Find the current Christian Carnival at Chasing the Wind.
Snippets from some posts I found to be encouraging and interesting:
At Life Nurturing Education, on finding strength in weakness:
Power in weakness. Perfect sufficiency. Strength in grace. It all seems so backwards, yet these seeds do nourish my famished soul. Christ is my sufficiency.
On a related note, at Heart, Mind Soul, and Strength:
The blessings of the beatitudes are focused on proclaiming God’s goodness to those who do not now see it: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. The beatitudes proclaim God’s promise that their faithfulness and hardship are known to God and will not be forgotten.
Homeward Bound asks, “When should we share our personal experiences in evangelism or apologetics as opposed to offering evidence (i.e., facts or arguments)?” and then considers the problems with experience and the place for experience.
Diane at Crossroads reminds certain “Emergent” Christians that they didn’t discover whole-person ministry for the first time themselves:
Come on emergents! Wake up and look around, and stop trying to hog the social gospel all by yourselves. Evangelicals have been and are now more and more on board too, WITHOUT losing the message of the cross and salvation thought the substitionary atonement of Jesus Christ.
And some more good apologetics-related thought from Rational Christianity, on the Cosmological Argument.
Thanks for the link!
Thanks for all the links. From Homeward Bound:
If Christianity were founded on a collection of personal experiences (sensing/experiencing God) then it would be pretty weak/vague much like new-age mysticism, or belief in some cosmic force (cue Imperial March). I would likely disbelieve many of the specific claims made about who God is and so forth.
Fortunately it isn’t founded on personal experiences alone, although personal experience does play a role in that we can know “it works”. 1 Peter 3:15-16