I realised that the deepest spiritual lessons...

I realised that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done. -Elisabeth Elliot
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Random links: June 21, 2017

4 Promising Opportunities in University Evangelism
 By Tim Keller & Michael Keller
Excerpt: 
" We hope realism concerning the challenges of university evangelism doesn’t give the impression we think the prospects for university missions and evangelism are bleak. Not at all. The current climate, for all its challenges, also provides promising opportunities..." image

Podcast: Five Big Problems for Small Churches
Highlights include:

Small churches are not a problem, virtue, or excuse.

Just because your church is small does not mean you can’t do good ministry.

There’s not a single command to the New Testament church that can’t be accomplished by a small church.

The sooner you can assess a Sunday service or church event the better.

Churches should purposefully and intentionally equip members for ministry.

It is a pastor’s job (according to the New Testament) to equip others to do the work of ministry.

How to Remember the Bible Verses You Memorize
The discipline of memorizing Bible verses pays great dividends in the life of a Christian. Having Scripture stored up in our hearts helps us to remember God’s promises in tough times, flee from sin in moments of temptation, possess greater confidence in sharing the Gospel, and give fresh words of encouragement to struggling Christians. The problem for us is that while memorizing a verse presents a challenge, remembering it in three months is a great difficulty. We often find ourselves wanting to quote something that we spent two days memorizing but cannot remember the exact wording of the verse or the precise reference to save our lives. How can we remember the Bible verses that we memorized a week, a month, or a year ago?...

Why are there so many Different Interpretations of the Bible?

Why are there so many Different Interpretations of the Bible? The Problem of “Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism”  Back in April of this year, at the national conference of the Gospel Coalition, Kevin DeYoung addressed the question of why there appear to be so many different interpretations of the Bible? If the Bible is inspired and sufficient, why do so many Christians disagree with one another on particular texts and topics? The language of “pervasive interpretive pluralism” was first used by author Christian Smith, who recently converted to Roman Catholicism. Kevin’s message was excellent, but I thought I would add to what he said with a few observations of my own.

Let’s begin with the important concession that this is a problem that all people face, regardless of their religious affiliation. It is not solely a Protestant problem. Anyone who thinks there is monolithic and always unified interpretation in the Roman Catholic Church is simply uninformed. Not only is this a problem in all families of the Christian faith, it is a problem in all spheres of earthly existence. In other words, this isn’t simply a religious problem, it is a human problem that infects every discipline of study and every work of literature that we read. Nevertheless, it is especially present in Christianity because we affirm that our “work of literature”, the Bible, is inspired, inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient...

Is the ESV Literal and the NIV Gender Neutral?
...There actually are five methods on translation with three sub-categories for the handling of gender language. Translations are all on a continuum, overlapping one another, and hence it is misleading to picture them as different points on a line. I am guessing, but for example, about eighty percent of the ESV and the NIV are the same, once you account for different translations of individual words...