Here are some ideas on how college students can demonstrate to their family that they love them from a distance.
Do you have any other ideas?
This was humbling to read today while I was at seminary.
Today hardly one in a hundred considers how difficult and arduous it is faithfully to discharge the office of pastor. Hence many are led into it as something trivial and not serious; and afterwards experience teaches them, too late, how foolishly they aspired to the unknown. Others think themselves endowed with great skill and intelligence and promise themselves great things from their talent, learning, and judgment; but afterwards they experience too late how limited their equipment is, for their powers fail them at the outset. Others, while knowing there will be many serious battles, have no fear, as though they were born for contention, and put on an iron front. Still others who want to be ministers are mercenaries. We know indeed that all God’s servants are wretched in the eyes of the world and common sense, for they must make war on the passions of all and thus displease men in order to please God.
—William J. Bouwsma’s John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Biography, p. 220
HT: My Mac Hero
In reading John Owen’s Overcoming Sin and Temptation, I came across this sweet quotation. Owen is arguing with someone who says he combats his lusts with a reminder that God’s law will condemn him at the end of his life. To that person he says,
“Yea, know that this reserve will not long hold out. If your lust has driven you from stronger gospel forts, it will speedily prevail against this also. Do not suppose that such considerations will deliver you, when you have voluntarily given up to your enemy those helps and means of preservation which have a thousand times their strengt*. Rest assuredly in this, that unless you recover yourself with speed from this condition, the thing that you fear will come upon you. What gospel principles do not, legal motives cannot do.”
I love the way Owen describes the truths of the gospel as gospel forts. I want to live in these forts. I need to stay in these forts everyday. It is only in these forts that I can stay protected against the temptation of my flesh, the allure of the world, comparison of others, the discouragement from failure, and the guilt of sin.
May God keep our souls in His gospel forts.
Here is a great quotation from Paul Tripp on how our weakness does not keep us from Jesus Christ, but brings us to Him. I need these reminders everyday.
“Your weakness does not keep you from your Lord; your delusion of strength does. Because the gospel is for the weak. The gospel is for the unable. The gospel is for the fool. The gospel is a welcome for people who say, ‘I can’t!” But they say that while running to a Redeemer who can. That’s the gospel.”
A few months ago, our pastor preached a message on how to develop biblical hospitality in your home from 3 John 5-8. He gave us some practical suggestions for how we can begin implementing hospitality. I’m posting those ideas here for my own remembrance and to share with others.