#ThirtyThankfuls Day 6: Teaching.

I’m finishing up my notes for Sunday School, as I stop to jot these few thoughts down for Day 6. I have to admit, I didn’t want to take time to prepare for Sunday School at the end of a long and wearying day. But the truth is, I do love it.

I am thankful that God has granted me the privilege of teaching His word to my brothers and sisters on a regular basis. I’m thankful that I have been entrusted with this sacred duty.

Like Ezra, my life goals are to know the Law of God, to do it, and to teach His statutes and rules to His people (Ezra 7:10). For over 15 years, He has given me countless opportunities to do that. I only pray I have shown myself faithful to the task.

Today (as of when you read this), I will be talking to my church family about how God’s perfect word is sufficient, and how we have no need of man-made tradition or additional, subjective “revelation” in order to rightly understand God’s will. His inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word is enough!

I am thankful that I get to do this. God is good.

#Septemblog Day 25: Fruit of My Labor.

It’s nice to work hard and then look back and see some good coming out of it.

An example from yesterday:

Before…

After…

The new garden is still not quite done: more cement blocks needed, more rebar reinforcements, and a good deal of top-soil is lacking before we can start planting (what you see there is a combination of grass clippings, disassembled tree, peat moss, and compost). But after several hours of hot, hot labor, I can look out my window and say, hey! I did that. Praise God.

Another example:

Looking back at my blog stats over the last month, if you discount the hits on my home page, the 5 highest-traffic posts on this site are two sermon manuscripts, the notes from two Sunday School lessons, and a Monk Manual review (still somehow one of my top-three posts of all time).

If you expand that out to the past 3 months or all of 2022 so far, it’s largely the same five posts.

What that tells me is that no matter how many book reviews I write, how many pop-culture posts I produce, the content that seems to be doing the most good for y’all is my Bible teaching.

That’s encouraging.

That’s also why it’s going to continue being a focus of this blog in the coming years.

Those posts are the seeds that grow best, it seems. I think that’s pretty awesome. Praise God.

Five-minute update.

Hey readers!

I’ve missed checking in, so I wanted to give you a five-minute update (5 minutes to write, not to read!).

Things are busy. Just…really, just busy. Work is busy (yay, computer system overhauls!), church life is very busy (yay, church mergers!), home life with a wife and two littles is very busy (so many tantrums!).
I haven’t been reading much (got 75 pages into a 600-pager and stopped because I knew I couldn’t finish in time!), and I have a stack of short-story books on my shelf that I need to work through before they’re all due back at the library. What that means is you will get more #52Stories posts very soon. I’m going to finish that project, even if it’s just for me, folks. So I hope you don’t hate it. 🙂
I’m also thinking about starting a series of posts on Mondays where I work through what I’ve been teaching in Sunday School lately: a fly-over summary of the Minor Prophets. Basically, it’s just an overview that gives you the historical context, major themes, and some application points. If you’d be interested in something like that, let me know in the comments!
Coming up later this week: my thoughts on using the Monk Manual personal planner for 2 weeks. It’s been a different kind of daily-journal / productivity experience, and I look forward to sharing that with you.

That’s it, time’s up, see you later this week!