Featured Articles on Trans·formed This Week
When Parents Ask the Wrong Questions (Marc Cortez): The Gospel should change the way that we approach our families, our children. We don’t need to ignore the important issues that I mentioned above, but they shouldn’t be our only, or even our primary, concern. Instead, we should be ultimately concerned about whether we are doing everything that we can to make sure that our children understand the Gospel.
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Rooted Leadership: Heroes (Chad Hall): In over a decade of coaching, I’ve discovered the powerful role heroes play in the lives of everyday leaders. Most leaders I talk with can name a few admirable people they consider to be heroes in their lives. These heroes exert unique power in the lives of the leaders who admire them. In fact, these heroes reveal deeply rooted truths about the leader’s authentic self.
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Don’t Give Pat Answers! (Bev Hislop): Timing is the key to appropriateness. The above are typically not helpful at the first impact of pain. There may come a time when some of these could come out of a conversation initiated by the people in pain. Again, sensitivity to appropriateness is essential.
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What to Do When You Fail (Bill Mounce): When you stumble in your walk with Jesus,what will you do? When you give into temptation and sin, what’s next? You need to know that these are defining moments in your life. If you don’t get this right, you will be miserable. There is nothing more miserable than a follower of Jesus hanging on to his or her sin, lying face down on the path, insisting that everything is okay and nothing is wrong.
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Brain Rules (John Johnson): Some years ago, Atlantic Monthly published an article entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” In it, Nicholas Carr made a compelling case that the internet is having a far more profound effect on our thinking than any of us realize. Skimming from one idea to another has the potential of remapping our neural circuitry. We are losing the ability to have a sustained thought. As he put it, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” To put it another way, we are at risk of turning into pancake people, spread wide and thin, as we connect with the vast network of information accessed by the touch of a button.
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Other Articles on Trans·formed This Week
- The Power of Words (video): Here’s a great little video on the power of words. It’s amazing how you can say things one way and get very little response; say it again in a way that connects with people, and you have a chance to change the way they live.
Other Posts of Interest from around the Web
- Marc Cortez is giving away two books on apologetics.
- Generation Me and Youth Ministry Today: From books like Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, we were led to believe that this generation born after 1982 was more altruistic and socially-minded than baby boomers and Gen X’ers. Not so, according to a new study.
- Kings, Creeds, and the Canon: Musings on N.T. Wright: I have been a student of N.T. Wright for a while now….hich is why it’s odd to find myself rather frustrated with some of his most recent work, particularly as articulated in How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels.
- Does Calvinism Make People Jerks? No. But Calvinism is a useful tool for jerky people to act like jerks.
- God is Most Glorified in Us When We Are Most Dependent on Him: God calls his people to live supernatural lives—to live in expectant and full dependency on the living God, believing and trusting that what seems impossible to us is possible with God.
- Report Says Church Giving on the Rebound: The recession and a sluggish recovery have made for a lighter collection plate in recent years, but a new study shows that giving to U.S. congregations bounced back in 2011 as the economy improved.
- 10 Tips on Preparing and Preaching for Easter: It’s an occasion to celebrate the resurrection and victory of Jesus Christ over Satan, sin, and death while also seeing lost sheep return home and lost people become Christians. For some preachers, though, it’s a difficult time because they struggle with the weight and pressure of preaching an Easter sermon in fresh ways year after year and preparing their congregation to reach out into the community. Having now preached and prepared every Easter at Mars Hill Church since 1996, I relate with what you’re experiencing and have by God’s grace learned a few things over the years that I want to share with you today.
- Why I Don’t Trust My Own “Scholarship”: Who do I think I am teaching eternal truths, when I can’t even remember the most basic everyday temporal happenings? If I don’t really trust my memory, can I trust my theological “scholarship”?
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