Confession time: I have not read this book yet, but I’m going to review it anyway. I always read a book before offering any kind of review. But this book is different. It’s meant to be read one page at a time. It’s a devotional book. Read one page each day, and you will finish it in a year.
This devotional is different than most. It focuses on how the gospel impacts the way we live every day. The gospel is not just our ticket to heaven. It’s the truth that changes the way we live. Paul Tripp does an excellent job of showing us how that happens in his newest book, New Morning Mercies.
If the title sounds familiar, it should. Continue Reading →
I love my children and want them to learn to obey, but what I’ve noticed in myself is that I can begin to be controlling toward them sometimes rather than really caring for their souls. When that happens, I lose sight of what’s best for them and begin to parent them to obey because it’s convenient for me. Obviously, that’s not what God had in mind when he gave those commands, and that is a sure fire way to provoke my kids my kids to anger (Ephesians 6:4) and teach them to obey from the wrong motives. This is also not the way that God has loved us. He sent His Son to come down and be made like us so that He could rescue us from our sin and be a merciful and faithful high priest (Hebrews 2:14-18). I have been learning some pitfalls to avoid and applying scripture to my heart in the areas of sin where I struggle in order to grow to be faithful in training my children in obedience while maintaining a heart of Christlike sympathy.
repetition.” If you think about it, all of us are creatures of habit. Our habits, for the most part, define and describe us! Jesus echoes this in the Sermon on the Mount when he describes how to recognize false teachers and, by extension, the truly saved versus the unsaved: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Jesus uses the term fruit as an illustration of what their life produces, the attitudes and actions they display as the pattern of their lives. And the root of that fruit is what resides in our hearts. There is a very insightful saying about the cause and impact of habits we all would do well to memorize: “Sow a thought reap an action, sow an action reap a habit, sow a habit reap a character, sow a character reap a destiny.”