I’m cautiously optimistic about the new ESV Study Bible. For some people, Study Bibles offer greater motivation to regularly dig into God’s Word, as they offer convenient insights into difficult passages. For others, Study Bibles become an excuse not to study God’s Word, as they make it too easy to study the convenient notes under the text instead of the text itself.

If you think you can resist that temptation, then this is probably the best study Bible you’ll be able to find. It uses the ESV text, which I’ve grown to love for its balance between accuracy and readability. It adds the wisdom of 100 of the world’s best biblical scholars. And it’s shipping now at 40% off from Westminster Books, where you can get a variety of editions and view PDF excerpts like the Book of Jonah.

UPDATE: Westminster won’t ship to Hawaii, but you can pre-order through Amazon for shipping on October 15.

If you can’t resist the temptation, a better option might be the excellent NIV Quiet Time Bible from InterVarsity Press. It simply asks questions about the text that lead you to the same answers study notes would give, except you arrive there through your own study. It’s not in print anymore, but you can always find used hardback and paperback copies on Amazon.

So far, the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has forced some Americans out of their homes, but for most people it’s just caused them to put off a vacation, car purchase, or retirement for a year or two. Meanwhile, a million people in India live like this their entire lives:

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it’s worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners’ house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for “broken,” and the Hindi for “trash.” Today, official India calls them the “scheduled castes,” but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means “broken” or “oppressed” but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don’t stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India’s animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a safai karamchari. This literally means “sweeper” but is generally translated into English as “manual scavenger,” a term popularized by India’s British rulers, who did nothing to eradicate the practice and much to keep it going. This scavenging has none of the usefulness of the usual meaning. There is no salvaging of waste, no making good of the discarded. Champaben recycles nothing and gains nothing. She takes filth away, and for this she is considered dirt.

Also in India, thousands of Christians are being killed, tortured, and raped in an effort to rid the state of Ossetia Orissa of all Christians. I was forwarded this email from a Good News India missionary there:

All our dream centers are under lock down with the kids and staff huddled inside and police outside. The fanatics are circling outside waiting for a chance to kill.

Others were not so fortunate. In a nearby Catholic orphanage, the mob allowed the kids to leave and locked up a Priest and a computer teacher in a house and burned them to death. Many believers have been killed and hacked into pieces and left on the road…. even women and children.

Lord, have mercy on us for ever complaining about anything.

With dramatic things happening every day in the economy, the presidential election, and the war on terror, it’s pretty easy for me to get sucked into the bottomless vortex of the newsmedia. There’s always one more headline to read on my homepage, one more pundit to watch on cable, and one more blog post to click on my RSS feeds.

That’s why this post by Joe Carter was a much-needed slap in the face:

Why do so many people buy into the ridiculous notion that a daily diet of current events is anything other than a mindless (though perhaps harmless) form of amusement? Even ardent news-hounds will admit that the bulk of daily “news” is nothing more than trivia or gossip. How much of what happens every day truly is all that important? How many of us have ever even stopped to ask why we have daily news?

As University of Florida history professor C. John Sommerville notes in his excellent book, How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Age:

The product of the news business is change, not wisdom. Wisdom has to do with seeing things in their largest context, whereas news is structured in a way that destroys the larger context. You have to do certain things to information if you want to sell it on a daily basis. You have to make each day’s report seem important. And you do that by reducing the importance of its context.

I took a few classes on counseling in seminary, and my professor loved to remind us that if the family of God was doing its job, Christians wouldn’t need to turn to pastors or psychologists for counseling. This series of articles by David Powlison, editor of the Journal of Biblical Counseling, offers some ways we can all start doing our job better.

His primary question is this: What does it really mean to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) to a brother or sister in Christ?

Friendship Counseling, Part 1

Friendship Counseling, Part 2

Friendship Counseling, Part 3

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(via Between Two Worlds)

From a Touchstone article by Christopher Jackson:

Consider a woman who has discovered her husband’s sexual unfaithfulness. Going to church would require flashing fake smiles at the greeters, and exclaiming, “Oh, I’m great!” to everyone who asks, “How are you?” Who could blame her for avoiding the faces and questions that all say, “You had better act happy! Don’t be a downer!”?

