A Note To Subscribers

If you received this blog post in your email inbox, that's because at some point you subscribed to my blog. Thank you! Blogger tells me that the automatic email subscription service is going away. Supposedly, I can access the subscription list, but I haven't been able to do it successfully, so it will be up to you to re-subscribe using the new subscription service links on the side of my blog instead.

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

I've been blogging for over 10 years. 

I've written over 500 blog posts. 

And this blog has had well over 215,000 views.

YOU are the reason I keep writing. 

Thanks for reading!

Summer Sale on Seminary Now: 40% Off!

Last year, just before the pandemic started, I filmed a series of teaching videos for Seminary Now to go along with my book Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters. As one of the contributors, I was given access to all of the other content. I went through Ruth Haley Barton's course, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. I had read her book several years ago with a group of women in leadership, and it was great to go through her content again.

Our family has loved Seminary Now! For family devotions, we've gone through John Walton's Lost World of Genesis One, Sandy Richter's Stewards of Eden, and David Fitch's Faithful Presence. Our 12-year-old has genuinely enjoyed these courses.

Looking for high-quality resources to equip your leaders and disciple your church? If you haven’t subscribed to Seminary Now yet, take advantage of their biggest sale of the year! 

For a limited time, save 40% off an *annual* subscription 

with discount code ANNUAL40. That’s less than $9 a month!
This amazing offer expires today, June 22.

Sign Up

Seminary Now is a new streaming video platform with courses from today’s leading professors and authors. In addition to those listed above, Seminary Now offers courses by Scot McKnight, Nijay Gupta, Brenda Salter McNeil, Robert Chao Romero, Lynn Cohick, Tish Harrison Warren, Tremper Longman, and Esau McCaulley. Like Netflix or Masterclass, subscribers get unlimited access to all courses—available on smart phone, tablet, and TV devices. Most courses are presented as 10 episodes of less than 15 minutes each, making them ideal for family devotions, personal enrichment, or small group learning.

GET SEMINARY NOW FOR YOUR CHURCH

The high-quality content and easy accessibility make Seminary Now an excellent resource for training your leaders and discipling your church. A church subscription to Seminary Now provides:   

• logins for church staff and lay leaders to complete certificate tracks 

• engaging, relevant content for small groups and Sunday school classes

This month only: 20% off a church subscription (expires June 30). Complete this form to get church or group pricing. 

Comment below to let me know which course you want to take first! Or, if you're a subscriber, I'd love to hear which course has been your favorite and why.

Introducing a New Devotional Resource on the Psalms

Until recent decades, the Psalms have been a mainstay for individual and corporate prayer for Christians. For 2000 years, churches sang and prayed the Psalms so frequently that many Christians knew them by heart. In some traditions (Catholic, Anglican, Christian Reformed, to name a few), this is still the case. But for the vast majority of us who identify as Evangelical Protestants, the Psalms have dropped off our radar.

In our clamor for the latest worship songs, we have lost sight of one of the most precious resources of our historic faith. We cherish the fact that we can come to God just as we are, but our "vocabulary" is rather limited. We naturally gravitate toward certain language and certain topics when we pray. To be frank, our prayers often become unimaginative and dull. Believers can still value the authenticity that comes from spontaneous prayer, while expanding our language for prayer by praying the Psalms.

I'm delighted to share with you a new devotional resource that I hope will strengthen our collective prayer muscles and provide companionship on our spiritual journey. Praying the Psalms with Augustine and Friends is an anthology of devotional reflections on the Psalms by over two dozen early Christian writers. I've selected a few paragraphs on each psalm by a wide range of voices spanning the first 15 centuries of the church -- Augustine, John Calvin, Gertrude the Great, Mary Sidney Herbert, and many others. Most, if not all, of these writers prayed through the Psalms regularly and would have known them by heart. I found their words inspiring, challenging, and enlightening, and I hope you do, too.

Does your prayer life feel anemic? Are you hungry for a deeper connection with God? Consider joining me this summer in praying through the Psalms. Praying the Psalms contains a reading plan that will take you through the entire book of Psalms in eight weeks by reading and praying just three psalms a day. 

Option 1: Read the Psalms.

Option 2: Read the Psalms along with these devotional reflections.

The devotional is not meant to replace the Psalms, but to be read alongside them. I've set aside June 14 to August 14 to read the Psalms with you. That's 9 weeks, so there's grace built in if life gets crazy and you fall behind. 

All of the Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics are divided into eight "chapters" so that they are easy to read with a group over eight weeks. Each chapter has discussion questions. And each week, you'll find a free companion video on the Sacred Roots YouTube channel in which I introduce the next "chapter" of the book. Here's my introduction to the series:

If you plan to join us in reading through the Psalms, I'd love to hear about your experience! Comment below to let me know that you're joining us. Could you recruit a friend or two to join you? 

This volume is the first in the Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics series funded by the Lilly Foundation. The series is one dimension of the Sacred Roots Thriving in Ministry project led by Hank Voss of Taylor University, which seeks to connect under-resourced pastors with the riches of our historic faith. You can learn more about the larger project on the Sacred Roots website. The Lilly Foundation covered the cost of producing the first 16 volumes, so all the income from sales of the book will fund a second series of spiritual classics. You can order a copy of Praying the Psalms on Amazon. 

I hope this is a rich summer for all of us as we expand our prayer language and practice bringing our whole selves into the presence of God