I will be taking an extended break from blogging starting today. No, I am not burned out on it. I enjoy sharing information and interacting with you through the blog, and I will miss this part of my daily routine. But as we are in the midst of trying to sell our house and in process of seeking God’s next place for us, I need to focus on other things right now.

How long of a break am I planning? I don’t know yet. It may be several weeks. It may be for the rest of the summer. At this point I just need to take things one week at a time.

If you are a regular reader, instead of checking in each week to see if the blog is back up, there is a better way. Click here to subscribe by email, and you will automatically get an email notifying you when I start posting again. (This is through a service called FeedBurner. There is no cost, and they do not give away your email address or use it for anything else.) Or if you are familiar with RSS, you can subscribe by feed reader.

I will keep comments open for a few more days, but after Wednesday this week all comments will be closed until I return. However, I will keep the blog and all its archives up and open for searching and browsing. If you have any questions or I can help you in any way, you are always welcome to contact me by email. God bless, and thank you for reading!

Yesterday’s message in the Gospel of Mark series was called The Kingdom That Grows, taken from the parables of the growing seed and the mustard seed in Mark 4:26-34. Here is a brief outline of the message:

I. The Parable of the Growing Seed (verses 26-29)
    A. We plant the seeds.
    B. God makes his kingdom grow.

II. The Parable of the Mustard Seed (verses 30-32)
    A. God’s kingdom starts small.
    B. God’s kingdom will grow surprisingly large.

Note: Click on the Sermons tab at the top of the blog for this and other messages.

Ray Ortlund writes about the importance of those seemingly innocent, little moments of decision in life. “Your danger and mine is not that we become criminals, but rather that we become respectable, decent, commonplace, mediocre Christians. The twentieth-century temptations that really sap our spiritual power are the television, banana cream pie, the easy chair and the credit card. The Christian wins or loses in those seemingly innocent little moments of decision. Lord, make my life a miracle!”

C.S. Lewis offers some advice about giving. “I do not believe one can settle on how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

Amy Hall dicusses the phrase, If God were real: “It’s the temptation of some who reject the reality of God’s existence to use the following kind of reasoning as part of their evidence: ‘If the Christian God were real, He would do [X]. However, He does not do [X], therefore He is not real.’ The problem with a person using this kind of reasoning is that he presumes to know what God would do, and often he does this without the proper knowledge of God’s actions in the past, His character, or His overall purposes. The reasoning turns out to really be: ‘If I were God, I would do [X]. The Christian God does not do what I would do (in light of my purposes and goals), therefore He is not real.’”

Tony Woodlief looks at friendship as shared experiences. “My 298 Facebook friends aren’t the ones who remember our dead daughter’s birthday or leave flowers at her grave. Nor among them is the pastor who baptized each of our children and waged a personal holy war to keep our marriage from crumbling years ago. We have these deeper friendships because we’ve tried to build a life in one place. They sprang up because the stuff of life happened to this cluster of us living near one another, and much of it was too joyous or heartbreaking not to share with someone. If friendship is the key to happiness, then maybe this is the key to friendship, to be enmeshed — not just tangentially or voyeuristically, but physically — in the lives of others. That can be hard to swallow in a culture that prizes individualism, mobility and privacy.”

Just in time for Father’s Day, here is a great list of 10 ways to do your husband good (from Nicole at GirlTalk).

10 Ways to Do Your Husband Good (Proverbs 31:12)

1. Write him a love note and place it in his sock drawer.
2. Take an entire evening to enjoy his favorite hobby with him.
3. Show up at work with a special drink or take him to lunch.
4. Encourage him for demonstrating a specific godly trait—in front of friends.
5. Arrange a datenight at his favorite restaurant.
6. Pray for him today and tell him you are doing so.
7. Surprise him with his favorite dessert after dinner.
8. Greet him in an extra-special way when he comes home from work.
9. Lead the children in a time of honoring him.
10. Ask him: “What is one way I can be a better wife?” Then do it!

What are some other ways wives can do their husbands good? We husbands want to get as many ideas out there as possible!

Related post: 20 Minutes to Change Your Marriage

Cute.

Orange Telecom by PES (video length: 1:05)

 

SCHOOL DAYS EDITION.

Ejected. Umpire Don Briggs ejected the entire crowd at a high school baseball game. He said he had no problem with the players but ejected the crowd of over 100 for being unruly, yelling and arguing.