Sadly, many American churches unwittingly encourage their members to pretend to have it all together and be perfectly content. Even churches that vocally reject the prosperity gospel implicitly confirm that heresy. A kind of health-and-wealth theology has infected many churches, promulgated not so much by preaching or catechism as by the manipulative “How-are-you’s,” backslapping, and vigorous handshaking before and after services.

I suspect that those in the midst of difficulty avoid services not out of disdain for God’s Word, but out of great respect for the command against dishonesty. They know how their fellow Christians expect people at church to speak and act, and they know that they would be lying.

Lord, may it not be so in our church family.

Compare these two covers for the same issue of Time Magazine.

Here’s what Americans saw:

Here’s what the rest of the world saw:

I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the financial crisis, and this Time article finally helped me put the pieces together. It seems to come down to one word: greed.

Greed motivated people to buy houses they couldn’t afford. Greed motivated them to pull all the equity out of their homes to buy toys they couldn’t afford. Greed motivated them to lie about how much they earned to qualify for loans they couldn’t afford.

Greed motivated mortgage brokers to wink and look the other way when they knew they were selling loans to people who wouldn’t be able to pay them. Greed motivated big lenders to gamble on perpetually rising home prices to keep funding their risky loans.

Greed motivated credit card companies to push illegal zero-percent $100,000 cash advances on people as down payments on homes, hiding the fact that their interest rates would skyrocket to 25% or more if they were just one day late on their payment.

Now we’re paying the consequences for all this greed, but have we even learned our lesson? Is it possible that greed is now motivating us to throw more money at the problem so we can get the party going again?

Jesus told a chilling story about wealthy, comfortable people (like the vast majority of Americans) who aren’t satisfied with their wealth and still want more:

The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God (Luke 12:16-21).

The church is a bride.

Christ loves the church just as a husband should love his wife (Ephesians 5:25). After Jesus returns, the uniting of him to his church will be like a wedding ceremony (Revelation 21:2).

I know a few things (only a few) about marriages and wedding ceremonies. I was on the mainland this weekend performing a wedding, and I challenged the couple to strive for things in their relationship that are identical to the things a group of believers (the church) should maintain in their communal relationship with Christ:

Faithfulness
A marriage ceremony is an exchange of ownership: “I am my beloved’s and he is mine.” Each person gains the right to have a say in their spouse’s schedule, commitments, and priorities. They get exclusive rights to the other person’s attention and affection.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of things competing for our attention and affection every day. The question we should ask for each one is, “Will it bring me closer to Jesus or farther?” Here’s the cheat sheet I use most of the time: Things I see on TV = farther. Things in my earthly family and church family = closer.

Intimacy
I need to confess that I flinch whenever I get the “Jesus is my boyfriend” vibe from worship songs. I throw up a little in my mouth whenever I hear songs like “In the secret, in the quiet place… I want to touch you…” Bleeeccch.

Still, I can’t get around the fact that Paul uses a sexual metaphor in Ephesians 5 to describe the relationship between Christ and the church: “A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

Healthy physical intimacy in a marriage is dependent on intimacy in all the other areas: emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Physical intimacy is the ultimate act of vulnerability; making yourself completely naked in front of the other person. It reflects a relationship marked by transparency and trust. That’s the kind of intimacy Christ desires with his church.

Submission
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord … as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” (Ephesians 5:21-24).

In a healthy marriage, a husband never forces his wife to submit. His wife gladly submits because she is overjoyed to have a humble, sacrificial, God-exalting husband leading the family. Our submission to Christ as a church should come out of a deep appreciation for his sacrificial love for us.

Another New Testament metaphor for the church:

The church is a building.
No, the church isn’t defined by the building it meets in. The group of believers called the church is God’s building (1 Corinthians 3:9), and each person in the church contributes something to the building. Some people build like Tim the Tool Man, with shoddy craftsmanship and substandard materials, but some people work to become excellent builders who know how to handle expensive, high-quality hardware (1 Cor. 3:12-15).

