My sister-in-law is getting remarried soon. Her new
fiancé seems like a good man, and we have high hopes that their
marriage will be a good one. Her first marriage was deeply unhappy and
she was grievously sinned against in it. My wife is shopping for a
wedding gift, of course. I notice that the famous love passage from 1
Corinthians 13 is a prominent theme on many of these gifts. You know
the one. It begins “love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy or
boast…” It ends with the words, “love never fails.”
It is a great duty of husbands and wives to live in
quietness and peace, and avoid all occasions of wrath and discord. Because
this is a duty of so great importance, I shall first open to you the great
necessity of it, and then give you more
particular directions to perform it.
One of the most severely lacking areas in Christian publishing today is in books for children. Publishers don't seem to realize that children are quite capable of thinking and understanding. The books that line the shelves of the children's section are nearly always trite and condescending and do little more than make well-known stories from the Bible look ridiculous. This "dumbing-down" of the Bible often tends to have a negative effect on young eyes and ears as they grow older and more sophisticated. The "stories" that they heard and read as children remain just that: stories. As they come to understand the world around them better, children begin to realize that trains and cars and animals don't really talk. It is only natural then that they should also begin to think that David, Noah, Adam, and Abraham are really nothing more than fables and cartoon characters. When we teach the Bible in a silly and unreal way to our children, we shouldn't be surprised when they begin to think of the Bible as a silly book of fairy tales and myths.
President Obama has stated that he believes our children need to spend more time in school. He has proposed lengthening the school day and shortening the summer vacation in an effort to stay educationally competitive with other countries. [1] It is always fascinating to me that whenever the government gets involved in anything the solution is always more. More money, more time, more education, etc. Admitting that our current school system is broken is simply an admission that the government has no business being involved in it in the first place. The public schools have had a monopoly on education for nearly 100 years and the system has only gotten worse. Keeping students in the classroom longer isn't going to solve the educational problem; it will just give it more time to waste.
The following article is the cover article from the August 2009 issue of Christianity Today. It deals with a very important topic that modern Christianity has been very slow to acknowledge: the disconnect between telling our children to wait until marriage to have sex on one hand and then also telling them to wait to get married until they are "ready" on the other. Statistics reveal that this tactic is failing miserably and this article explains why.
One of the most misunderstood and misrepresented chapters in the New Testament is 1 Corinthians 7. In this chapter, Paul makes the argument that unmarried people should stay unmarried because they will be better suited to serve the Lord, without having a “physical” mate to worry about. Unfortunately, this passage of Scripture is often used in the counseling of Christian young people as an justification for them to stay single. If this is really what this passage means, then Paul is teaching something that is very much at odds with the rest of the Bible.
There has been a great resurgence in the last 10 years or so of the practice of family worship. Most of us, in one way or another, are probably convinced that corporate worship in the home is a good and biblical thing. But if you're like me (and I pray for your spouse's sanity that you are not), you find the idea of family worship a whole lot easier than the actual practice of it. If this sounds like a good description of you, then I have some welcome news: Someone has finally written the user's manual on family worship.
As I didn't think myself to be the best judge of a book intended for women, I asked a woman to review this week's book: Tending Your Garden by Denise Sproul. Denise has been writing a continuing column in the Highland Study Center's monthly magazine, Every Thought Captive, for years, and this book captures many of those articles under one cover. Denise's wisdom and experience in the area of family "garden tending" is beyond dispute, as she and her husband have seven (for now!) children. This concise book is the perfect complement to Denise's husband's book on the family, Bound for Glory, which is mainly targeted to husbands and fathers (look for a review of this book in the near future). Without further introduction, here is this week's guest review:
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