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“… let us encourage one another–and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb. 10:25b).

Here are a couple of reads that I found encouraging today:

Jeremy Pierre, taking his cue from C.S. Lewis, encourages us to Love the One You’re With.  I especially found Lewis’ comment that reality is iconoclastic a helpful antidote to the fictions I carry in my own heart and head.  Perhaps it’s the case that we all live with a certain idealistic, romantic notion of “reality.”  But the real reality is far better, and more difficult, and more helpful to our souls.  Thanks Jeremy for the encouragement. How are you going to glorify God today?  Feels like a really big yet nebulous question, doesn’t it?  What if your life is “ordinary”?  Will got get any glory out of your little routine?

Mark Altrogge encourages us with a reminder of the Thousand Opportunities we will have today to honor our God with ordinary obedience.  May we be aware of God’s constant presence and activity in our lives and live each small, ordinary, run of the mill moment for Him.

In the latest edition of Themelios, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on 40 years of preaching in The Preacher’s Decalogue.  A snippet:

Forty years exactly have passed since my first sermon in the context of a Sunday service. Four decades is a long time to have amassed occasions when going to the church door after preaching is the last thing one wants to do—even if one loves the congregation (sometimes precisely because one loves the congregation and therefore the sense of failure is all the greater!). How often have I had to ask myself, “How is it possible to have done this thousands of times and still not do it properly?”

Yes, I know how to talk myself out of that mood! “It’s faithfulness, not skill, that really matters.” “How you feel has nothing to do with it!” “Remember you’re sowing seed.” “It’s ultimately the Lord who preaches the word into people’s hearts, not you.” All true. Yet we are responsible to make progress as preachers, indeed evident and visible, or at least audible progress (1 Tim 4:1315 is an instructive and searching word in this respect!).

All of this led me while traveling one day to reflect on this: What Ten Commandments, what rule of preaching-life, do I wish someone had written for me to provide direction, shape, ground rules, that might have helped me keep going in the right direction and gaining momentum in ministry along the way?

Be encouraged today, whether preparing to preach and teach, driving to work, or loving your wife and neighbor.  “Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6).

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