Ultimately, Jesus is the one who finishes the building. And he doesn’t settle for a single-wall tract home. Paul says Christ is building his church into a temple (Ephesians 2:21). You might be thinking, “That sounds nice. A temple.” But to Jewish people of Paul’s day, the temple in Jerusalem was the building by which all other buildings were judged. It was the pinnacle of craftsmanship, earthly grandeur, and spiritual significance.

Which means that Jesus is crafting his Church to become the pinnacle of society. And since the local church (small-c) is the visible manifestation of the universal Church (Big-C), that means every church family should be the pinnacle of love, grace, and truth in its community.

Here’s another word-picture that describes the church:

The church is a body.

Maybe you’ve already heard plenty of sermons about the body of Christ. You know how each one of us is a vital member of the body, whether we happen to be a beautiful brown eye or an ugly cracked foot (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). The way we usually intepret this is to apply it to the visible body of Christ in the local church, which means we assign each body part to a ministry role. The eye is obviously the senior pastor, and the foot is the poor woman who gets stuck filling every… single… communion… cup. Or maybe the guy who gets roped into supervising a junior high all-nighter.

But the body isn’t just the church assembled. It’s the church at all times. It’s individuals who display the power of God and the love of Christ in their own foot-like or eye-like way, wherever they happen to be. The body doesn’t magically reconstitute and reanimate every Sunday, only to be dissolved for the next six days.

The church body is always the body. Which means that everything we do - everything - affects the other members of the body in some way. Even the things we do when no one else is watching. Things that no one else will ever know.

They might not know exactly what’s happening, but they know something’s up. That’s what makes the body the body.

In preparation for a few upcoming sermons on what makes a church, I’ve been digging into the New Testament passages that describe what a church is supposed to look like. The first thing that struck me from this overview is that no biblical authors seem to be able to talk about the church without using some kind of metaphor. Almost every description of the church includes a word-picture to help us envision it.

Since no metaphor is perfect (try describing yourself with a single metaphor - it’s impossible even for one individual!), you’ll find many different pictures that portray the church as it’s supposed to be. I’ll spend the next few blog posts exploring some of these portraits.

The Church is a Family.
This is the picture used most often in the New Testament to describe the church. Jesus calls God our Father in the Lord’s Prayer, and Paul expands on that idea by explaining that we’re God’s children and fellow heirs with Christ (Romans 8:16-17). We’re getting the same inheritance from our fabulously wealthy dad as Jesus does!

Being God’s kids makes us brothers and sisters to each other (1 Corinthians 8:11-13). Think about that for a minute.

Think about your flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters. No matter what happens in life, you’re stuck with them, like they are with you. Sure, you’ll get annoyed with each other. Maybe you’ll even stop talking to each other. For a while. But eventually you’ll have to see each other at Christmas or Thanksgiving. You’ll make a joke about their new haircut, and everything will be back to normal.

That’s how it’s supposed to work with our spiritual brothers and sisters too. Instead of quickly leaving a church when we get annoyed at someone (the normal strategy in our individualistic attitude toward the church), God calls us to figure out a way to work it out and reunite.

Some people in the church might become like loving fathers to us, and others like devoted sons (Philippians 2:22). And every church needs a few affectionate mother-hens like Rufus’ mother in the Roman church (Romans 16:13).

Being an earthly parent is tough work! It takes patience and discipline and proactive concern. Being a child takes humility and respect. And none of this changes in the church.

Like a family, the church is expected to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you” (1 Thessalonians 3:12). It’s through this kind of love that God will “establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (3:13).

I’m a volunteer soccer coach and a part-time football fan, so my attitude this weekend was a roller coaster ride plunged low by the depressing UH Warriors game, then revived by the aggressive soccer game played by the 6-year-old boys on my team who were clearly having a lot of fun.

Sports bring out all kinds of reactions and emotions in me, so it was refreshing to hear C.J. Mahaney’s sermon “Don’t Waste Your Sports.” He offers a biblical approach to playing and watching sports, saying there are two perspectives possible:

One appreciates the actual process of playing the sport. The other has sadly turned sport into an ugly expression of human pride, envy, and malice. What will keep us from turning sport into something ugly rather than beautiful?

Listen to the sermon here.

(via Justin Taylor)