Slay Yourself, 2nd Edition

I am currently thinking about a lot the challenge of Messiah Yeshua to me as his follower to die to myself. This is the biggest lesson I am learning at present. And he is bringing a number of good authors I have read in the past to mind. I recently quoted David Platt the call to "slay yourself". But here is how Paul David Tripp expresses the same challenge :

"From the earliest age, our love of self shapes everything we do and say. We fight over toys, the last bowl of cereal, and who gets the bathroom first. We work to be thought of as right, to be viewed as attractive, to win the argument with a neighbor, to get the promotion. We strive to be first, best, the center, the most powerful, the best known, the most loved. We really do love us and have a wonderful plan for our own lives! We indulge our desires and do anything we can to meet our own “needs.” If we were really honest, many of us would say that we would be completely satisfied living our own lives for the sake of our own selves. But Christ asks us to do something unthinkable. He asks us to be willing to say “no” to the one person we have the most trouble saying no to—us!"

PAUL DAVID TRIPP

It is an improbable ask, and one that is only possible through Grace!

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Spiritual Leadership

J Oswald Sanders (1917-1992) was a Christian leader for seventy years. He wrote more than forty books on the Christian life including one book I dip into often, The Incomparable Christ. He was the director of the China Inland Mission (Overseas Missionary Fellowship), where he was instrumental in beginning many new missions projects throughout East Asia. Spiritual Leadership encourages the church to pray for and develop Spirit empowered leaders. People who are guided by and devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ. The book presents the key principles of spiritual leadership. He illustrates his points with examples from Scripture and biographies of men who have led the people of God in history. The book has 20 chapters. I have tried to summarise the main conclusions of these chapters under five key questions. Most of the ideas presented in this article are directly from the book. But I have communicated these ideas in my own way, except where direct quotes are given. Towards the end, I off

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Inconsistency of Moral Progress

If morality, if our ideas of right and wrong, are purely subjective, we should have to abandon any idea of moral progress (or regress), not only in the history of nations, but in the lifetime of each individual. The very concept of moral progress implies an external moral standard by which not only to measure that a present moral state is different from an earlier one but also to pronounce that it is "better" than the earlier one. Without such a standard, how could one say that the moral state of a culture in which cannibalism is regarded as an abhorrent crime is any "better" than a society in which it is an acceptable culinary practice? Naturalism denies this. For instance, Yuval Harari asserts: "Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in th

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I am what I am by Gloria Gaynor

Beverly Knight closed the opening ceremony of the Paralympics with what has been dubbed the signature tune of the Paralympics. I had no idea Ms Knight is still in the singing business. And clearly going by the raving reviews she will continue to be around. One media source says her performance was so electric that "there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen as she sang the lyrics to the song and people even watching at home felt the passion in her words" . The song was Gloria Gaynor's I am what I am . Clearly not written by Gloria Gaynor but certainly musically owned and popularized by her. It opens triumphantly: I am what I am / I am my own special creation / So come take a look / Give me the hook or the ovation / It's my world that I want to have a little pride in / My world and it's not a place I have to hide in / Life's not worth a damn till you can say I am what I am The words “I am what I am” echo over ten times in the song. A bold declaration that she

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