• A few details, then a brief note. First, if you have a copy of our little green book, What It Means to Be a Disciple, please bring it to Sunday School. We’ll have extra copies available. Thank you.
• Also, I want to urge you again to consider the marriage and family retreat next weekend at Warm Beach, Friday evening through Saturday til 4:00 or 5:00. Our speaker, Dr. Dan Zink, is gracious, wise, and straightforward. There will be real content. Join us. Invest in your marriage and your family. Scholarships available — we can make this work.
• Please check your bulletin insert this Sunday for 3 upcoming events: the retreat next weekend; our annual meeting the week after – Feb. 8; followed by our move to two services – Feb. 15.
• The summer before going into high school I took a fledgling computer programming course. Among other things, they taught us to write what’s known as an “infinite loop” — a little program that repeats itself endlessly. In those years I learned the well-known maxim: “garbage in – garbage out,” meaning: the end result of any process will not be superior to its constituent parts.
• That maxim can be applied to your own soul. Paul said, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things” (Php 4:8).
• In all things — and I would argue this with regard to our thought/inner lives specifically — we reap what we sow. If you are living on a diet of internet garbage, television, romance novels and so on, or even mediocre devotionals that have now supplanted the Word of God in your life, remember the old maxim: garbage in – garbage out. The growth and depth in Christ that you feel is lacking in your life will not arrive until your soul is fed on solid food, not milk (1 Cor 3:2). Lay aside pet ideas and preoccupations and “find out what pleases the Lord” (Eph 5:10).
• I’ve struggled with this one all my life. Lately I’ve had to recommit myself to reading worthy books all the way through to the end (I get too many going and don’t finish any of them). Life-changing solid food, for me, came from the English Puritans (Owen, Baxter, Sibbes); latter-day Puritans (J.I. Packer, Ryle, Candlish, Ferguson); clear-headed intellectuals and lovers of God (Augustine, Sproul, Lewis, Frame) and many others. Right now I’m re-reading Augustine, to much effect, and Tozer (who loved the Puritans).
• Above all, stay in the Word, which is living and active and will cut you to the bone. Great thinkers and writers will influence and instruct you, but the Word changes you as you read it. Let’s get after it, “for the appointed time has grown very short… the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:29ff).