Charming. Would you send your child to this school?

Children in this Indian village attend snake charming school as early as age two.

Vacation Delay. Officials at Dickson Elementary School in California announced that students would have to attend an additional 34 days of school this summer due to a clerical error. Thursday, June 17, was supposed to be the last day of school. Now the students will have to wait until July 31. The error? Their early release days were five minutes too short to count as official school days.

The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented Christian growth around the world through global missions. Mark Noll highlights the following areas of rapid growth between the years 1800 and 1914 in his book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. (pp. 40-42)

• The number of Protestant foreign missionaries in the world grew from 100 missionaries in 1800 to over 21,000 missionaries by 1914.
• The portion of the world’s population that was Christian grew from 23 percent in 1800 to almost 35 percent in 1914. This rate of growth represented the fastest proportional growth of the church since its earliest centuries — and over a period in which world population grew more rapidly than ever before.
• The number of non-white Christians grew from 28 million in 1800 to 149 million in 1914. This meant that in 1914 the number of non-white Christians in the world was rapidly nearing the number of all Christians who were alive in 1800.
• The number of languages with Scripture increased from 67 languages in 1800 to 676 languages in 1914.

For a great visual of this amazing growth, see the flash video map on the History of Religion.

Here is the latest news on the upcoming Hobbit movies:

• Director Guillermo del Toro has confirmed that actors Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, and Hugo Weaving will be returning in their roles as Gandalf, Gollum, and Elrond (respectively).
• Del Toro has narrowed down the choice of actor for young Bilbo Baggins and is “very close” to making an announcement.
• Del Toro also confirmed once again that the two films would focus on the contents of the Hobbit book only and would not be split between the Hobbit and a second film bridging the gap to the Lord of the Rings books.

HT: BBC Radio

The Bush deficits look really bad …

… until you place them next to the Obama deficits (projected).

For the record, I was against the large deficits under President Bush, and I am even more against the larger deficits under President Obama. At some point we need to cut government spending and balance the budget. (Wasn’t that one of Obama’s campaign promises?)

HT: Instapundit

Yesterday’s message in the Gospel of Mark series was called Show and Tell, taken from the parables of the lamp and the measure in Mark 4:21-25. Here is a brief outline of the message:

I. The Parable of the Lamp (verses 21-23)
    A. The purpose of parables: to conceal and reveal
    B. That which is hidden will be revealed

II. The Parable of the Measure (verses 24-25)
    A. Consider carefully what you hear.
    B. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
        1) Whoever has will be given more
        2) Whoever has not will lose it all

Note: Click on the Sermons tab at the top of the blog for this and other messages.

Dannah Gresh on Christian dating relationships: “A girl should get so lost in God, that a guy has to seek God to find her!”

Russell Moore writes about our family background as Christians (in the context of adoption). “Whether our background is Norwegian, Hatian and Indonesian, if we are united to Christ, our family genealogy is found not primarily in the front pages of our dusty old family Bible but inside its pages, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Our identity is in Christ; so his people are our people, his God our God.” (Adopted for Life, p. 37)

Jonathan Edwards urges believers on to greater zeal and resolve. “Two things urgently needed in ministers, if they would attempt great advances for the kingdom of Christ, are zeal and resolve. Their influence and power for impact are greater than we think. A man of ordinary abilities will accomplish more with zeal and resolve than a man ten times more gifted without zeal and resolve … Men who are possessed by these qualities commonly carry the day in almost all affairs.”

Crime writer Andrew Klavan recounts the prideful, arrogant little prayer that led to his conversion. “I was reading a novel … and got to the scene where one of the main characters … said a little prayer before going to sleep. That’s the one thing I’d never tried. So I said a very brief prayer of thanks and it went off in me like a bomb. There are really no words to describe it. I have always thought it was a tribute to the generosity of God that even such a prideful, arrogant little prayer in some sense would be answered.”

• Zoomii. Zoomii lets you browse books at Amazon.com shelf by shelf.
• Goodbye Kindle. Tim Challies explains why he traded in his Kindle for what he considers the perfect technology — a stack of regular books.
• Eating Disorders. A good article about dealing with eating disorders.
• The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms. “Lyrics” and “free music downloads” are near the top of the list.
• Total Cost for Cell Phones. Bill Shrink compares the total cost of ownership for the iPhone 3G S, the Palm Pre, and the Android G1. ($2,600 to $3,800 over 24 months — plus tax!)