. The film also explores the roots of extremism, the bond between fathers and sons, and ultimately asks a universal question: When we are harmed, will we respond by retaliating, or in life-giving ways?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Coming Out of the Locker Room Ghetto

What do people expect when an ex-jock discusses pop culture? “Hmmm. Magic light box have good shows. Me like some. Others make me puke Gatorade. Me give it three jock straps.”

Physics Made (Almost) Easy

In this neat little book the authors aim to provide the minimum amount of knowledge you need about classical physics (that is, everything except quantum mechanics) to gain some real understanding of the world or to proceed to “the next level,” which would be freshman physics.

Family’s missing pet tortoise found in storeroom 30 years later

In 1982, builders conducting repairs on a house in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that belonged to the Almeida family, left the front door open. The Almeidas could not find the family tortoise that day and never saw it again, until this month.