Tag: reading

Reading, Writing and The Internet

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

Recently, I was discussing how blogging and book-reading complement each other. I find I read more theological books as a result of my blogging than I might otherwise. Yet blogging does eat up time and keep me from reading as much as I’d like. It’s more than just time, however. Blogging gives me bits and pieces of info which fascinate me and substitute the place of reading to some degree.

It’s not just blogging. All things internet promote a piecemeal view of the world. News and information, on the run, in bite size pieces. Immediate access. Unending links to yet more and more and more. The daily presence and impact of the internet on the majority of today’s culture, myself included, is shaping how we think and how we read.

In college, I was required to read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In that book he argued that the various technological media of our day and any other, impact what and how we think far more than we realize. He showed how the printing press revolutionized the world, just as had the alphabet before it, and now the TV (and nightly news) after it. I think Neil’s work should be updated to include the internet’s influence. It will be interesting to see how dramatically it will shape our thinking and culture.

My thoughts here were spurred on by stumbling across an interesting article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” [HT: Stephen Altrogge]. Nicholas Carr, who recently published a book on this topic, does a good job of explaining the problem in this column (published in The Atlantic). It’s definitely worth your time to read it all the way through (without skimming, mind you…).

I’m not so sure the internet’s influence is a huge problem, but I think we should all be aware as to just how much our reading habits are influenced by our internet usage. This makes me even more satisfied with my new focus on reading and reviewing more books on my blog. This will help my blog serve my aim to read more books. I hope you’ll join me in reading more books, because Christians after all, are people of The Book. It follows we need to preserve the art of reading and thinking (and even writing), since God communicated to us not in a movie, or a drama, not on the internet or a magazine, but through books, 66 of them.

Oxygenating Your Spiritual Life

~ fundyreformed ~ 4 Comments

Are you blue in the face?

Going without oxygen, or with too little oxygen makes one blue. And going too long without meditating on God’s Word makes one blue as well.

Yesterday’s sermon, by my pastor John Piper (will be available for download here from Desiring God) emphasized our need to be meditating on the Gospel and reading our Bibles. His text was James 1:21.

Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

He focused on the second half of the verse. Why do we receive the word, when it is already implanted? This is the “word of truth” by which we have been born again, already (vs. 18). So why do we still need to be receiving the word?

Just because we are alive, doesn’t mean we don’t need to breathe. Rather, since we are alive, our bodies demand that we breathe. Breathing is necessary for life, but breathing doesn’t make our hearts beat.

Similarly, Piper reasons, if we are genuinely saved, and spiritually alive, we will want to breathe. And breathing is necessary for our life. The word is able to save our souls, but only if we receive it with meekness. Of course, a genuinely saved person will receive it with meekness.

So the Bible, and particularly the gospel message contained in it (“word of truth” primarily refers to the message of Gospel–good news of Jesus) is vital for our spiritual well being. If we don’t humble ourselves and fill ourselves with it continually, we prove that we have no real life. And availing ourselves of the Bible, reminding ourselves constantly of the Gospel, proves to sustain and nourish our spiritual life.

So aim with me this year to do a better job of oxygenating your spiritual life, by God’s grace and for His glory and our joy.

Note: I’ll add the link to Piper’s message, when it is available. I hope also to recap last year’s blogging and focus on 2008 in a post here soon.

UPDATE: Check out these Bible Reading plans available for download from NavPress. Our church uses the Discipleship Journal plan.

UPDATE 2: Here is the link to Piper’s sermon.

Christmas Reading

~ fundyreformed ~ 1 Comment

Merry Christmas everyone. 1 week, that’s all. Only 1 week till Christmas!

I hope that you will all have a great Christmas, but that it will be more than just an American Christmas. Please celebrate Christ and revel in worship as we remember his birth. Look past the manger to the Cross and further still to the empty tomb! Remember that Jesus is the Greatest Gift ever given!

I wanted to point you to our online Christmas Card and wish you all a wonderful Christmas. And I thought I’d also list a few interesting posts on the topic of Christmas here, as well.

Here is the link to our family Christmas greeting, and the links below are worth the read:

  • The 12 Days of Theology (an interesting new version of the popular carol 12 Days of Christmas)
  • A look at the history of the song “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”
  • A good old hymn you might have never heard of: “Christmas Day Has Come” [tune available (scroll down) here]
  • Ben Stein (a Jew) on Christmas:

    I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are “” Christmas trees. It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they’re slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto…..I do not like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians.

  • Down with Santa Claus — an thoughtful critique of Saint Nick
  • An Eschatological Advent
  • Six Gifts from God at Christmas

    Here are six gifts from God, specially wrapped and delivered . . . for you! A sympathetic friend, a supreme and unchallenged Lord over all, wonderfully wise, always able to act on behalf of those who trust him, sensitive and caring and compassionate, the giver of all peace and comfort and consolation.

We Believe (#11): Living God’s Word by Meditation and Prayer

~ fundyreformed ~ 6 Comments

Part 11 in a series of Sunday posts celebrating the glorious Truth we believe as Christians. The readings are quoted from the Elder Affirmation of Faith, of my church, Bethlehem Baptist (Pastor John Piper). I’m doing this because every few weeks our congregational reading is an excerpt from this document, and every time we all read aloud the truths we confess, my soul rejoices. I pray these posts will aid you in worshiping our Lord on His day.

Living God’s Word by Meditation and Prayer

We believe that faith is awakened and sustained by God’s Spirit through His Word and prayer. The good fight of faith is fought mainly by meditating on the Scriptures and praying that God would apply them to our souls.

We believe that the promises of God recorded in the Scriptures are suited to save us from the deception of sin by displaying for us, and holding out to us, superior pleasures in the protection, provision, and presence of God. Therefore, reading, understanding, pondering, memorizing, and savoring the promises of all that God will be for us in Jesus are primary means of the Holy Spirit to break the power of sin’s deceitful promises in our lives. Therefore it is needful that we give ourselves to such meditation day and night.

We believe that God has ordained to bless and use His people for His glory through the means of prayer, offered in Jesus’ name by faith. All prayer should seek ultimately that God’s name be hallowed, and that His kingdom come, and that His will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. God’s sovereignty over all things is not a hindrance to prayer, but a reason for hope that our prayers will succeed.

We believe that prayer is the indispensable handmaid of meditation, as we cry out to God for the inclination to turn from the world to the Word, and for the spiritual ability to see the glory of God in His testimonies, and for a soul-satisfying sight of the love of God, and for strength in the inner man to do the will of God. By prayer God sanctifies His people, sends gospel laborers into the world, and causes the Word of God to spread and triumph over Satan and unbelief.

*Taken from the Bethlehem Baptist Church Elder Affirmation of Faith, paragraphs 11.1 – 11.4. You are free to download the entire affirmation [pdf] complete with Scriptural proofs for the above statements.