Gleanings of Wheat

I'd like to direct you over to my left side bar - if you're reading this via RSS or on an imported Facebook note, please click over, it's worth it. There you'll find the RSS feed for my church's sermons , always good biblical stuff over there, but in particular I'd like to point you over to our Family Life Seminar 2010 series. Really good stuff. If you want to be challenged, check it out. Oldest to newest in the series w/ a brief description when needed: Portraits of Glory: A Wedding Picture - How marriage can help you see and treasure Christ that you'd otherwise miss as a single Picking Fights: Knowing when to Confront and when to Overlook Respectful Love: The Role of the Husband Nothing More than Feelings: Living by What is Real vs What You Feel - Aimed particularly at women, an examination of how the inner man can effect how we think, feel, & act A Father's Love A look at how being a parent can help you see how the Father relates to us a...

On Sunday my pastor had post it notes in the bulletin (go listen to the sermon , it'll make more sense) for us to write things that we were thankful for on. Today he emailed us all what was written. It was a nice reminder of the things God has done in the lives of my church family. I am Thankful For: My Family the women that serve so faithfully with our children, for their prayers and care in helping shepherd the kids the people in this church the life and people that God has given me. For God’s precious gift of Jesus! For my family and friends always coming through God allowing me to have a house This church my family and friends going to bed The church Everything I’ve been through this past year Prayer and for my prayerful church family My house and family Letting me go to Northland Camp For my Family The birth of our daughter God bringing us back to Calvary because we (our family) have been blessed by the good teaching That God gave my older son a job Chu...

I'm moments away from heading out to my church's annual Thanksgiving dinner. I look forward to this every year, there's always great food and plenty of fellowship to be had. This year, Lord willing, we will have plenty of visitors as well as new members that haven't been able to do this with us yet. I pray in the midst of all the fun and food we, as a body, would be mindful to give thanks for God's grace. I'm so glad God has brought me into this church family! *To see thankfulness posts from other people check out Rebecca's site.

If you have read, are currently reading, or are going to be reading Owen's fine work on the mortification of sin and would like to interact a bit with some other people I would encourage you to head on over to my church's forum as we're just kicking things off and I'm hoping for some interesting and encouraging discussion. Calvary Baptist Forums

Really, I do. Last night I had the great pleasure of loading my kids up and driving out to my deacon's home to have dinner with his wife and children - he was supposed to be there too, but got stuck behind an accident and ended up not getting home until dinner was over with. Anyway - I had a wonderful time. His wife and I got the birth stories done before he got home, you know, because you can't have two women together alone for the first time an not end up sharing birth stories. At least that's how it goes with me. We bond over shared experiences of pain, striving, and great joy. It is like loving the same movie, but in real life . ;) With that taken care of we spent hours just talking about God. How he delivered us from churches with very bad theology and a low view of God, how we found our current church, how He changed our views on His sovereignty, and about a zillion other things. I cannot begin to tell you how I enjoyed myself. The kids had lots of fun, and I feel so...

I thought I'd share a link to a conference that is happening in Chicago right now. The speaker line up is amazing, John Piper and Nancy Leigh Demoss kicked things off yesterday - I'm listening to Piper's message as I type this. The mp3s are available online, and I think there might be a live video feed if you really want to see what is going on. Anyway, if you listen to it I hope each of you will be blessed. Kristina

David poses this excellent question and then follows up with a passage from Nehemiah and a link to an article by Greg Gilbert that is well worth reading. Notable quote: I am really afraid that we’ve managed to create a generation of anemic Christians who are spiritually dependent on excellent music. Their sense of spiritual well-being is based on feeling “close to God,” their feeling close to God is based on their “ability to worship,” and being able to worship depends on big crowds singing great music.

I was over at Doug's blog earlier and he mentioned that when he began attending a church recently he had 9 Marks in his mind as a mental check list. It is an interesting post , you should check it out. After reading his post I figured I'd go see what this checklist was exactly. Turns out what I had in my head over the summer as I tried out a new church was basically this list...only I didn't realize it. Well, I decided to do a search to see how many churches in my area are listed on the website. I expected only to see a handful, I know most of the churches in my area and they don't fit the bill. I was disappointed/ surprised/ not really surprised to see that only one church came up within a 10 mile radius of every zip code I've lived in since moving to Illinois. It is the church I've been attending for a few months now, and am currently considering membership. When I widened the search to fifty miles only four churches ended up on the list. That's when I w...