Mixtape for May 2011
21 tracks that I can't get enough of right now.
You can also stream it as a playlist on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FC1F37D72BBEAC52
21 tracks that I can't get enough of right now.
You can also stream it as a playlist on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FC1F37D72BBEAC52
Great, great thoughts from Eric McKiddie:
"There has always been a pastoral Rat Pack. From Peter, James, and John to Peter, Apollos, and Paul; from Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli to Edwards, the Wesley’s, and Whitefield.
And now we have Keller, Carson, Piper, and Driscoll.
No, the Evangelical Hollywood is not new, but what is new is 24/7 access to it. Blogs, tweets, and decades of sermon archives are available at the click of a mouse. This, I think, is what has ratcheted up the evangelical celebrity scene to new proportions.
And – just like back in Paul’s day – it isn’t sinful for gifted men to be famous and have large followings.
It is sinful when the infatuated wants to be like them, identified by them, and loyal to them, rather than wanting to be like Jesus, identified by Jesus, and loyal to Jesus. It is sinful for the cynic to use Jesus in order to identify himself over against the fan-boys, rather than actually reveling in Jesus himself (see 1 Corinthians 1:11-12)."
Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy institution through which God wishes to preserve humanity until the end of time. In your love you see only each other in the world; in marriage you are a link in the chain of generations that God, for the sake of God's glory, allows to rise and fade away, and calls into God's kingdom.
In your love, you see only the heaven of your own happiness; in marriage you are placed and given responsibility within the world and human community. Your love belongs only to you personally; marriage is something beyond the personal, an estate, an office. Just as it takes a crown to make a king and not just his will to reign, so it takes marriage and not just your love for each other to make you a married couple in human and in God's eyes. Just as you first gave the ring to each other and now receive it once again from the hand of the minister, so your love comes from you, and your marriage comes from above, from God.
As God is higher than human beings, so the sacredness, the rights, and the promise of marriage are higher than human beings, so much greater is the holiness, warrant, and promise of marriage than the holiness, warrant, and promise of love.
It is not your love that upholds marriage, but from now on it is marriage that upholds your love.
A good friend recently shared this Berry poem to me. For those with worried minds & restless hearts, his words bring comfort. Luther once said, "Pray & let God worry." Pray. Of course. But also take to heart the tangible promises of Jesus in Matthew 6 about birds & flowers. And then go lay down outside & enter into "the peace of wild things":
When despair for the world grows in me,
and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear
of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who
do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"
